Some questions are so intensely charged with electricity that you can feel with all your senses the monstrous impact power, as they strike their bull’s eye in the very heart of your interlocutor.
Does God really exist? Every man and woman of religion will see this moment as their call to sacred duty to solemnly, and with a colossal internal passion (whose tightly coiled overstressed spring can be actually felt vibrating through their electrified bodies) reveal the awesome truth to you and to all, which, in the Christian parlance, is called witnessing. In plain language, they are going to use this question as an opportunity, and will immediately jump in, with the fervent declaration that the formal, rational, and incontrovertible proof of His existence has already been firmly established.
Yes, they will talk… not of faith, but of definite knowledge… As if in your crude uneducated ignorance you have missed the obvious: right here, all the time, under your nose, here is that King’s Cross station, and here is the express train to life eternal. (Needless to say, their God is strictly and exclusively denominational…)
…But not so fast, please! If knowledge were indeed available, who would need the faith?
I do not think we can ever prove the existence of God to everybody’s satisfaction, nor should we. All those terribly strained and oh-so-silly rational arguments from design; ontological; theological; epistemological; gnoseological; eschatological; and even the one seemingly the most reasonable of them all, the teleological argument--- all of them are vain and fruitless efforts to prove the unprovable. For, had we been able to prove God’s existence, faith would have ceased, and become knowledge. There would have been nothing left to believe, no hope, but dry certainty; no poetry, but matter-of-fact prose. Love would have become a scientific subject. Life itself, devoid of the divine mystery, would have reverted to the pre-human condition of animal instinct, a degeneration toward the generic, death being just one recurring season in the recurring cycle of nature. But all of this ought to be beside the point, because God is not a phantasm of our dreams, and not a scientific fact, and not something tangible, or specific enough, that we may pinpoint Him, like a student in the classroom, who is desperately trying to recapitulate, in his feverishly throbbing memory, that whole mental process which is supposed to lead him to the ultimate triumph of passing the damn exam: Quod Erat Demonstrandum!
...I will be immediately contradicted of course by just about every single representative of every major culture and religion. They will surely quote numerous passages from religious texts, some very excellent aphorisms from their well perused booklets containing hundreds of collected familiar (and not-so-familiar) quotations, and mention what they have heard from persons of wisdom and what they themselves have always deemed a matter of fundamental common sense. Yes, every religious and traditional person takes the existence of God for granted, but always by his or her faith, which only too often effectively masquerades itself as irrefutable knowledge, inside his or her head.
Every religion worships God in its own special way, and this religious worship makes God understandable to every member of their congregation through common faith and practice, and through the sharing of the so-called devotional reading, those literary products appealing to the raw sentiment of the believer like the fiery sermon of a popular evangelical preacher, but totally devoid of intellectual depth. After having their souls soak in all such reading, these people do sincerely believe that they possess adequate knowledge and sufficient comprehension to prove to any heathen or unbeliever, which for them is close to being the same thing, that God, their God, unlike all those other fake gods, does exist in truth and beyond any doubt.
But the real God, the one and only true God, the very same Christian God whom the Jews refer to, possessively but authoritatively, as Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Ehad, and whom the Muslims call Allah in Arabic (“There is no God, but God!”), is certainly above the competence of even our greatest geniuses. He is the Absolute, and this concept of the Absolute is so thoroughly incomprehensible that most attempts at proof are nonsensical, and those that seem to make some sense, you just take another look: they all end up in a vicious circle! Instead of such total silliness as trying to prove something that we cannot even begin to comprehend, we will be much better served by establishing His Existence in explicit formal terms, that is, not scientifically, but mathematically. It is essential for me to be clearly understood here, because what we call “mathematics” is not a science of fact, as is popularly believed, but a complete fiction of artificial creation, a collection of postulated hypotheses, a fantastic construction that stands and does not fall just because nothing made so clearly out of thin air can be caused to tumble. Not surprisingly, mathematics is habitually referred to not just as a science, but as an art, and the basic meaning of all art is creative fiction. And thus we come to the big point that if we wish to be guided by fact, and not by belief, the only way for us to arrive at the truth is not by some asinine reasoning about the shape of the earth, but by an inflexible command, issued by an inflexible commanding authority, that is, by definition--- no arguing about, no questions asked!
