H5267: PART A: EXPLORATION TOWARDS THE DIVINE MYSTERY

(I)Ways of going towards the Divine

Introductory Remarks: Ways of or for going, rather than ‘proofs’:

•  Not to take them as if they were meant to or even capable of bringing about conviction in someone not already well on the way to belief. They took on this function only in post-enlightenment defensive apologetics. In their original context of composition they were something else.

• To take them rather as philosophical elaborations of pre-philosophical ways of encountering the divine, giving disciplined, intelligent, 'sophisticated' expression to pre-reflective experiences - of the cosmos or of human existence - in which the divine is encountered, so many tracks or ways from the cosmos or human existence towards the divine, side by side with 'religious experience' properly so called and apparently leading the same direction, which is why we call 'God' at the end.

 
• At least two ways for any particular proof to fail:
• 1) some people don't have the relevant experiences: not seeing the question which the experience sets, they don't appreciate the answer;
• 2) the particular proof in question is not a good philosophical elaboration of the relevant experiences. It is conceivable that a philosopher could write learned articles in defense of various formulations of a particular Proof, and still remain for all intents and purposes an unbeliever.

• Some further reasons why the proofs don't operate like proofs in logic or maths:
• - the question of God is a life question, not just an intellectual puzzle; it is not just a cognitive question, though it does have a cognitive dimension.
• - the question of God, in its cognitive dimension, is like a question in metaphysics rather than in science: God is much too basic an issue to allow for proof in the ordinary sense, either of existence or non-existence. We are dealing with a determining element within a sort of super-paradigm (Barbour), or overall vision. The name of the game in either direction is conversion rather than proof, though there are criteria so it is not entirely irrational: reasonable rather than rationally required.

• Some possible criteria for the overall vision of which the 'existence of the Divine' is a part: (a)consistency, coherence, simplicity (b)applicability, adequacy to the totality of my/our experience (c)viability: allows successful insertion into the real, contributes to the thriving of a particular organism in its total environment (d)personal criteria: does it feel right? can I take it? Compare the person building a tower in the gospels. Various different proofs/ elaborations of the different ways, will feed into this.

 

 

In this context we can take different proofs or ways as a set of converging probabilities (Newman). Or we can think of proofs and difficulties such as problem of evil and the misuse of religion as cost-benefit analyses, contributing to reasonable but not coerced decision as to way of experiencing and taking Nature and people and life as a whole and the transcendent dimension of things and ways of acting accordingly (esp. Hartshorne).
 

Our exposition will typically have three parts, the first two of which are determined by the reflections above:

• The object of the first part will be to get the general idea of the particular Way or Path or Approach, and what distinguishes it from other Ways.
• The object of the second part of the exposition will be to give a history of this particular Way and its fate in the history of philosophy and general culture, and to look finally at some of the contemporary philosophical exponents of this particular Way.
• We will then consider the question, who or what are we directed towards in the particular Way, how does the Divine typically present itself as we come up this Path?

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

(a)THE COSMOLOGICAL WAY

-- going from the cosmos or world to God; usually distinguished from the Design approach which also does this, but they are easily combinable and each helps to make up the deficit in the other. From ‘cosmos’ and ‘logos’: literally, discourse on the Cosmos as a way to God, or in the course of giving an account of the Cosmos we find ourselves opened out onto the Divine Mystery.

(A) Intuitive presentation:

 
•  The cosmological approach has its roots not in the experience of order but in the experience, positively of the being of the world and of ourselves, the power of being, the stubborn reality of things; and negatively in the experience nevertheless of the contingency of the world of our experience and of ourselves as part of it, the creature-liness of things and of ourselves, the accidentality, facticity, the does not have to be character of what nevertheless is.

• This double experience typically sets up two questions: 1)the utter contingency of the fact that it is: why is there anything rather than nothing? the wonder at the appearing being that stands before our eyes and in us; 2)the utter contingency of the way that it is: why is it the way it is and not otherwise? why this particular kind of world rather than some other. If meditating on these questions leads us to talk in terms of some being, person or thing or force, or something else, perhaps extremely strange, which unlike the things of our experience would not lead to such experience and such questions, and which provides the key as to why a world and why this kind of world, then we have a 'cosmological argument'. ?

• There are probably three kinds of escape, the third way however being a correction rather than a rejection:
1. (i) it is possible that a person has never had such experiences: the questions which the experiences set are not for him/her real questions, s/he does not see the point of the whole approach;
2. (ii) it is conceivable that a person has had such experiences, does see the point of the questions and even feels them as real questions, but for some reason denies that questions of this sort necessarily have answers;
3. (iii) the Heideggerian critique: Western metaphysicians go too quickly in finding the explanation of the Being of the beings or things in terms of another being or thing -- what He. calls the 'onto-theological structure of Western Metaphysics'. God is not a being, a person or thing, not even the supreme being: God is Other- than-being, perhaps something like Heidegger's Being which is not a being but gives the beings, or perhaps a prime determinant of the character of the giving of Being.

(B)Technical details

(I)traditional:

• Classic expression in first three of the Five Ways of St Thomas:
• the Argument from Motion, going back ultimately to Plato but in St Thomas more like Aristotle's version; also Arabs and Jews;
• The Argument from Efficient Causality, Aristotelian in terminology to be found already in Alfarabi;
• The Argument from Contingency, similarly.
• So they are not original with Aquinas by any means, though he does give them a style and taste typical of his particular thinking. For more on these arguments, see History of Philosophy I notes from last year.
• One difficulty of having three or five ways is how to maintain the unity of the Divine. Contemporary ways of putting the argument manage to avoid this. But this problem is solved, in large degree, already in Duns Scotus whose version of the proofs is probably the most sophisticated in the Middle Ages.

(II) 20th Century

(a)Van Steenberghen, Hidden God, Ch IX. two steps: 1/there is an absolute; 2/the Absolute cannot be finite: an absolute finite being is a contradiction in terms; Therefore it is infinite.

(b)Van der Veken: 1/the Totality/Universe/Being/The Real has certain abstract characteristics -cf. Parmenides already; 2/there has to be an explanation within the Totality why the Totality has these characteristics; 3/no finite being, person or thing, nor complex of such beings can provide this explanation.

(c)Hartshorne: see Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, stated p. 281, argued pp. 283-284.

(d) Swinburne: see seminar reading. Also John Hick and Ninian Smart for other presentations.
 
 

(C)Who or What we are opened towards in the Cosmological Approach:

(1) the Divine as immanent in reality, sustaining it;

(2) the Divine as transcendent to, other than and different to, reality --everything else as creature.

(3) the Divine as not a finite being, not a person or a thing in the usual sense of these words, not a being among the beings, not the kind of thing which itself would provoke the self-same questions. So therefore extremely strange.

Two possibilities

• 1/ an 'Infinite Being'; or

• 2/ not a being at all but something entirely different: Neo- Platonists --the ONE, beyond Being, beyond thought; Thomas: Being itself subsisting; Heidegger: Being --what gives the issing is not one of the things which is.

Concluding Remarks

The other Ways complement the Cosmological Way somewhat in this respect, but only religious experience properly so called taken up into various traditions of experience and interpretation truly gives us a Divine Mystery that a Christian or a Muslim or Jew would recognize.

The Ways on the other hand convey a kind of credibility to religious experience which it wouldn’t otherwise have: God breaks through not just in the experiences of Prophets and Mystics but in everyday experiences and the experiences of scientists in the performance of their tasks. We go now to a second family of Ways or Approaches, also starting out in the Natural World out there, the Way of Design or the Teleological Approach.

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