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Are we all postmoderns now?
I have a thought experiment, riffed from Schrödinger, of a box that when opened reveals whether or not God exists. While philosophically paradoxical (any entity that can definitively say God doesn't exist must be all-knowing and thus indistinguishable from God; an entity that says God does exist may only be referring to itself), I consider this a test for the strength of belief and/or the strength of the yearning for truth for believer and non-believer alike. Would someone be willing to stake a core part of their identity in opening such a box or would they rather leave it closed?
In my innocent (if not naive) moments, I consider the existence of God to be self-evident: life and consciousness are (to me) massive gaps in the Atheistic narrative. In my cynical (if not naive) moments, I consider the existence of God to be self-evident as well, but only as the creator/designer of our simulation.
During the "Sunday school" hour, my church has been having members talk about their lives and how they ended up being where they are geographically, professionally, and spiritually. Statements by two members struck me particularly:
These are members who, if offered the choice in my thought experiment, I'm sure would open the box. Yet they made statements that seem at odds with an assurance of the physical reality of God.
In the first instance, conditioning belief on an attribute of God (and one that has only existed for two thousand years!) implies a causality that runs in the opposite direction than it does: that the existence of God is predicated on our belief; or even worse, our preference for certain attributes of God. We may consider his attributes good but only because God is the creator of everything including morality. What we perceive (at least as through a glass dimly) as his good attributes are simply because we were made by a God who has these attributes. Any part of us that considers any aspect of God to be less than perfect is an error of our own fallen nature.
In the second, the desire (spurred by our post-enlightenment culture, perhaps) to appear (or even to actually be) intellectual and rational is juxtaposed against faith as if the existence of God is predicated on our ability to reason our way to him (or at least not reason ourselves away from him). Put succinctly, this line of thinking posits that we adjust our priors for the existence of God based on rational evidence or lack-thereof. Yet this presupposes our intellect to both be the primary means of knowledge about the existence of God and to be a reliable source of this knowledge. I have qualms with both presuppositions. The existence of God can be perceived experientially, and is probably a more robust evidence for God than mere philosophical puzzling (Colossians 2:8). Contra Aquinas, the intellect itself is fallen and incapable of definitively or reliably answering questions of God's existence. One of the genuine contributions of post-modernity and critical theory is bringing attention back to the limitations of rationality and scientific knowledge.
In both of my fellow Christians' statements, the "default" position is assumed to be one of agnosticism or "lack of belief". And indeed, everything about our culture assumes agnosticism. To participate and engage in culture is to do so within this agnostic backdrop. Every aspect of our interactions with non-believers and believers alike is permeated with this assumption.
Yet I owe this culture no allegiance. My acquiescence to the milieu (or should I say malaise?) is entirely self-imposed. Would that I could live in my own impenetrable bubble; surrounded by society without feeling the taint of it. The impossibility drives a desire to escape, to find a place where I can find the space to fully explore my relationship with God, with my family, with fellow believers, with nature; and better organize my own opinions and beliefs into a consistent narrative. It's the same desire that drives Rod Dreher to recommend cloistering away from culture, and Ayn Rand to fantasize about capitalistic communes. (It's worth nothing that neither acted on this desire; though Dreher did emigrate).
My fellow Christians keep reminding me that we are called to be in the world but not of the world. They are probably much better Christians than I; they may driven by a genuine desire to save the lost. I know myself, and I merely use the Biblical commandment as an excuse to amass temporal and superficial comforts at the expense of something much deeper. No fellow believer will uncover my secret: it is impossible to distinguish someone who is just "in the world" with someone wallowing in it.
Lest it be unclear at this point: I am inescapably postmodern.
But what about God? Why is it that the universe needs to be created but God needs no creator? I have a sympathy for an eternal universe because of this issue with what comes first. If the universe is infinite in time then we don't need to care about beginnings. If God is infinite in time then that's a similar kind of completeness.
