H5267/7367/9367/9467: PHILOSOPHY OF GOD/RELIGION PART A:

(I) Ways of going towards the Divine (cont.)

(c) THE EPISTEMIC, AESTHETIC AND ETHICAL WAYS: the ways of truth, goodness, beauty, love and duty.

-- in Philosophy, in Plato's Symposium and in the Platonic tradition of Augustine, Anselm and Bonaventure and the Fourth Way of St Thomas, also some of the Transcendental Thomists; and with the Moral Argument or Argument from Duty following on from Kant and also, in a different form, John Henry Newman.

-- also countable within this broad way would be the approaches to God of the likes of Gabriel Marcel, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas.

-- once again, it has taken a number of different forms:

(A) identifying or defining the goal of our strivings,

: what we are striving for, as God or somehow related to the Divine Mystery:

We would like the truth, or an adequate conception of what is real, what we are striving towards in our knowing practices, to be something other that just what I think or what you think or what the majority or even the experts think is real, but to be something 'objective' as we say --even the experts can be wrong.

So also for the good, some things are really good, and not just good for us, and evil also in not just subjective human opinion or convention; similarly for values and disvalues, = the good and the bad in the context of decision making.

So also for beauty and ugliness --beauty may lie to some extent in the eye of the beholder but not totally.

Also love: in love there is involved an affirmation of the loveableness of the person loved, in and for themselves, not just for us or because of our love --for GOD, from God.

That is to say: implicit in the affirmation involved in ordinary human practices such as the search for true knowledge, the judgement of and the striving after genuine goodness, the recognition of and artistic creation of beauty and in the experience of love is a kind of affirmation of transcendence, a transcendence of the merely human this worldly sphere of human subjectivities, an implicit affirmation of something like a Divine Subjectivity, a Divine Mystery, which the arguments merely serve to make explicit.

Truth, properly considered = the content of the divine knowledge, what God knows;
what is real = eventually, what is real for God;
and the whole scientific enterprise is to bring our knowledge closer and closer to the content of the divine knowledge. Cf. Steven Hawking, in his book on the history of Time, in spite of his atheism.

Similarly for Goodness and Beauty: the Good is the Good in the eyes and ears and touch of God, and S/HE provides the criterion also for the truly beautiful and the truly lovable.

Put more modestly: the theistic paradigm gives a straightforward readily intelligible way of providing for a not relative to human desires idea of Truth or the Real, Goodness and also Beauty and Loveableness which we commonly take for granted and would like to retain. Other possible definitions or ways of identifying Truth or the Real, etc., are all subjected to paradoxes of one kind or another. This fact may not, taken by itself, be a reason in the sense of self-sufficient proof for taking the giving of the Divine Mystery as really real and co-ordinating ourselves with It, but it is certainly one advantage of the theistic paradigm.

The theistic 'paradigm' makes at least some kind of sense of this kind of thing.

For a recent rendition of this first kind of argument, see especially Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, Ch XIV, the Epistemic and Aesthetic Ways.

The argument from truth goes back as far as Augustine and his illumination theory of knowledge, according to which the existence of God is implied in every form of true knowledge. Also Bonaventure.

Also Transcendental Thomism: the Absolute Horizon or Horizon of Absolute Being is co-posited as horizon in any claim to knowledge.

There are a number of ways of avoiding the conclusion, but each has its cost: once again it is a matter of counting benefits and costs (cf. Hartshorne, cited above, for further detail).

(B) contextualizing the extent of our striving for these things.

A second form of this Way goes back as far as Plato, The Symposium and is also to be found in Augustine and Transcendental Thomism. This form concentrates not on the independent of human desires and needs idea of Truth or Goodness or Beauty or the Lovable but rather on the extent of our desire for these things:

Human beings manifest a passionate desire for goodness and truth and a striving for a more than merely earthly beauty.

We are never satisfied, there is an insatiable curiosity for more and more ultimate explanations, and for a beauty and love not reasonable;

Augustine: you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you; and "Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so Ancient and So New". (Confessions, Book I and Book X respectively.)

the phenomena of Greed, and other forms of idolatry;

the phenomena of restlessness: human nature as characterized by a restlessness, sometimes apparently quite irrational, certainly ill understood, an infinite longing,

which in the tradition is termed, "the natural desire for the vision of God".

