{"id":8450,"date":"2013-10-04T11:40:05","date_gmt":"2013-10-04T11:40:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/10\/04\/ontic-versus-alterity-theism-2\/"},"modified":"2013-10-04T11:40:05","modified_gmt":"2013-10-04T11:40:05","slug":"ontic-versus-alterity-theism-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/10\/04\/ontic-versus-alterity-theism-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Ontic Versus Alterity Theism"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. Mikael Stenmark<\/a>'s Prague paper, "Competing Conceptions of God: The Personal God versus the God beyond Being" got me thinking about it again.  What follows, however, is not intended as commentary on Stenmark's paper.<\/span><\/p>\n

One way into the problem as I conceive it is via the following aporetic triad:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

1. There are things other than God that exist, and they all depend on God for their existence. <\/span><\/p>\n

2.  For any x, y,  if x depends for its existence on y, and x exists, then y exists. (This implies that nothing can depend on God for its existence unless God exists.)<\/span><\/p>\n

3. God is not one of the many things that exist, and so God does not exist.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is easy to see that the limbs of the triad cannot all be true. And yet each has some plausibility, at least 'in-house,' i.e., among theists.<\/span><\/p>\n

(1) or something like it must be accepted by both ontic theists and alterity theists.  Roughly, an ontic theist is a theist who maintains that God is a being among beings while an alterity theist is one who maintains that God is radically transcendent, radically other, to such an extent that he cannot be identified with any being.<\/span><\/p>\n

(2) won't be accepted by the alterity theists, but it is to my mind exceedingly plausible!  <\/span><\/p>\n

(3) won't be accepted by the ontic theist, but many find it plausible.  <\/span><\/p>\n

But since the limbs cannot all be true, one of them must be rejected.  (I am assuming, of course, that there cannot be true contradictions.)  There are therefore three main ways of solving the problem.<\/span><\/p>\n

A. The quickest solution, call it Blanket Atheism, is by rejecting (1).  There is no God in any sense of the term.  No being is God, and there is no God 'beyond being.'   There is just the natural world (and perhaps abstracta) but nature is not God.<\/span><\/p>\n

B.  The alterity theist rejects (2) while accepting (3).<\/span><\/p>\n

C.  The ontic theist accepts (2) while rejecting (3).<\/span><\/p>\n

But there are two other C-options, two other options involving the acceptance of (2) and the rejection of (3).<\/span><\/p>\n

One could take a monistic tack, roughly along the lines of Spinoza.  Accordingly, (i) there is a sense in which God exists — God is not natura naturata<\/em>, but natura naturans<\/em> — ; (ii) God exists in the primary sense of 'exists'; (iii) God alone exists, hence is not one of many existents, and so does not exist in the sense in which Spinozistic modes exist.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is what I used to think, back in the '80s.  See my "Two Faces of Theism," Idealistic Studies<\/em>, vol. xx, no. 3 (September 1990), pp. 238-257.  But I moved away from this position in the '90s and took an onto-theological turn that found expression in my existence book<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is the other C-option.  Accordingly, God is not an existent among existents as the ontic theist maintains.  Nor is God somehow real but nonexistent as the alterity theist maintains.  Nor is God the one and only existent as the monist maintains.  Rather, God is self-existent Existence, yet transcendent, pace<\/em> monism.  This is roughly akin to the position of Aquinas.  Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.<\/em>  So God is Being (esse<\/em>) but God also is.  God is Being but also the prime 'case' — not instance! — of Being.  But God is in a mode of Being unlike the mode of Being of anything else. So God is not a being among beings, nor does he have properties in the way Socrates has properties.<\/span><\/p>\n

But this too has its difficulties.  So now I am contemplating the final step: Into the Mystic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Roughly, the above triad is an aporia<\/em>, an insolubilium<\/em>.  One has to blast through it, as through a koan, into the Transdiscursive.  The philosopher, however, hovers at the boundary of the Unsayable, marking it without overstepping it, incapable qua philosopher of effing the Ineffable, but able — and this is his office –  to point to it while refuting both denials of it and bad theories about it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. Mikael Stenmark's Prague paper, "Competing Conceptions of God: The Personal God versus the God beyond Being" got me thinking about it again.  What follows, however, is not intended as commentary on Stenmark's paper. One way into the problem as I conceive it … Continue reading “Ontic Versus Alterity Theism”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,191,20,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aporetics","category-atheism-and-theism","category-metaphilosophy","category-mysticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}