An Existential God New Perspectives in Philosophy of Religion

1
An Existential GodNew Perspectives in
Philosophy of Religion

• John Davenport
• November 17, 2007

2
Two Fundamental Questions in Religion

• Does God (or the divine) exist?
• Transcendence Is there anything more to reality
  than the material world (i.e. matter-energy,
  space-time)?
• Is the history of religiousness consciousness in
  human culture evidence for a transcendent source,
  or can even the earliest human concepts of the
  sacred and the profane be explained
  naturalistically?
• Does the testimony of revealed religious
  traditions give us evidence for the existence of
  supreme being of the kind described in their
  texts?
• Is there good evidence against the existence of
  God, e.g. moral and natural evil?
• 2. What does God properly mean? (what is it
  whose existence we are debating)?
• The sacred or divine in primary human
  socieities is directly associated with the
  transcendent source of reality (cosmogonic power)
  in the creation myths of all cultures.
• (a) this includes the idea that the divine is
  the ultimate origin of all things, but the later
  idea of creation ex nihilo is a more radical
  extension of the basic cosmogenic idea
• (b) but it also includes the idea of the divine
  power as the ultimate owner, possessor, and thus
  destining power in reality all rightful
  authority or sovereignty originates with the
  divine.
• These two features correspond to what Rudolph
  Otto called the divine as mysterium tremendum,
  the sacred as both absolute power and
  awe-inspiring determiner of fate.
• It is a later development of the axial turn in
  human history (800 300 BCE) that the divine is
  conceived as ethically good, or as The Good
  (Plato), the origin of all value and model for
  all justice in human affairs.
• In western culture, this ethical turn is
  cotemporal with the emergence of monotheism among
  the Jews and Greeks.

3
The Archaic Sacred as Wierd in northern
European Mythology

• The Wierd (which we find in Beowulf,
  Anglo-Saxon poems such as the Wanderer, and in
  norse mythology) means roughly fate or destiny.
• It is the divine reality that stands behind the
  gods, the because the source of reality is the
  ultimate owner and controller of all things,
  which is uncontrollable by human beings God is
  the unappropriable appropriator of Being itself.
• It is represented by mythic symbols such as
  dragons, sacred trees, and three Fates (Norns)
  (e.g. Shakespeares three weird sisters in
  MacBeth).
• It is the law that prevents misappropriation of
  divine right from prevailing.

4
The Archaic Conception of the Profane

• Likewise in archaic mythology, the profane is
  the opposite of the sacred because it attempts to
  misappropriate divine authority by owning or
  dominating free beings and destroying the order
  set up in creation.
• Thus the profane is chaos that prevents the
  order on which life depends
• The profane is represented by images of death,
  decay, rigid mechanism or iron necessity (e.g.
  the Death Star in the Star Wars saga)
• It is in northern European mythology, it is
  represented by monsters such as the dragon and
  the other monsters in Beowulf.
• Will this original sense of the profane be
  preserved in new film versions?

5
The Axial Conception of Maximal Perfection
Plato, Augustine, and St. Anselm

• The archaic conception of norse mythology, and
  the very different Lord of Hosts in the Torah,
  both contrast with the God of Philosophers in
  Greek and Christian thought.
• Perfect Being Theology in the western traditions
  (a brief summary)
• God as maximally great, or perfect in the static
  sense, having greatest consistent set of
  properties that add to metaphysical value in a
  being (including freedom?)
• Necessary existence God exists necessarily
  rather than contingently (Anselm)
• Omnipotence (maximal power, e.g. in Gods role as
  creator or cosmogonic divinity)
• Omniscience (maximal knowledge, including
  knowledge of the whole future)
• Omnipresence (the divine is present everywhere,
  at all times, keeping things in being)
• Eternality (God is absolutely unchanging, and
  hence above or outside of time)
• Impassibility (God cannot be moved or desire,
  since motivation implies change)
• Simplicity (God has no parts, is absolutely
  unified, since God is not generated)
• First cause/First mover God is not only the
  cause of the existence of all contingent beings,
  but also their final end or natural goal (what
  they really seek or desire)
• Aseity God exists absolutely from Gods self
  (absolute independence and originality)
• Maximal goodness (omnibenevolence) God is the
  ultimate standard of goodness, the source of all
  value to be united with God is our ultimate
  happiness or blessedness.