So, here is the bottom line. If we want the existence of God, one universal, indivisible, absolute God, above all feuding religions and doctrinal controversies, unquestioningly acceptable to all, and also recognized by all as the supreme authority, established, then the only way to do this is by definition.
…God by definition? Established by a firm and solid command, issued by a commanding authority?
The obvious question about to be asked here is: by whose commanding authority, and why should anybody want to obey this authority? The answer is: by the authority of common sense. The reason to obey is quite similar to Hobbes’s description of the covenant establishing a Commonwealth: to promote and defend the common good of its participants. In our case, it is a pressing need to address the daunting problems facing our long-suffering world in a more or less intelligent way. Which is not by the brute force of weapons, nor by the seductive power of the dollar, nor by any combination of the above, but by the most sensible power of basic human communication, in this case, between nations, and what we need here, in the first place, is a common denominator. Yes, some kind of reason, serving as a generally acceptable and accepted arbitrator, whose authority can be accepted by every nation without any detriment to the national pride, or a seething discontent of an overruled minority, as in the case of a majority decision adopted formally by voting, say, within an international organization, such as the UN.
Such common criterion can only be discovered by our appeal to the common gold standard in ethics, which is the Absolute, which every great culture can easily find in the God of their religion.
Religion, unfortunately, has failed us all in our search for such common denominator. In fact, throughout all history, nothing has been proven more divisive and lethal than religious strife, both among major religions, and also among their bitterly bickering sects and denominations. Religion in a certain sense has always been the deadliest bane of the human race. But don’t we know that the worst poison of a venomous snake can, at the same time, become the life-saving cure, in fact, maybe the only existing cure for an otherwise incurable disease? (As Dr. James Tyler Kent wisely observed, “If a drug cannot kill, it cannot cure.”) This is exactly the case in point. Without religion, there is no way of telling good from bad, right from wrong, except in purely relativistic class-differentiating pseudo-terms, which, under the scrutiny of an impartial, disinterested arbitrator, should instantly reveal their false through and through, and terribly biased nature.
There can be no “generic ethics” without the cultural ethics of individual nations, rooted in their respective religious traditions. So, how can this problem be resolved? How can these different cultures take that thing, which makes them so different, and turn it into a common foundation? Simple: the same as with the deadly snake: they must first separate the venom from its carrier, then distill it, and then, lo and behold! it is now transformed into the cure. Religions must overcome their incompatible theologies, and turn them all into a surprisingly compatible, perhaps, even nearly identical, set of philosophies. Let them all be thinkers among fellow thinkers, rather than rival worshipers,ready to murder each other out of their sanctimonious sense of duty to demonstrate the superiority of their God over the competing gods of the other creeds! Let them use the venom of their weapons as ink, to sign the covenant of peaceful coexistence among the nations.
Now, how does religion become philosophy? By reaching beyond faith and belief, by conceptualizing God and His attributes. The concepts of Perfect Goodness, Infinite Presence beyond Space and Time, Immunity to corruption, being the First Cause in the chain of causes and effects, being the One Absolute Standard of Truth, not by faith, but by definition, and, therefore, not subject to doubt (as distinguished from everything else, which is), hostility, and rejection (which is the general attitude of the religions toward each other, etc.)-- all these ought to be defined not as attributes of a theological God, but as philosophical concepts alongside God, and virtually indistinguishable from Him. Thus presented, those skeptics who question the existence of God out of principle ought to be questioning also the conceptual realities of all philosophical constructs and abstractions. God will find Himself in good company, and cannot be denied, because all other things, which nobody can deny, will also be thus denied. Slightly modifying Dèscartes’ argument here, He exists by virtue of our thinking about Him: a slightly irreverent, but logically convincing approach.
The One God of philosophy is also Universal and Transcendent in clear and distinct ways which refer to the most practical scale of all, namely, the totality of the world of our planet. Being universal, means that He is not for the Christians only, nor for Muslims only, etc., and to suggest that only one group is right about their God, while all others are deeply and hopelessly in error, should constitute an even deeper error of judgment and understanding. The fact that He is transcendent, recognized by all believers, means that He transcends all established religions, each being a particular rather than exclusive revelation to different people, with a different set of historical circumstances and cultural traditions. Kierkegaard is absolutely right to insist that any heathen who worships a wooden stick with sincerity, believing that he worships the true God, is indeed worshiping the true God!
