Who or What is God?
Vishnu
Buddha
Contemplating God
Jesus Christ
“He (Allah) Knows Everything”
Primitive Mother
Parvati – young lover
Virgin Mary
Kali – wrathful goddess
The Limits of Imagry
Nanak, First Sikh Guru (15th – 16th Century C.E.)
On a visit to Mecca, Nanak was waked from sleep
by his Muslim hosts and admonished not to lie
down with his feet toward God.
He responded, “Try to point my feet where God is
not, as God is everywhere.”
Traditional and Philosophical
Notions of God
God Beyond Images
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Personal or Impersonal?
Separate from, or part of, reality?
With, or without, limits?
Like, or unlike, we humans?
• Comprehensible or incomprehensible?
Our Knowledge of God
Revealed Theology
• Passively received
Natural Theology
• Actively constructed
• Prophetic utterances
• Experience and observation
• Sacred literature
• Rational inferences
• In
principle, doctrines
are absolute
• By
rules of logic,
conclusions are probable
Avicenna – Necessary Being
Essential elements of the main argument
are pretty straight-forward:
Main Premise: All beings cannot be contingent – they
can’t all be “caused and conditioned.”
Conclusion: a necessary being must exist – this is
what we call God.
Reconciling this conclusion with more
traditional conceptions of God’s essential
properties is more difficult!
God as Emptiness
Cobb introduces a new consideration:
God is often considered a being “without limits”
– the literal meaning of “infinite”
Every property is a limit, in (at least) the sense that
the predication of a property entails the negation of
any other incompatible properties.
His conclusion: that God has no positive properties,
or is more accurately characterized as “Emptiness” –
that reality which, because it has no nature or
properties itself, allows all other beings to be.
Glossary - AVicenna
Essential Concepts and Their Use in the Readings
Contingent and Necessary Being
Contingent: having the property of being caused by another; of existing
only under specific conditions
Necessary: having the property of being uncaused; of having to exist
by virtue of a being’s nature
Application in Avicenna’s “The Nature of God”
The necessary being is derived from the contingent beings of the universe, as
the “place” where the causal chain of creation must have started.
By definition, contingent beings did not at one time exist; a previously existing
being or power is the condition of a contingent being’s existence. Without a
necessary being – which by definition does not depend on a previously existing
being or power for its existence – there would be no beginning of the causal
events which ultimately created the universe as we know it.
Essential and Accidental Properties
Property: a quality or trait belonging to a being. Often said to “be predicated
of” a being, by virtue of the subject-predicate relation.
Example: “Greatness can be predicated of God” = “God is great”
Essential Property: a quality or trait which makes a being the kind of being
that it is; a quality or set of qualities that define a category of beings
Example: “Mammals give birth to their offspring.”
Accidental Property: a quality or trait which is possessed by a being, but is
not essential to that being; a potentially mutable quality of a being
Example: “A college education can take 5 years to complete.”
Essential and Accidental Properties - Applications
Avicenna is concerned with showing two things:
1. that God – a necessary being – cannot have accidental properties, and
2. that God cannot change – God is perfect and complete
1. All the properties of a necessary being are one with its very nature
(including its existence, Avicenna argues). That is, all its properties are
essential properties, and these are all completely unified. Therefore, they
cannot be either acquired or lost. But accidental properties can be
acquired and lost. Such properties, therefore, cannot be predicated of a
necessary being.
2. Obviously, if no properties of a being can change, that being will be
what it is, as it is, for the entire span of its existence.
In the case of a necessary being, existence is eternal if a being is
necessary. This line of thinking adds the observation that existence
cannot be an “accidental” property, as all accidental properties can
change.
Quiddity and Reality
Quiddity: the essence or “whatness” of a being; the sum total of
the properties that make a being “what it is”
Reality: the existence or actual being of a being; its ontological
actuality or factuality
Application in Avicenna’s “The Nature of God”
To have reality, contingent beings depend on other beings or powers. Thus,
what they are – their quiddity - can be distinguished in fact as well as in
principle from their reality, or their actual existence.
Example: the nature of a table “exists” in the carpenter’s mind before it
actually exists in reality (after s/he has made the table)
According to Avicenna, a being that is necessary has a nature or quiddity,
but if this being is uncaused (if it is not dependent on a prior existing being
for it’s reality), then there was not a time in which it did not exist. It’s
nature can’t be distinguished from its reality.
