GOD, BY POSTULATE!

(With this entry I am returning to the Philosophy section, which goes under the title God, By Postulate!)

This clearly preambular entry comments on this section’s general title. Assigned to the section on the spur of the moment, I started having reservations about it practically right away. There can be no doubt that this particular subject is enormously important to the philosophy of religion, but the latter is obviously only one part of the larger subject of philosophy. Why don’t I find a more encompassing title for the section, then?

I contemplated, meditated, and ruminated, and eventually I realized that my initial title was a good one. Its relevance to philosophy as such is incontestable. After all, ethics, ontology, gnoseology, epistemology, etc., are all about God, as Spinoza and Pascal passionately asserted, and as Kant has most convincingly demonstrated in his metaphysical quest. There could be no philosophy without the concept of God (compare this to Thales’s “all things are full of gods”), but there could be no understanding of the dividing line between science and religion, and no appreciation of where exactly philosophy fits in this nearly impossibly difficult conundrum, unless we separate the unknowable God, who is necessarily beyond our comprehension, from the scientifically comprehensible and theoretically unchallengeable God by Postulate.

Indeed, I will repeat that accepting God by faith is religion, whereas attempting to prove His existence scientifically, that is mathematically, is impossible, because God is the ultimate elementary concept, and we cannot appeal to any preexistent concept for help in establishing quod erat demonstrandum. As a matter of fact, the “exact” science of mathematics cannot prove any of its own elementary propositions which are otherwise self-evident out of sheer common sense to every reasonable and not necessarily educated person, for which reason it accepts them all axiomatically, by postulate, just because it can neither prove them nor do without them.

By the same token, philosophy cannot do without God, because He alone supplies the absolute standard of all things. To make my point even clearer, all atheistic philosophers must of necessity address themselves to a gold standard of sorts, and their refusal to refer to that standard as “God” is merely a matter of linguistic preference, just as those who believe in God refer to that same standard as “God.” And, just like in mathematics, as we are dealing with elementary concepts axiomatically, so in philosophy we must deal with the basic concept of God.

I am therefore confidently contending that God By Postulate! is perhaps the most important statement “made on behalf of philosophy” (hello, Kant!), and that my sectional title is thereby admirably superb.