My central thought about the absolute necessity of one Philosophical God as the only possible arbiter in all matters of international relations and in the development of the concept of International Justice to be made acceptable to all and accepted by all, needs to be understood as a sine qua non of any such comprehensive endeavor. No man’s reason, no artificial concept of this nature shall ever suffice, because all great cultures already have their established ethical standards in the particular Deity of their respective religions. The task is to universalize these cultural representations of God philosophically, that is, to make His Word absolutely universal!
Now comes the question of Transcendence. When I say that we must ‘save’ the God of philosophy from the God of religions, what I mean exactly is that we must accept God as truly transcendent, that is, we must put Him above all particular religions. By saying: the Christian God, the Jewish God, the God of Islam, the God of Buddhism, etc., we are limiting and splitting the concept of God placing it within time and human history, and limiting its infinity. Therefore, we must necessarily transcend religious sectarianism, yet we cannot do it without retaining our God of Religions, because our Infinite Absolute Deity is totally incomprehensible. We cannot discover Him, or produce a proof of Him in any reasonable way, and the only way that we can make His existence acceptable to the human brain is by definition. To make our Deity comprehensible, we must appeal to the religious traditions of different cultures, who have all made God comprehensible, by making Him the object of their worship, and through this very graspable mystery of individual religions we arrive at the understanding of the God of our Religion. Then, through the upward connection from individual cultural roots to One God, Universal and Transcendent, we shall arrive, despite all inter-religious hostilities, and actually bypassing their pitfalls, at the commonly shared Absolute of universal Goodness, Truth and Justice.
And finally, regarding the God of Philosophy, as opposed to the God of Religions. Here is what Nietzsche confesses in his autobiography Ecce Homo (Why I am so clever, Section 1):
“I am too inquisitive, too questioning, too exuberant to stand for a gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers, at bottom only a gross prohibition for us: thou shalt not think!”
It may be true that religious dogmas demand that we accept too many things unthinkingly, on faith, but it is still possible to reconcile Nietzsche’s argument with the philosophical concept of God, by transcending the God of the religious dogmas, who is always the automatic answer (What is Truth? God is Truth!), and who is never allowed to be questioned---and reaching for the Supreme Philosophical God who can be seen as the ultimate Question, addressed both to Him by us, and to us by Him.
Does God really exist? Every man and woman of religion will see this moment as their call to sacred duty to solemnly, and with a colossal internal passion (whose tightly coiled overstressed spring can be actually felt vibrating through their electrified bodies) reveal the awesome truth to you and to all, which, in the Christian parlance, is called witnessing. In plain language, they are going to use this question as an opportunity, and will immediately jump in, with the fervent declaration that the formal, rational, and incontrovertible proof of His existence has already been firmly established.
Yes, they will talk… not of faith, but of definite knowledge… As if in your crude uneducated ignorance you have missed the obvious: right here, all the time, under your nose, here is that King’s Cross station, and here is the express train to life eternal. (Needless to say, their God is strictly and exclusively denominational…)
…But not so fast, please! If knowledge were indeed available, who would need the faith?
I do not think we can ever prove the existence of God to everybody’s satisfaction, nor should we. All those terribly strained and oh-so-silly rational arguments from design; ontological; theological; epistemological; gnoseological; eschatological; and even the one seemingly the most reasonable of them all, the teleological argument--- all of them are vain and fruitless efforts to prove the unprovable. For, had we been able to prove God’s existence, faith would have ceased, and become knowledge. There would have been nothing left to believe, no hope, but dry certainty; no poetry, but matter-of-fact prose. Love would have become a scientific subject. Life itself, devoid of the divine mystery, would have reverted to the pre-human condition of animal instinct, a degeneration toward the generic, death being just one recurring season in the recurring cycle of nature. But all of this ought to be beside the point, because God is not a phantasm of our dreams, and not a scientific fact, and not something tangible, or specific enough, that we may pinpoint Him, like a student in the classroom, who is desperately trying to recapitulate, in his feverishly throbbing memory, that whole mental process which is supposed to lead him to the ultimate triumph of passing the damn exam: Quod Erat Demonstrandum!
...I will be immediately contradicted of course by just about every single representative of every major culture and religion. They will surely quote numerous passages from religious texts, some very excellent aphorisms from their well perused booklets containing hundreds of collected familiar (and not-so-familiar) quotations, and mention what they have heard from persons of wisdom and what they themselves have always deemed a matter of fundamental common sense. Yes, every religious and traditional person takes the existence of God for granted, but always by his or her faith, which only too often effectively masquerades itself as irrefutable knowledge, inside his or her head.