The question is whether one can have a desire for something without having at some stage an implicit vision or feeling or having somehow been 'touched by' what it is one desires:

Bonaventure (Questions on the Trinity): if you desire something, you have to know the object of the desire, and if you know this you know God;

Aquinas (S.T., 1a, 2, 1, ad 1): the awareness that God exists is not implanted in us by nature in any clear or specific way. We all want happiness which in fact can only be found in God, but this does not amount to an awareness of God. We can see something which is actually Peter coming towards us, without knowing that it is Peter. Sartre: because there is no God, human being is a "useless passion": instead of a natural desire for the vision of God we should think of it as a malady which can never be radically cured but which we may guard ourselves against to prevent its worst effects.

To know the passion isn't finally useless we have to already know there is a God: the passion probably can't by itself show that there is a God. However, as with the previous version of this Way it does fit in well with there being One, yet a further indication in favour of the theistic paradigm. After we have found God we will then interpret it as a passion She has put in us so that we may search for Him, a sign of having already been touched by the Divine Mystery in the deepest heart --thus Augustine. The "Hound of God" theme.

(C) the Way of Duty: as expressed in the 'Moral Argument' in its various forms:

:the call of conscience as somehow the voice of God, the divine mystery in our hearts, calling us onwards, persuading us, luring us to the Good.

1)simplest form of the argument:

If there is no God, then everything is permitted.
--see Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamozov
--see Sartre, existentialism and humanism, pp. 33-34.
It is not the case that everything is permitted.
e.g. the torture and murder of innocent children, launching an all out nuclear war on a non-nuclear power...
Therefore there is a God.

Compare the Psalmist: "The Fool says in his heart: there is no God. Such are corrupt..."

a rejection of the second premiss is hardly likely: even Sartre makes a distinction between acting in good faith and acting in bad faith. To really think this way is probably to be less than human: As Hume puts it, Treatise, III, I, II: "these sentiments [of morality] are so rooted in our constitution and temper, that without entirely confounding the human mind by disease or madness, 'tis impossible to extirpate and destroy them.". We may disagree as to what is right and wrong but moral practices of some kind or another have been with us since pre-historic times, at least within the group.

.the first premiss is more difficult.

One certainly does not have to be an explicit self-conscious theist in order to be moral.
'I ought to do this' does not imply, God invites/commands me to do this, unless I am already a theist, and then only indirectly??
'God commands this' does not imply 'I ought ethically to do this', except in so far as I recognize the divine mystery as an ideal evaluator of the good thing to do: the command itself does not imply an ought?? what is known as the autonomy of ethics: good religion may take over, affirm and validate and to some extent liberate our ethical practices, but the latter would seem to have some legitimate existence in their own right.
If there is no God, there is no transcendent evaluator of the good thing to do, only human beings; but this does no more to the objectivity of ethics than it does to the objectivity of science,
or, rather, it does the same, and the argument in this form thus reduces to the first (under (A), above)

Yet it could still be that the 'voice of conscience' allows for interpretation as the divine persuasion, the divine invitation, feeling God's feelings... Cf. Whitehead and Hartshorne and Process thinking generally. Cf. also, John Henry Newman, below. Once again, we have something which (certain) theistic paradigms help to make more intelligible, and which therefore contributes positively to their acceptance.

2)the 'Moral Argument' in Kant is more indirect:

.Whether or not there is a God, it is not the case that everything is permitted: morals is something each rational being imposes on themselves, autonomous rather than heteronomous.

: a maxim for living is ethical if and only if it abides by the principle of universalizability, and this principle is a principle of reason which we impose on ourselves as rational beings.

On the other hand, our moral consciousness itself 'requires' the eventual harmony of virtue and happiness, demands from us a kind of belief ('postulate of practical reason') that in the end everything will work out O.K., that wrongs will be righted and everything will get balanced:

: moral being cannot admit the suffering of the innocent, the disproportion between human being as sensuous being and human being as moral being:

[cf. the atheist Camus, in the novel The Plague: the refusal to condone a state of things in which children are put to torture.]

Virtue is worthiness to be happy, good people ought to be happy people, innocent children ought not to suffer.

According to Kant, the refusal to condone this state of things is tantamount to admitting or confessing a kind of belief in (at least the possibility of) this ultimate harmony, made possible by the Divine Mystery, governing both Nature and the realm of Ethics.

The existence of God is thus a postulate of practical reason, together with freedom and the immortality of the moral person. A postulate of practical reason for Kant does not increase our theoretical knowledge, but still is something we act on in practice, and this, he thinks, is all we need. Our theoretical knowledge is and remains restricted to the world as it cannot but appear to us; but this is also to say that it does not decide what the world is in itself, Kant in this manner limiting knowledge so as to make room for faith.