6
Platos argument in Republic II

• God is perfect definition of divinity
• If God changes, he changes for the better or
  worse change is assumed to be alteration in a
  value-property
• If God were to change for the worse, he would be
  imperfect
• If God changes for the better, then he improved
  from the definition of improvement
• If something X improves from state A to state B,
  then X was imperfect in state A, or lacking a
  valuable property intuitive truth?
• Hence, if God changes for the better, he was not
  always perfect from 4, 5, Hypothetical
  syllogism
• Hence, if God changes either way, he was
  imperfect perfect before he changed from 2, 3,
  and 6 by Disjunctive Syllogism
• Hence God does not change 1, 7 by Modus Tollens

• In other words, since we start from the concept
  of God as perfect, this concept implies that God
  cannot change any change in him would imply
  imperfection Obviously a perfect being cannot
  get better. Nor can he get worse since Hed be
  corruptible now if He could.God cannot gain a
  new property or perform a new action without that
  property or action adding to His goodness as a
  being or agent (Katherine Rogers, Anselmian
  Eternalism, Faith and Philosophy 24 no. 1
  (January, 2007) 2-27, p.10)

7
Difficulties with the Standard Anselmian Model of
divine attributes in natural theology

• Divine agape or creative love if God is
  impassible, how can God love his/her creation, or
  feel and compassion or benevolence towards us?
• Motivation more generally, strong divine
  impassibility seems to follow from Platos idea
  that all motivation is erosiac in form, a lack
  seeking completion. Since God is complete and
  needs nothing, God cannot be motivated to act at
  all.
• Creativity but if he/she is without motives,
  then why would God create a universe of
  contingent beings? (Note that we do not have to
  think that we can guess Gods plans or reasons
  for creating the world to judge that a being who
  could not be motivated to create, or to love
  his/her creation, is not perfect not God
  after all).
• Biblical portrayal of God western monotheistic
  religions (Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam)
  portray God as reacting to the created order and
  even as passionate.
• Free will If the freedom that created mortal
  persons (e.g. human beings) require to be
  responsible for their character and actions
  involves the liberty to make alternate choices,
  this seems to be incompatible with divine
  foreknowledge of our future choices, and with
  total divine predetermination or providential
  control.
• Soteriology and Eschatological Hope the standard
  Anselmian model does not seem to include the most
  distinctive attribute of God according to
  monotheistic religions after the axial turn,
  namely Gods power to save created persons from
  spiritual lostness, or to bring about an
  ethically perfect state of being in the
  hereafter.

8
Sources for an alternative existential conception
of God (or divine attributes)
Søren Kierkegaard Martin Buber
Emmanuel Levinas Mircea Eliade
Danish existentialist Jewish
existentialist Jewish alterity ethicist
German mythographer
Charles Hartshore, Process Theologian
William Hasker, Philosopher of Religion, defender
of open theism
9
The Process Concept of Perfection

• From the Process Theology of Hartshorne
  (inspired by Whitehead) the existential model
  takes a basic alternative to the static
  conception of perfection that is the keystone of
  the standard Anselmian model.
• Perfection is maximal, endless, infinite
  development, qualitative enrichment, growth in
  richness (unity within diversity) through
  relationship
• Superabundance the most perfect being creates
  out of pure generosity, not to satisfy any need
  or lack in itself, but thereby grows richer
  through relationship with lower orders of being
  (contingent, created reality)
• Panentheism the perfect being transcends its
  creation (is not identical with it) but is also
  immanent within it.
• Higher Time this kind of perfection implies a
  series of successive stages, with an asymmetry
  that is something like the difference between
  past and future as we know it. This is not
  created (physical) time, but an uncreated
  temporal series that is part of the divine being
  itself (compare Heidegger).

10
God as Personal Being Agapic Love

• The process concept of perfection fits well with
  the idea emphasized by the biblical traditions
  and religious existentialists that God is the
  Ultimate Person, rather than an abstract
  principle like Platos Form of the Good or a
  maximal combination of value-properties.
• Agape. Kierkegaard follows several church fathers
  in emphasizing the idea that faith is a relation
  with a personal God, a being of perfect love who
  in turn commands and makes possible agapic love
  between human beings.
• Ultimate Thou (Du) In his famous book, I and
  Thou, Buber argues that persons can be directly
  present to one another in their uniqueness and
  independence as persons (which he calls the
  I-Thou relationship, as opposed to the I-It
  relation). For Buber, God is the person who makes
  possible all interhuman I-Thou encounters, and
  who is the ultimate Thou, always offering
  encounter, direct mind-mind contact.
• Alterity Emmanuel Levinas follows Buber but
  argues that the relationship of moral obligation
  is more aymmetrical we are called to
  responsibility by the Face of the other person,
  or what he calls their alterity (otherness,
  independence). He relates alterity in this sense
  to creation ex nihilo.