Every religion worships God in its own special way, and this religious worship makes God understandable to every member of their congregation through common faith and practice, and through the sharing of the so-called devotional reading, those literary products appealing to the raw sentiment of the believer like the fiery sermon of a popular evangelical preacher, but totally devoid of intellectual depth. After having their souls soak in all such reading, these people do sincerely believe that they possess adequate knowledge and sufficient comprehension to prove to any heathen or unbeliever, which for them is close to being the same thing, that God, their God, unlike all those other fake gods, does exist in truth and beyond any doubt.
But the real God, the one and only true God, the very same Christian God whom the Jews refer to, possessively but authoritatively, as Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Ehad, and whom the Muslims call Allah in Arabic (“There is no God, but God!”), is certainly above the competence of even our greatest geniuses. He is the Absolute, and this concept of the Absolute is so thoroughly incomprehensible that most attempts at proof are nonsensical, and those that seem to make some sense, you just take another look: they all end up in a vicious circle! Instead of such total silliness as trying to prove something that we cannot even begin to comprehend, we will be much better served by establishing His Existence in explicit formal terms, that is, not scientifically, but mathematically. It is essential for me to be clearly understood here, because what we call “mathematics” is not a science of fact, as is popularly believed, but a complete fiction of artificial creation, a collection of postulated hypotheses, a fantastic construction that stands and does not fall just because nothing made so clearly out of thin air can be caused to tumble. Not surprisingly, mathematics is habitually referred to not just as a science, but as an art, and the basic meaning of all art is creative fiction. And thus we come to the big point that if we wish to be guided by fact, and not by belief, the only way for us to arrive at the truth is not by some asinine reasoning about the shape of the earth, but by an inflexible command, issued by an inflexible commanding authority, that is, by definition--- no arguing about, no questions asked!
So, here is the bottom line. If we want the existence of God, one universal, indivisible, absolute God, above all feuding religions and doctrinal controversies, unquestioningly acceptable to all, and also recognized by all as the supreme authority, established, then the only way to do this is by definition.
…God by definition? Established by a firm and solid command, issued by a commanding authority?
The obvious question about to be asked here is: by whose commanding authority, and why should anybody want to obey this authority? The answer is: by the authority of common sense. The reason to obey is quite similar to Hobbes’s description of the covenant establishing a Commonwealth: to promote and defend the common good of its participants. In our case, it is a pressing need to address the daunting problems facing our long-suffering world in a more or less intelligent way. Which is not by the brute force of weapons, nor by the seductive power of the dollar, nor by any combination of the above, but by the most sensible power of basic human communication, in this case, between nations, and what we need here, in the first place, is a common denominator. Yes, some kind of reason, serving as a generally acceptable and accepted arbitrator, whose authority can be accepted by every nation without any detriment to the national pride, or a seething discontent of an overruled minority, as in the case of a majority decision adopted formally by voting, say, within an international organization, such as the UN.
Such common criterion can only be discovered by our appeal to the common gold standard in ethics, which is the Absolute, which every great culture can easily find in the God of their religion.
Religion, unfortunately, has failed us all in our search for such common denominator. In fact, throughout all history, nothing has been proven more divisive and lethal than religious strife, both among major religions, and also among their bitterly bickering sects and denominations. Religion in a certain sense has always been the deadliest bane of the human race. But don’t we know that the worst poison of a venomous snake can, at the same time, become the life-saving cure, in fact, maybe the only existing cure for an otherwise incurable disease? (As Dr. James Tyler Kent wisely observed, “If a drug cannot kill, it cannot cure.”) This is exactly the case in point. Without religion, there is no way of telling good from bad, right from wrong, except in purely relativistic class-differentiating pseudo-terms, which, under the scrutiny of an impartial, disinterested arbitrator, should instantly reveal their false through and through, and terribly biased nature.