Also, why does life need God? Do we understand the biology of the primordial soup deeply enough to be totally sure how proteins might form? We have not replicated their formation in the lab, sure, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. How can we be sure that we're not missing some feature of underwater volcanoes that makes it easier to form proteins, or that there isn't some other process that produces life? Does anyone feel really confident about microbiology from billions of years ago?
??? Why so? If we're not using our intellect, then it's just words, superstition and cope (that the evil people who do so well on Earth will actually be invisibly punished by powerful beings after they die, when said beings could easily punish them in public). Scientific logic has gotten us a great many good things, what has critical theory supplied of equal worth? Critical theory is a great solvent, it's used to destroy. But where is the evidence that it dissolves bad things and not good things? I could use critical theory to undermine critical theorists, analyze how they invent new concepts like 'gender' which further divisions and conflict. I could psychoanalyze the interests of critical theorists as a class, open up questions as to the meaning of emancipation...
The universe is composed of parts that change. Everything that changes is composed of the actual (what it currently is) and the potential (all the states it could be in.) Everything that is composite like this needs some sort of explanation for why it is in this current condition and not a different state.
The classical theist definition of God solves this problem by proposing something that has no composition, no change. Because there is nothing else that it could be, its current state needs no explanation. This changeless, fully actual thing is that which we call God. Based on knowing that it is without composition, fully actual, philosophers can then derive proofs for the other common attributes of God.
Can this changeless, fully actual thing have downstream causal effects? If not, I don't think "we call this changeless, fully actual thing God, and God is the reason the universe exists" works as an argument for the existence of God-as-the-thing-that-caused-the-universe-to-exist.
If the changeless thing is allowed to causally affect things, the question becomes "but where did the system that contains the changeless thing and also the changeable universe come from, since the changing universe can't be a part of the changeless thing".
The changless thing is allowed to casually affect things, in fact, that is it's nature entirely. The changeless thing's nature is entirely, wholly, and simply to act, to bring into existence. You would need to present a really good argument for why this would imply the universe is part of God. It is contingent on God, and is possibly inevitable based on God's nature, but has a different nature.
Edit: One classical theist described God as an "omnipotence trope," if that helps conceptualize what theists are talking about.
Does the changeless thing that we're calling God know it has acted? Before it acted, did it know that it had not yet acted?
(BTW if your faith is a load-bearing part of your personality, and you're not currently doing anything deeply maladaptive due to that faith, there's probably only downsides and no upsides of engaging)
The changeless thing exists out of time and knows all its actions before, during, and after them. It is without emotion. If that is incompatible with your understanding of the Judeo-Christian God then I don't know why that matters to this conversation.
So, if I'm understanding this view correctly
So, coming from a viewpoint of "for a statement to be meaningful, nontrivial, and correct, its negation must be meaningful and incorrect":
Also, is there any particular reason that we would expect that the universe we live in is one that is causally downstream of an instance of this specific type of god?
I'm going to start referring to the philosopher's God as pGod, to disambiguate and maybe help distinguish the idea in your mind from any religious upbringing you might have had.
I think it can only be discussed analogously, and determined negatively. Meaning, we can be certain of what pGod isn't, and use all those "isn'ts" to develop an "is." It is so far outside our realm of experience as temporal, complex creatures.
When we know something, we are grasping its form and holding the form somewhere inside our self. As the originator and grounds of all forms, pGod grasps these forms in their most perfect way. That is what is meant by pGod knowing everything.
What specific type of god? pGod, the First Cause God? The arguments from casualty, rationality, motion, essence, etc all point to the same type of pGod. They are all arguments for the same God that Is, Existence itself, formulated differently to avoid different objections as they arise, to try to express the idea more clearly.
Or do you mean the omniscient, omnipotent, divinely simple God? The same arguments that make the case for pGod are then continued to require such things. As you can see above, the omniscience follows from the nature of the pGod as the ground of all things, that which is "proved" (philosophically, proof just means a logically coherent argument given certain starting positions) in the argument for pGod.
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