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Edited on Wed Mar-02-05 08:28 PM by Stunster
You constructed this out of what I said:
1. In order for something to exist it must be intelligible. 2. A thing is intelligible iff something exists that can understand it. 3. An infinitely complicated thing is intelligible only to an infinite consciousness 4. Reality is infinitely complicated. 5. Therefore an infinite consciousness exists. 6. For all x, if x is an infinite consciousness, then x is God. 7. Therefore God exists.
Actually, I wasn't really trying to give an argument for God's existence in that post. I was trying to explicate what is involved in the notion of God's existence, in answer to the question in the thread title.
But yes, that is something like an argument I would be prepared to offer for God's existence. It is certainly not original, and in this form, was presented in the well known book by the Canadian Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan SJ, entitled Insight, published in the late 1950s, I think.
But Lonergan's argument doesn't so much rely on the notion of infinite consciousness as on the notion of an 'unrestricted act of understanding'. But I suppose they might well come to the same thing.
I'd have more hesitation in agreeing to the idea that God is infinitely complicated. In fact, Aquinas following Aristotle's act-potency metaphysics, would say that God is 'omnino simplex' --altogether simple. The simplicity being referred to is ontological. Meaning, God is not composed of any parts, either physical or metaphysical. In particular, God is not composed of act and potency (in Aristotle, 'energeia' and 'dynamis'); but rahter is 'actus purus'. God is not a metaphysical composite of subject and attribute, of essence and existence, of matter and form, or of genus and differentia. God is, 'esse ipse subsistens'---self-subsistent Being---not a being among other beings.
What I was suggesting is that we ought to interpret 'being' as information. Whenever we encounter a being of any kind, we encounter information. Information is the ultimate 'stuff' of being.
In the case of God, it is not limited. Hence there's no potentiality in God to gain or lose information. Hence, to reiterate Aristotelian-Thomistic points above: God does not gain or lose intrinsic properties; God's does not come into or go out of existence; God's form is not limited by a particular material medium; God doesn't depend on a prior species of which God is an individual instance, and hence does not depend on a genus. Etc.
It will turn out, though, that infinite self-communicating information constitutes both Consciousness and Value. But there is no division or composition, involved. The model here is the human person. The person is, roughly, information getting communicated, thus constituting consciousness, thus constituting value. We tend to think that human persons are intrinsically, not merely instrumentally valuable, and it is this which undergirds morality.
The ontological simplicity of a person's rational moral consciousness, was of course, held by Plato & Descartes, but there are important differences between P & D, and Aquinas & Aristotle. For one thing A & A were not substance dualists. (I think this is one reason why it's not an accident that Christianity preaches not merely the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the body. But that would take us off in another direction.
The point I want to stress here is that God can be viewed as the reality that is the least composite possible. Of course, as Aquinas explicitly recognizes, it's God's lack of compositeness that makes it really tough for human minds and human language to grasp God intellectually.
I'm trying to think of an analogy here, and the one that comes to mind is mathematics. It's in one sense terribly complicated. But math itself, viewed metaphysically, as it were, is terribly simple. Once you understand it, it all makes perfect sense, and all holds together in a nice logical unity. Of course, if God is consciousness, then God is more than just math, because God. being infinite, can understand and know the truth of undecidable Godel propositions. But so can we.
In order for a thing to be intelligible, isn't it enough that something could exist capable of understanding it?
Yes, but I'm looking at this question sub specie aeternitatis. Suppose there was something which never is actually understood at all by anything. Like a Kantian 'ding-an-sich'. Ok, if it's never a 'ding' for some knower, then it strikes me that it makes no difference to say of such a thing that it exists or doesn't exist. One may as well say it doesn't exist. And returning to Lonergan, to know that something exists or is the case necessarily involves understanding. So, if something is never understood, then it is never known to exist or to be the case. And if it's never known to exist or be the case by anyone or anything, then one may as well say it doesn't exist or is not the case. Of course, since God exists, this is never a problem. But if there is no transcendent knower, no unrestricted act of understanding, then you're stuck with the quasi-Kantian antinomy of things that exist but are never known to exist. But if nothing and no-one knows about their existence, what could it possibly mean to say they have actual (as against merely possible) existence?
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