11
Gods Relation to Human Persons the World

• The Levinasian idea of Alterity and Open
  Theisms emphasis on divine personhood provide a
  way of applying the process conception of
  perfection to the relation between God, created
  persons, and the natural world.
• Alterogenesis A crucial divine attribute
  suppressed in the Anselmian model is that God is
  the only being capable of creating alterity our
  fabrications remain our possessions, but God is
  capable of creating beings with an independence
  or aseity like Gods own free human beings can
  face, choose relation with God, or even reject
  God to the end.
• Imago dei human alterity involves our free will
  and is a reflection of divine freedom,
  personhood, and capacity for agapic going out of
  oneself towards alterity like God, we grow
  through relationship with alterity though what
  is strange to us, uncontrolled by us.
• Subcreation (Tolkiens term) human beings are
  like God in being capable of free creativity,
  which is the essence of authentic artwork that
  is, creating beauty and value for its own sake,
  for its pure wonder, rather than for material
  gain or self-completion. (Consider chidrens art)
• No absolute human autonomy But unlike God, we do
  not create primary reality or alterity itself
  our works are made possible by the powers and the
  materials we have been given. Thus we cannot
  claim absolute ownership over our works, or
  absolute sovereignty over ourselves God is the
  being from whom our ethical authority derives
  (see God as Wierd)
• Natural Law perhaps a universe run by natural
  law that cannot be constantly violated without
  destroying its order (on which the moral
  significance of human choices depends), has its
  own kind of alterity.

12
Kierkegaard on Eschatological Faith

• Finally, in his most famous book, titled Fear
  and Trembling, Kierkegaard (though a pseudonym)
  argues that the distinguishing mark of religious
  faith is found in Abrahams trust that God will
  ensure the promised ethical outcome that Isaac
  live to father a great nation despite the
  obstacle constituted by the demand to sacrifice
  him (or by virtue of the absurd).
• Using this case as a model, we may generalize
  that eschatological possibilities are final
  realizations of a promised or revealed ethical
  ideal that cannot be achieved by human striving
  it is only by divine power or miracle.
• God or the divine, as the object of religious
  faith, is then properly understood as the
  personal source of eschatological promises and
  eschatological possibilities. God is not only
  creator, but finisher, Alpha and Omega.

13
Open Theism and limited divine foreknowledge

• The Risk-Taker version of the Free Will Defense
  for Moral Evil (and perhaps natural evil too)
• 1. Divine foreknowledge of future choices
  (simple foreknowledge) are incompatible with
  leeway libertarian freedom and thus with moral
  responsibility.
• (A) Omniscient foreknowledge that I will vote
  for the democratic candidate in 2008 makes it
  temporally impossible that I will choose to vote
  for the republican candidate instead (this is
  like the necessity of the past, which not even
  God can change on standard western theism).
• (b) Omniscient divine knowledge of what (to us)
  are choices still to be made in the future make
  these choices inevitable in a similar fashion,
  removing human freedom.
• Divine preordination of future choices (through
  directive contrastive influence to choose option
  D over R, or through pre-selection of possible
  persons by knowledge of so-called Molinist
  counterfactuals (about what they would choose to
  do if created) is incompatible with real human
  power to choose otherwise.
• But human moral agency (responsibility for ones
  self, character, and actions) is a crucial value
  in the world according to the alterity thesis,
  it is one of Gods central purposes for creating
  the universe that it include agents with a
  freedom that is an image of His/Her own.
• Therefore God is incapable of being both
  maximally good, omniscient about the future, and
  governing by total providential predesign
  rather, it is part of divine perfection to take
  the risk that free mortal persons will use their
  moral freedom to sin or make evil choices, thus
  leading to moral evil.
• If human moral freedom requires a law-governed
  universe that nevertheless includes
  indeterminism, then to create moral agents, God
  must also take the risk involved in creating such
  a universe, making natural evils of various kinds
  possible.

14
Conclusion Should we believe in God, as
conceived on the new existential model

• Results of our Analysis
• The new existential picture synthesizes what was
  most insightful in the older archaic models
  emphasizing cosmogonic power and the divine as
  absolute unappropriable appropriator
• Through the process conception of perfection, it
  shows that other elements of the existential
  model cohere well together God as absolute
  person and perfect love is not impassible but
  capable of self-motivation in creating persons
  and worlds, and Gods attributes include not only
  Gods cosmogonic role as the beginning or source
  of all things, but also Gods eschatological role
  as the finisher and perfector of the world (which
  is so vital for direct human relationship to God
  as savior or source of self-transcendence).
• These elements in turn fit with the notion of
  Gods being as essentially temporal or
  processive God is not the same before creating
  the world, during the history of our universe,
  and in the Hereafter (the new heaven and the new
  earth). So we have at least three stages of
  higher or divine time.
• Finally, the new existential model makes possible
  more believable answers to the problem of evil
  (the hardest challenge to western monothestic
  conceptions of God in any form).