Eugene I wrote: ↑Sun May 16, 2021 2:03 pm
Robert and Simon, you position in philosophical terms is close to Kantian transcendentalism: God in its ultimate essence is even more fundamental than consciousness. So, God in its essence is a "thing in itself" for us, non-accessible by any means (experientially or cognitively) . This position is perfectly in accordance with the traditional Catholic-Orthodox theology, so it is understandable why it is the view of your preference. However, there are some things to note here:
1. Technically it is not idealism anymore, but rather something like "transcendental monism" or "property monism".
2. We are back to "Kantian divide" and dualism between the divine transcendent essence and world's immanent aspects.
Yes and my biggest problem with Kant is that he lumped everything that was not directly observable together ontologically, in his quest to confine reason, to try to make philosophy scientific. It seems to be that apart from any divide he created, he merged two types of differences together;
1) Phenomena versus “things-in-themselves”
2) “Things-in-themselves” versus god
For the first I would say there is no fundamental duality, phenomena is like that observable aspect of noumena. The second I do see as a kind of duality (though not fundamentally as only god is fundamental), but lumping god in the category of ‘things’ goes against everything we knew about god for thousands of years. Did he give any justification for this mixing that has allowed it to stand in ontological discussions ever since?
This basically means that, as opposed to creatures who possess consciousness but have no ability to know the final essence, God is super-conscious in a sense that he is conscious like us, but in addition has an ability to know the final essence (and plus many other powers and abilities that we do not have).
I don’t think this is a correct way of looking at it. We have senses and develop understanding through experience, like we add something to ourselves. God just is unrestricted understanding. There is nothing he experiences to then understand. To even call it consciousness is really a mistake, although of course from our perspective consciousness is the only understanding we have of perception.
This is of course a possibility that we can not refute, but in philosophical terms, it is not idealism anymore. From philosophical perspective, as Bernardo would likely argue, it is not parsimonious, because postulating such extra "final essence" level of ontological structure of reality is not necessary. In simple words, it is an ontology with "one more turtle" below the fundamental level of consciousness.
Yes and I can respect that way of looking at things, if you don’t have faith in judeo-christian scripture it’s an understandable conclusion. It leaves you with some problems in terms of ‘first cause’, eternal, “simple” etc, but those are perhaps not obvious from a philosophical perspective. You also end up with a god that acts out of necessity, which I would argue makes the term “god” meaningless. However for those who believe in scripture, it’s clearly creation ex nihilo (out of nothing), not creation ex deo (out of god). Even Jesus asking people to pray becomes, if not completely meaningless, at least weird.