{"id":3913,"date":"2014-02-04T07:59:30","date_gmt":"2014-02-04T12:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/?p=3913"},"modified":"2014-02-04T11:24:51","modified_gmt":"2014-02-04T16:24:51","slug":"god-and-gods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/2014\/02\/god-and-gods.html","title":{"rendered":"God and gods"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It seems apparent to me that, if the atheist wishes to disprove or otherwise snub his empirically verifiable nose at the idea of God, he ought to be sure that knows what the word \u201cGod\u201d refers to. David Bentley Hart makes this one of the central propositions of his book \u201cThe Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss,\u201d<\/a> where he contends that \u201cthe more scrutiny one accords [the God Debate] the more evident it becomes that often the contending parties are not even talking about the same thing; and I would go as far as to say that on most occasions none of them is talking about God in any sense at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a tendency, for instance, for atheists to believe that God is a god.\u00a0The best example of this is in the following, oft-heard \u201carguments\u201d \u2014 and I use the term in the haziest possible sense \u2014 against the existence of God:\u00a0\u201cWe are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go\u00a0one god further,\u201d or that tragic, near-mystical exercise in atheistic coyness \u2014 \u201cWhen you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The problem with believing that the God of philosophical tradition is just another type of powerful, supernatural being \u2014 akin to Zeus \u2014 is that He is not, and no theist can be a theist within his own tradition and maintain otherwise. The successful dismissal of God-as-all-other-gods has all the nonsensical weight of dismissing the existence of a buffalo considered as a planet. The gods are contingent beings.\u00a0They all have stories of their own creation \u2014 something else is always responsible for their existence. They are always popping out of someone else\u2019s head or, if you have the misfortune of being Aphrodite, from Uranus\u2019\u00a0detached\u00a0and far-flung genitals. They are explained by some prior cause.<\/p>\n

This is not God. God, if we are going to talk about the same thing, cannot be considered as\u00a0a contingent being. God, considered properly, is the source of his own existence. He is absolute, which is infinitely, qualitatively different than the contingency of \u201call other gods,\u201d as it is from all other beings. The Christian has every right to\u00a0agree<\/em>\u00a0with the atheist who refuses to believe in God with the same vigor by which he refuses to believe in Zeus, a fairy or a flying spaghetti monster. For any fairies or noodly phantasmagoria \u2014 if they do exist \u2014 would not contain the source of their own existence.<\/p>\n

Not understanding that this is what Christians actually mean when they say \u201cGod\u201d is the primary reason why any one lends any credence to the that pervasive and Reddit-friendly \u201cargument,\u201d that \u201cIf God created all things, who created God?\u201d The question only makes sense if we are speaking of a god, a very powerful, but nevertheless contingent being, a being who does not contain the source of his own existence and must be held in being by some other cause.\u00a0Why then, does the theist posit the existence of an absolute God? Why believe in God and not god?<\/p>\n

The average atheistic minded\u00a0homo sapien<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 and the average Christian who doesn\u2019t know better \u2014 seems to think that theists are proving the existence of a \u201cgod who started it all.\u201d The argument goes like this:\u00a0Every effect has a cause, and every moving thing is set in motion by some other thing, and thus there must be something which sets the first mechanical movement in motion, and \u2014 lest we become caught in infinite regress \u2014 this thing must be Uncaused, Unmoved, in short, Absolute. If all things are contingent, the first cause cannot itself be contingent, or else nothing would ever have come into existence. If all that ever existed was always contingent upon something else for its existence, nothing would ever exist. Therefore, from the fact of contingent existence, we may reasonably posit an absolute source of existence.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019ll grant that this argument has more than enough weight to give the atheist pause. \u00a0After all, the only alternative to positing a first cause is positing some form of infinite regress. And atheists have, with wonderful gusto. The universe always existed, it is but one of an infinitely repeating cycle of universes, an infinite repetition of a Big Bang and Big Crunch, cycling through a wormhole, etc. If the theist questions the reasonable grounds for these theories, atheists generally point to the fact that, whatever poverty of evidence these theories suffer, they suffer no more than the theory of God.<\/p>\n

It seems that we are at an impasse. The theist looks at the contingency of all things and posits an absolute which gives all contingent things a starting point \u2014 an Unmoved Mover. The atheist looks at the same and posits an infinite universe. Neither position seems to be rustling up any unopposable proof of its truth anytime soon. The theist may rightly ask how, if particular events are caused by an infinite number of prior events, any would ever happen. The atheist may rightly ask why an absolute on which all contingent things have their source has to be \u201cGod\u201d in any meaningful sense.<\/p>\n

But this first mover \u00a0(considered as so many atheists consider it, as an absolute \u201cstart\u201d of all things (which, as readers have pointed out, is not how, say, Aquinas or anyone in the theistic tradition would consider it))\u00a0is still not God. Every single being in the entire Cosmos has some prior cause, and every single being has some other motion, event, or source that \u201ctakes responsibility\u201d for its existence, and this is all well-worn and obvious, but things are not just contingent in their origin. Things are contingent in their current existence. Hart describes this fact well:<\/p>\n