There can be no “generic ethics” without the cultural ethics of individual nations, rooted in their respective religious traditions. So, how can this problem be resolved? How can these different cultures take that thing, which makes them so different, and turn it into a common foundation? Simple: the same as with the deadly snake: they must first separate the venom from its carrier, then distill it, and then, lo and behold! it is now transformed into the cure. Religions must overcome their incompatible theologies, and turn them all into a surprisingly compatible, perhaps, even nearly identical, set of philosophies. Let them all be thinkers among fellow thinkers, rather than rival worshipers,ready to murder each other out of their sanctimonious sense of duty to demonstrate the superiority of their God over the competing gods of the other creeds! Let them use the venom of their weapons as ink, to sign the covenant of peaceful coexistence among the nations.
Now, how does religion become philosophy? By reaching beyond faith and belief, by conceptualizing God and His attributes. The concepts of Perfect Goodness, Infinite Presence beyond Space and Time, Immunity to corruption, being the First Cause in the chain of causes and effects, being the One Absolute Standard of Truth, not by faith, but by definition, and, therefore, not subject to doubt (as distinguished from everything else, which is), hostility, and rejection (which is the general attitude of the religions toward each other, etc.)-- all these ought to be defined not as attributes of a theological God, but as philosophical concepts alongside God, and virtually indistinguishable from Him. Thus presented, those skeptics who question the existence of God out of principle ought to be questioning also the conceptual realities of all philosophical constructs and abstractions. God will find Himself in good company, and cannot be denied, because all other things, which nobody can deny, will also be thus denied. Slightly modifying Dèscartes’ argument here, He exists by virtue of our thinking about Him: a slightly irreverent, but logically convincing approach.
The One God of philosophy is also Universal and Transcendent in clear and distinct ways which refer to the most practical scale of all, namely, the totality of the world of our planet. Being universal, means that He is not for the Christians only, nor for Muslims only, etc., and to suggest that only one group is right about their God, while all others are deeply and hopelessly in error, should constitute an even deeper error of judgment and understanding. The fact that He is transcendent, recognized by all believers, means that He transcends all established religions, each being a particular rather than exclusive revelation to different people, with a different set of historical circumstances and cultural traditions. Kierkegaard is absolutely right to insist that any heathen who worships a wooden stick with sincerity, believing that he worships the true God, is indeed worshiping the true God!
My central thought about the absolute necessity of one Philosophical God as the only possible arbiter in all matters of international relations and in the development of the concept of International Justice to be made acceptable to all and accepted by all, needs to be understood as a sine qua non of any such comprehensive endeavor. No man’s reason, no artificial concept of this nature shall ever suffice, because all great cultures already have their established ethical standards in the particular Deity of their respective religions. The task is to universalize these cultural representations of God philosophically, that is, to make His Word absolutely universal!
Now comes the question of Transcendence. When I say that we must ‘save’ the God of philosophy from the God of religions, what I mean exactly is that we must accept God as truly transcendent, that is, we must put Him above all particular religions. By saying: the Christian God, the Jewish God, the God of Islam, the God of Buddhism, etc., we are limiting and splitting the concept of God placing it within time and human history, and limiting its infinity. Therefore, we must necessarily transcend religious sectarianism, yet we cannot do it without retaining our God of Religions, because our Infinite Absolute Deity is totally incomprehensible. We cannot discover Him, or produce a proof of Him in any reasonable way, and the only way that we can make His existence acceptable to the human brain is by definition. To make our Deity comprehensible, we must appeal to the religious traditions of different cultures, who have all made God comprehensible, by making Him the object of their worship, and through this very graspable mystery of individual religions we arrive at the understanding of the God of our Religion. Then, through the upward connection from individual cultural roots to One God, Universal and Transcendent, we shall arrive, despite all inter-religious hostilities, and actually bypassing their pitfalls, at the commonly shared Absolute of universal Goodness, Truth and Justice.
And finally, regarding the God of Philosophy, as opposed to the God of Religions. Here is what Nietzsche confesses in his autobiography Ecce Homo (Why I am so clever, Section 1):
“I am too inquisitive, too questioning, too exuberant to stand for a gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers, at bottom only a gross prohibition for us: thou shalt not think!”
It may be true that religious dogmas demand that we accept too many things unthinkingly, on faith, but it is still possible to reconcile Nietzsche’s argument with the philosophical concept of God, by transcending the God of the religious dogmas, who is always the automatic answer (What is Truth? God is Truth!), and who is never allowed to be questioned---and reaching for the Supreme Philosophical God who can be seen as the ultimate Question, addressed both to Him by us, and to us by Him.
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