One problem with this is whether it is capable of surviving abstraction from Kant's philosophy. But perhaps there is something in it. We do habitually believe, in face sometimes of considerable evidence to the contrary, that eventually everything will work out right, that judgement will have its day, though perhaps not today, a belief expressed in all kinds of stories about the eschaton. Being ethical is being on the side of the Universe. Is there any way we can make sense of this?

(D)Some of the more recent renditions of this approach:

(i) the Moral Argument in John Henry Newman,

Grammar of Assent, Ch. V, Section 1: focusses on an analysis of the phenomenon of conscience. For Newman, conscience has two aspects

1)a moral sense, judging the rightness or wrongness of particular actions;
but conscience is also
2)a sense of duty or obligation to do the right and omit the wrong, which gives us all kinds of trouble if we don't.

According to Newman, this latter is not just presence to self --not being able to live with myself --but a presence to or before a transcendent Person, connected with various inter-subjectively appropriate emotions, the voice or the echo of a voice imperative and constraining, not my voice.

ii) the approach of the Christian existential writer Gabriel Marcel (1889-1980) to the recognition of God

This works via a reflection on the experience and difficulties as well as achievements of authentic human love, love characterized by trust or 'creative fidelity', creative trust, engagement, faith in and hope for a person, a kind of participation in God's creation.

Human love gives at least two kinds of intimation of the Divine:

1) an intimation of the Divine in the contrast between what human love proposes and what it can deliver

:in spite of failures and death love aims at perpetuity and unconditionality;

all human love is threatened by shortcomings, infidelity and the death of the beloved.

Yet love wants itself to be stronger than death,

stronger in itself: faithful unto death,
and
stronger in its power: "thou shalt not die".

2) an intimation of the divine secondly in the moments of deep fulfillment and joy that even human love can bring,
including the experience of being given to each other, meant for each other, e.g. by 'God' or 'the Universe'.
Human graciousness and love may be then experienced as a sacrament or icon of divine live: not itself the divine love but through it the divine graciousness and love is symbolized and to some extent made real.

Compare 1 John 4: 7-12.

For a summary of Marcel on this, see K. T. Gallagher, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (Fordham Univ. Press, N.Y., 1962).

A somewhat similar position is to be found in Martin Buber (1878-1965): the Divine Thou experienced in the thou's. This you will find included as one of the set readings.

(iii) Emmanuel Levinas

(French Jew, born Lithuania 1905, Prof. at the Sorbonne and University of Paris), has a somewhat less comfortable approach to the divine than Martin Buber or Gabriel Marcel.

Even the best human love is often rather egocentric. It is in the realm of the Same, part of our search for 'self-fulfillment', it does not really get us out of ourselves.

For Levinas, therefore, the Divine is rather experienced in the face of the Other, in Biblical terms, "the widow and the orphan" and the stranger, what Levinas calls 'the epiphany of the face';

True knowledge of God, then, accomplishes itself in the ethical dimension, respect and goodness for the widow and the orphan, the ones from outside,

as in the Epistle of James, 1/27; or Lazarus at the Gate; or Matt. 25/31-46, the road to Emmaus, and various legends about strangers.

The story that Levinas tells in this context is a critique of Western philosophy and the whole of Western culture, as a colossal Egology, with the Economic Subject as central, the economic, world dominating, totalizing 'I'. This makes for an ethics of self-affirmation and domination, the domination of the stranger and a life without God, never shown more clearly than in War, reducing everything to our sphere of influence, the purest expression of pure Being, installing an order which no one can escape. And all this before people started talking about Economic Rationalism.

Even spouse and family are typically or all too frequently in this sphere of domination, the sphere of the Same, not a relationship with the other but a part that I am missing, a complement to my own need and enjoyment: I build a house, and invite my spouse into my house and we have children; and we are having a nice comfortable Christmas party, with family and friends, all in the sphere of the Same; but someone is knocking at the door, nothing to do with the party, nothing to do with the same, o so inconvenient. The Other, the Widow and the Orphan, not asking to be integrated into the Same, but to be recognized just as they are --that is where God breaks through.

See Totality and Infinity (Duquesne Univ. Press, Pittsburgh, 1969). Further bibliography available on request.

This family of Ways took us from the sphere of Nature (Cosmological and Design) to the sphere of human life and striving and interpersonal relationships. Much more could be made of it, linking it up with the ordinary mysticism of everyday life.

The next Way we are to look at takes us into the sphere of worship - or at least, that is where it starts.

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