Defining "God"

I often find that in discussions about God, the concept of God is treated as if it’s an arbitrary mental construction; it’s treated as if it’s made up, imaginary. So, when it’s posited by the theist (a theist believes in a God who is, in part, known by revelation) it’s assumed, by the non-theist (I use this word to mean both agnostic and atheist), that it’s just an imaginary concept used to fill in various gaps in our knowledge, gaps which could be replaced just as arbitrarily -- which is to say equally as likely -- by the concept of the flying spaghetti monster, or the polka dotted magical unicorn, or any number of various absurdities.

Speaking for myself, if it were an arbitrary, imaginary concept, then the non-theist’s point would appear quite valid -- I would consequently find the position of the theist to be nothing but an unlikely guess. However, the theist does not give meaning to the word “God” from his own imagination; instead, the classical theist (i.e., Christian and Judaist) derives it from both reason and revelation – the deist from reason only, and, incidentally, the Muslim from revelation only. Now, non-theists regard revelation as imaginary, so the only common ground left between they and the theist is reason.

Reason, of course, must deal with facts, so it is only the facts with which our senses come into contact, and the realm of reason itself, that reason has to use. Thus, according to the theist the word “God” derives it’s meaning from the laws of being, of things we perceive through our senses and know through our intellects; these “things” reveal a separate, primordial ground of existence with a number of definable attributes – this we theists call “God.” It is this definition (or some vague intuition most common persons have of it) that impregnates the word “God” with meaning.

So it is out of the depths of reality itself that the meaning of the word “God,” for classical theists, is derived; to this extent the word “God” is an intellectual construct, not an imaginary idea. The difference is like that between the intellectual construct of a black hole, and the imaginary construct of Santa Clause. People, like Richard Dawkins, simply disregard the fact that “God” is a term which is also a conclusion of rational insight – like a black hole --; they are simply unaware of that fact, or they ignore it (someone like Dawkins, who speaks of Aquinas, should be aware of such a fact). When such people compare God to some made up, imaginary absurdity, it is like saying a black hole can have the properties of the sacred purple buffalo. Who could take such a person seriously? The next question is, what are the facts which lead to this “conclusion of rational insight,” and can they be put into layman’s terms? I’ll try to answer both questions simultaneously.

SOME PREREQUISITES (IN LAYMAN’S TERMS)

All knowledge originates from our senses -- to be more accurate, *through* our senses. Our senses come into contact with a three-dimensional spatial world, and our intellects provide us universal concepts through which we know about that world, through which we interpret the data of our senses. Now, it’s quite clear to our reason that we do not touch or taste or hear or smell or see God. We do not sense God. What do we sense? We sense physical objects, things. We sense rocks and trees and grass and dogs and people and stars and, though aided, we sense things like microorganisms and galaxies as well. So, we know we sense *things,* and we know we sense different kinds of things. However, though we sense different kinds of things we know something important about all of them: they all have being, or existence. Indeed, and we can say about existence that it exists in different ways. Joseph Conti points out that existence can be horsey, or evergreeny, or elmy, or sparrowy, or… you name it. The way things exist is called their “essence.” So things exist in different ways, they are limited existences, or existence limited. We know that a horse is not a bird, and that neither are human beings; we know that existence is limited, here, to a horse essence, a bird essence, and a human essence. But is there something that is pure existence without limitation? In other words, is there a being whose essence is existence? Well, taking what we know is common to each and every thing, namely, existence, we can investigate it’s properties and come to the grandest, most noble conclusion of human reason: God, the being whose essence is existence, exists! Or, as was revealed to Moses, I AM WHO AM (the being whose essence is existence), actually is.

First, we have to get it clear in our minds that proving God as the cause of the universe does not mean that He is moving along in time like we are, it does not mean that He ignited, so to speak, the Big Bang and then moved along in time as it progressed. What it does is look at any given moment in time, including the moment of the Big Bang itself, and finds that limited existences, things, need to be caused to exist at every moment. It doesn’t look backwards towards the beginning of time, it rather looks deep into the heart of every moment of time. We normally think of causes coming before their effects. A bowling ball, for instance, rolls down the lane and then crashes into the pins. Some people think of the proof for God as First Cause as something similar to the bowler who tossed the ball, as coming before the effect in time. They picture God doing something like winding up and tossing the ball. In this picture God is seen as moving along in time with the rest of the effects. But this picture is false. There’s another way to conceive of a cause, and that is, not coming before something in time, but coming before it logically, yet at the same moment. I’m going to steel an analogy from C.S. Lewis to explain this type of cause. Imagine two books on a desk, one with a red cover, one with a green cover. Now imagine that the book with the red cover is resting on the book with the green cover. The book with the green cover is causing the book with the red cover to rest about an inch from the desk. If this had been happening forever, without a beginning, the green book would still be causing the effect without ever coming before it in time. The cause does not come before the effect in time, only in logic. So, we have two things to remember regarding the proof that I will demonstrate. The first is that we are looking into the moments we experience as the present, not at the beginning of time. The second is that some causes come before their effects in logic, not time.