If one considers the terms of one\u2019s own existence, for instance, one sees that there is no sense in which one is ever self-existent; one is dependent on an incalculable number of ever greater and ever smaller finite conditions, some of which are temporal, and some of which are definitely not, and all of which are dependent on yet further conditions. One is composed of parts, and those of smaller parts, and so on down to the subatomic level, which itself is a realm of contingently subsistent realities that flicker in and out of actuality, that have no ontological ground in themselves, and that are all embraced within a quantum field that contains no more of an essential rationale for its own existence than does any other physical reality. One also belongs to a wider world, upon all of whose physical systems one is also dependent in every moment, while that world \u00a0is itself dependent upon an immense range of greater physical realities, and upon abstract mathematical and logical laws, and upon the whole contingent history of our quite unnecessary universe\u2026In short, all finite things are always, in the present, being sustained in existence by conditions which they cannot have supplied for themselves, and that together compose a universe that, as a physical reality, lacks the obviously supernatural power to exist on its own. Nowhere in any of that is a source of existence as such.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All things, in their present existence, are contingent upon innumerable, equally contingent realities for the fact of their sustained existence. I \u2014 right here, right now, typing these words \u2014 do not hold myself in being. The\u00a0infinite\u00a0regress that results from a proposed contingent universe that does not rest on any absolute \u2014 this is the same regress we are shot into when we consider, not just the origin of things, but the present existence of any single leaf, electron or baby.\u00a0It is because of this fact, this poverty, this contingency that pervades our every moment, not just our physical origins, that the idea of God, and not a god, takes hold in the intellect. Hart makes this point clear:<\/p>\n

One will not understand this line of reasoning properly, however, unless one recognizes that it is not concerned with the question of the temporal origins of the universe; it would make no difference to the argument whatsoever if it should turn out that the universe existed forever and will go on existing eternally, without beginning or end, or that it belongs to some beginningless and endless succession of universes\u2026.It might be worthwhile to invoke and old Western scholastic distinction between those causal relations that are \u201caccidental (per accidens<\/em>) and those that are \u201cessential\u201d or \u201cintrinsic\u201d (per se<\/em>). The former are principally physical relations (in the broadest sense): transitions of energy, movements of mass, acts of generation or destruction, and so on. In an extended series of such relations, the consequences of a particular thing can continue indefinitely after that thing has disappeared, because all causes in the series are ontologically extrinsic to their effects. The classic example is that of a causal relation between a man and his grandson: by the time the latter is sired the former may have been dead for decades; the first act of begetting was not the\u00a0direct<\/em>\u00a0cause of the second. The relation is one of antecedent physical history, not of immediate ontological dependency, and so the\u00a0being<\/em>\u00a0of the grandson does not directly depend on the\u00a0being<\/em>\u00a0of his grandfather. An example on a grander scale might be Roger Penrose\u2019s postulate of an infinite sequence of universes that always meet at conformal past and future boundaries: even this beginningless and endless cosmogonic cycle would add up to only a causal sequence per accidens\u2026Even if this kind of eternal chain of events and substances really were to exist, it would remain the case that, inasmuch as none of the links in that chain could be the source of its own existence, this entire series od causes and effects would be a contingent reality and would still have to sustained in a \u201cvertical\u201d\u2013a per se or ontological\u2013causality; and this second kind of of causal chain most definitely cannot have an infinite number of links. The ultimate source of\u00a0existence<\/em>\u00a0cannot be some item or event that has long since passed away, like a venerable ancestor or even the Big Bang itself\u2013either of which is just another contingent physical entity or occurrence\u2013but must be a constant wellspring at work even now\u2026The cause of being is not some mechanical first instance of physical eventuality that, having discharged its part, may depart the stage; rather, it is the unconditioned reality underlying all conditioned things in every instant.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A rejection of an absolute first \u201cstarting point\u201d is not a rejection of God. It is, if anything, a rejection of the God of Deism, an uninvolved Absolute Domino in a cosmic line of dominoes. The God of theistic tradition, that which we mean by the word \u201cGod,\u201d is posited by a reflection on the total contingency of all things, by the fact that no one holds the source of their own\u00a0current-moment<\/em>\u00a0existence, any more than they do the source of their origins. A proposed absolute that results from this reflection would have to be an absolute that is an ever-present source of being, giving existence at every moment, an absolute in which all things live, move and have their being, utterly present in every single contingent thing, at every moment.<\/p>\n

This is what the Christian tradition means by \u201cGod,\u201d and it is not a claim done away with by the position of an infinite repetition of contingent causes, a repetition that requires a here-and-now source of being as much as it does a temporal origin.\u00a0To do away with a contingent god is to do away with paganism and several sects of fundamentalism. To do away with a mere mover is to do away with Deism. To do away with the theistic tradition, one needs to confront God.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems apparent to me that, if the atheist wishes to disprove or otherwise snub his empirically verifiable nose at the idea of God, he ought to be sure that knows what the word \u201cGod\u201d refers to. David Bentley Hart makes this one of the central propositions of his book \u201cThe Experience of God: Being, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism-2","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nGod and gods<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It seems apparent to me that, if the atheist wishes to disprove or otherwise snub his empirically verifiable nose at the idea of God, he ought to be sure\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/badcatholic\/2014\/02\/god-and-gods.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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