What God Is
God is not an empirical notion.
If having a concept means having an acquired disposition to pick out perceived objects as being this kind or that kind and to understand what this kind or that kind of object is like, and to perceive a number of particulars as being the same in kind and to discriminate between them and other sensible particulars that are different in kind, then it is clear none of us have any concept of God.
God is not an empirical notion.
If anything, God is a theoretical construct, which means, for the purpose of philosophical inquiry, that God is closer to an entity in theoretical physics in that God is not directly observable but may nevertheless be inferred by His effects.
If this categorization is correct, and if we can neither observe God nor apprehend God’s essence some other way, then God must answer to a definite description – that is, a description that would pick out just the individual that is God, if God exists.
Philosophers have proposed various ways of arriving at such a definite description of God. Some, following Anselm, suggest God is that which nothing greater can be thought of, which (or so Anselmians claim) would entail the notion of absolute supremacy. From the notion of absolute supremacy, it is further supposed that if God exists at all, then God exists necessarily, which is to say God is such that he must exist no matter what and with all and only purely positive features.1
Others, like Thomas Aquinas, say we can reach a definite description of God by analyzing the world in front of us and then tracing back to what ultimate condition or set of conditions must be in place for reality to be actually intelligible – that is, not absurd. If Aquinas is correct that this line of reason demands some purely actual reality to secure the spot of fundamental explainer, one can then run conceptual analysis upon the notion of pure actuality to begin describing what many consider to be the unique individual that God is. Again, this latter approach is featured in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, but is found in philosophical theists — particularly classical theists — before and after him.
For our purposes, we might borrow the definite description of God found in the tradition of Classical Theism, which has the following crucial characteristics:
God is absolutely the first cause of all causable thing, purely actual (without intrinsic passive potency), and has no nature distinct from his act of existence.
It is often argued that these commitments further entail that God is “uniquely unique” (one and only one), eternal (not just everlasting, but always existing outside of time), necessarily existing (that is, spanning all possible worlds), omnipotent (capable of bringing about all logically possible realities), omniscient (understands all essences, possibilities, contingent truths, and necessary truths), and perfectly good (suffers from no privations).
A purely positive feature is one that neither entails nor implies a limit. For example, being curious implies a limit — specifically, ignorance. So the feature of curiosity is not purely positive, whereas, quite plausibly, the feature of omnipotence is.
This is to just clarify my understanding. Writing something out often does that. So not necessary to respond. I am using these posts to clarify things.
I completely understand what it means that we cannot understand God. Just as a slug could not understand what we are. But the slug can know of our existence directly but we cannot know directly of the existence of God. That is an important distinction.
If we knew directly of the existence of God, how would that change things? The answer dramatically and definitely not in any positive way. So one of the characteristics of God must be that He must not be directly knowable, whether of His nature or that if He even exists. (Pointed out here on a previous thread with reference to Stephen Evans and his book "Natural and Signs Knowledge of God")
I tend to ignore the esoteric discussions of God and instead to focus on the obvious. From last Sunday's gospel:
"I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
for although you have hidden these things
from the wise and the learned
you have revealed them to little ones."
And
"All things have been handed over to me by my Father.
No one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son
and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him."
So we are left with intermediaries, The Gospels, reason and science.
I wonder what Aquinas would have written if he had available the current knowledge that science has provided of the nature of the universe and its fine tuning. Aquinas used only what was available to him in the 1200s. We should use what is available to us in the 21st century as well as what was the basis for Aquinas' conclusions. Logic will not change but our understanding of the nature of our existence is rapidly changing.
One of. the most ironic things of the modern age is the conventional wisdom, that science points away from a creator. The actuality is that the more science discovers, the more it points to some sort of creator with an immense intelligence.
While we may not understand much of the nature of this entity, we do understand several things about it. Namely, that it would not create such an existence as our universe without a purpose. This creator had choices and by enacting one of these choices, it reveals certain things about its nature.