What I’m about to (attempt to) demonstrate is called the Cosmological Argument, it is an argument from the nature of the cosmos that we experience; it comes after experience and is therefore called, in fancy terms, a-posteriori. It was argued as far back as three-thousand years ago by Aristotle, right around the time Moses had a direct experience, or intuition, which brought forth to his mind, without discursive reasoning (that is, without stringing together premises in logical steps to produce a conclusion), the existence of a being called “I AM,” which is conceptually indistinguishable from Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. This argument is deductive, not inductive, so it starts from a universal and undeniable premise, moves to a second premise, the data of the senses, and eventually draws a conclusion based on these two major premises; it is a scientific proof in this regard. It is interesting to note that no philosopher, at least of relevance, has attacked this proof on it’s own grounds – they cannot. Instead they essentially deny science by either attacking reality itself, or our ability to know it. The scientist content to deal in science doesn’t worry himself about these absurd philosophies for he continues to get results, a fact which makes them completely irrelevant to him. Incidentally there are two types of results which come from accepting God’s existence as a rational conclusion. The first is that it gets us thinking as realists, which scientists are in practice, and which has important implications in the realm of ethics, of natural law. The second is that, for the theist at least, the results which make such philosophies irrelevant are the effects not in the world of descriptive facts with which science deals, but in the world of prescriptive facts with which our desires deal. In other words the quality of life the belief produces as an effect is it’s own justification and equally, if not more importantly, makes the skeptical philosophies as irrelevant to the believer as they are to the scientist.


THE PROOF

So, let’s take a look at this proof. We’ve already said that existence is shared by all things; what’s of note to us is that the one thing which existence gives to our minds is the first principle of knowledge: a thing that is, is; it cannot be and not be in the same way at the same time. This is called the principle of non-contradiction. G.K. Chesterton referred to it as the shadow following reality, it cannot be escaped. The second premise is that the cosmos, the world of our senses, is a collection of changing things – things moving, or changing, in time. These things, as we said, are types of existence, they are existence limited to specific essences. Another aspect of a limitation of existence, of a limited thing, is that it doesn’t have it’s reason for existence in itself, in other words, it doesn’t have to exist at the particular moment it does exist. We know this just by reflecting on possibilities. An atom which exists at a particular date and time could have been split at that particular date and time. You, as a human existence, could have never existed if the conditions that came together to produce your existence were slightly altered. We know, by the existence of free will – without which we cannot say we know anything, it’s a condition of rational knowledge – that conditions can be altered. We also know, by scientific research, that chance plays a role in evolution as well as particle physics; so, again, conditions can be altered. Therefore all limited things which exist at the same moment need, at that moment, something which is not limited, and which must exist in order to make them exist at that moment and all moments of their existence. Such an existence is an unchanging cause of the cosmos, is the I AM -- is what we call “God.”

Now, this proof may become more clear by looking at what results from denying it. So, what would result from denying it? Either 1.) that the principle of non-contradiction does not hold, or 2.) that the cosmos isn’t a collection of limited existences, or 3.) that limited things couldn’t be otherwise (there is no free-will, chance or potential), or 4.) that an unlimited existence, God, isn’t a necessary conclusion from the combination of 1,2, and 3, or 5.) some combination of 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Regarding number one, the principle of non-contradiction is self-evident and cannot be denied. This means we know that a thing cannot cause itself to exist, for it would be and not be at the same time in the same way. Regarding number two, the cosmos: well, it IS a collection of limited existences – that’s what a cosmos is, that’s how we know it exists. Regarding number three, if we deny that things can be otherwise then we deny free-will, chance, and we deny that things have potential; admitting just one of these things is fatal to our denial, and means we cannot deny it. So must we admit any of them? Well, free-will must exist or we are not free to know anything according to ground-consequent logic; chance is a scientific truth beyond a reasonable doubt; and potential is seen in the fact that a thing is a limited existence, which could have more existence -- in other words, there’s no reason why the toad you see hopping along could not be a rabbit instead. Something determined existence to exist as a toad, the toad you see, and nothing else; the series of logically prior causes, of simultaneous causes, which make up a moment must end in an unlimited existence – with no potential – which determines the existences of that moment, and all moments. This leads us to number four. Why must we admit that an unlimited existence is necessary? Because a.) the thing itself cannot cause itself, b.) another thing which itself is limited and needs caused at the same time cannot cause it, c.) it cannot be caused by nothing, for then it would be the nature of nothing to cause something, and only something can have a nature, which would make nothing something – either limited (b) or unlimited (d), d.) no other possible option remains except an unlimited existence, one with no potential. Therefore, God exists.