The Four Kinds of Causes
Active Cause: that power or activity which actually brings something into
existence.
Examples: the physical labor of the carpenter as s/he creates the table; the physical
processes governing the development of the fetus into a human being.
Material Cause: the “stuff” out of which a being is made.
Examples: the oak from which the table was made; the protein-based materials
out of which a human being is made
Formal Cause: the kind of thing which is being made or caused to exist.
Examples: a table, rather than a house or a sculpture; a human being, rather
than a dolphin or a cat (note: the material cause can accommodate many
different formal causes)
Final Cause: the function a thing performs in its environment; the purpose
for which a thing was created
Examples: to have a place for eating, working on papers, etc; ?, deciding the
purpose of human existence would involve us in the meaning of life, which is
certainly up for debate.
The Four Kinds of Causes - Application
With respect to contingent beings, the various causes can really exist
independently of each other (with the possible exception of the formal and final
causes).
Example: the carpenter thinks about the table without having either the
materials or the tools to bring the table into existence.
Avicenna claims that in whatever way we think of how God could be (i.e.,
no matter which kind of cause we consider), we cannot think of any of the
various causes existing without the others.
Consider: If all the properties of God are necessary, none can be
either created or destroyed. If these properties define God’s nature,
then His nature can be neither created nor destroyed. This means
that the set of properties, and therefore the being described by these
properties, can be neither created nor destroyed.
Glossary - Cobb
Essential Concepts and Their Use in the Readings
Metaphysical Dualism
Metaphysics: the theory of reality; the area of philosophy which attempts
to distinguish the real from appearance, or from the illusory
Dualism: from “dual,” or “two,” the view that there are two distinct substances
out of which the entire universe is created. Typically, the two are characterized
as matter and spirit.
Application in Cobb’s “Emptiness and God”
Metaphysical dualism creates an unacceptable and unhelpful conceptual
tension in the concept of God, which suggests that a different metaphysics is
worth considering.
If God is purely spiritual, God cannot be a father, king or any other
person whose role is modeled on the secular world and whose role is
therefore incompatible with other roles (mother, servant).
If God is purely physical, God is not worthy of worship
Emptiness
In a dualistic ontology:
• being and non-being are incompatible states of reality.
Example: there is sound, or there is silence (the absence of sound); one has
goodness, or one doesn’t; and so forth.
• non-being cannot be described, experienced or coherently
discussed.
In a Buddhist ontology:
• Non-being is as real as being; both are aspects of ultimate reality.
Example: without silence (for example: pauses between sounds in
spoken communication, empty spaces between physical marks in
written communication), there would be no comprehended speech.
• Ultimate reality can therefore have no properties
Rationale: the possession of any property logically excludes the possession of
a conflicting property. If ultimate reality is the source of all beings (thus, all
properties), ultimate reality must have no nature itself.
Religious Problem with Emptiness
If God, as “ultimate reality,” is in fact the ground of all other beings, then “God”
has no defined properties, including those which traditionally define God as
good, or just, or even all knowing.
This would suggest that God is “himself” beyond not just all
properties, but also all dualisms – good and bad, just and
unjust, etc.
This God is not a god of either worship or moral guidance.
But religions have also long promoted the idea that there is a “right way” for
us to act and in fact for the universe to be.
“Emptiness” is not an idea which can accommodate this judgmental or
discriminating approach to reality.
The Ultimate of Rightness
According to Cobb, Christianity understands and prioritizes this
“rightness”
This priority tends to anthropomorphize our concept of God.
Doing so is unacceptable, because God can’t just be one more
being among other beings.
However, this priority also tends to engage our intuitions that
there are things that are more rather than less important; more
rather than less desirable; right rather than wrong.
Cobb concludes that there is another ultimate besides that of the ineffable,
indescribable Emptiness of Being:
This is the ultimate of rightness, through which we experience a transhuman domain of goodness and of development from the worse toward the
better.
A New Concept of God
Cobb is thus trying to integrate two distinct but
venerable traditions in world religions:
1. Mysticism: God is the ultimate ineffable reality
Metaphysics: God, to be the ground of all beings, cannot have
properties of his own
2. Morality: God desires and acts to achieve goodness in the
universe.
Cobb does not achieve this goal of integration. He does,
however, ask us to consider thinking of the ultimate in
non-personal ways, and in ways that will incorporate as
much of world religions as is reasonable.