Prove the Existence of God With This One Easy Trick!

The simple trick is to flip ahead to page 372 of God: His Existence and His Nature, where there is a summary of the classic attributes of God; these include unmoved mover, necessary being, and ground of intelligence, yada yada. 

The various ways to God are interrelated in complex ways, but for me, the way of intelligence is the most persuasive, or at least the most ready-to-hand. We're always using our intelligence, and it must come from somewhere and know something. Conversely, if it comes from nowhere and knows nothing, we'd all be tenured. 

Therefore, in order to keep the mind limber, I'm going to flip back to a subsection called The first intelligible, the first truth, source of truth, and maybe, like yesterday, weave it together with Schuon's essay on the proofs of God.  

Schuon mainly deals with the ontological, cosmological, teleological, and mystical proofs of God. Like Garrigou-Lagrange he also touches on the proof via miracles, but this I find the least persuasive, at least a priori. Once everything else falls into place, then it is easier to accept the miraculous a posteriori, since, once we establish his existence, God can do whatever he feels like he wants to do, gosh!

Lazy man though I am, I wouldn't necessarily want to begin with the exceptional or inexplicable, and from this deduce the existence of God. In an age both scientific and scientistic, I don't think this works, especially in world full of people who have been educated -- or indoctrinated, rather -- beyond their intellectual station.  

Better to wield a proof that goes to the heart of the scientific enterprise itself, which prides itself on its great *intelligence*. That "all truth comes from God" is in a way the least and greatest miracle -- least in the sense that it is so common, greatest in the sense that it leads all the way to the toppermost of the cosmos.

As Schuon says,

The first thing that should strike a man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- whence the incommensurability between it and material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

It doesn't get easier than that, but then again, not everyone is capable of abiding in this simple truth, which we might call the "mysticO-intellection" of pure metacosmic Dudism. 

In fact, while looking up that passage, I stumbled upon this one:

A proof is not convincing because it is absolute -- for this it could never be -- but because it actualizes something self-evident in the mind.

Thus, 

To prove the Absolute is either the easiest or the most difficult of things, depending upon the intellectual conditions of the environment.  

Also, when speaking of logic, to say proof is to say premises and therefore Gödel, from whom there is no escape in this or any other world. 

In other words, we cannot use logic to prove that which escapes logic, let alone that which is the very ground, source, and possibility of logic. Otherwise we are in the position of someone who searches in time for the origins of eternity, when the actual relation is the converse (eternity being the source and goround of time). 

Now, Gödel's theorems do not say that man is confined to what logic can prove, rather, that we can know truths that are unprovable. This is because, as Schuon writes,

Correlative to every proof is an element eluding the determinism of mere logic and consisting of either an intuition or a grace; now this element is everything.

Why everything? Because it is precisely this x-factor which allows man to slip through the web of his own definitions, this because the intellect is ultimately conformed to nothing less than the Absolute.

Schuon provides a good segue back to G-L, writing that

Nothing is more arbitrary than a rejection of the classical proofs of God, each of which is valid in relation to a certain need for logical satisfaction. 

But because of the x- or (↓) factor just mentioned, "this need increases in proportion to ignorance, not in proportion to knowledge," to the point that the people most in need of proof will be unaware of any need at all, because they are sealed in their own matrix of assumptions and premises: a vertically closed system. But Genesis teaches that God never premised a closed garden.

For to deny its vertical source is like intelligence slitting its own throat. Which is not very intelligent, but there it is.

The argument from intelligence ascends through the degrees of being "not only to a first being, but to a first truth, which is the ultimate basis of all other truths" (G-L). 

Let's start with the truism that things are more or less true, i.e., that there are contingent truths and there are necessary truths, the latter of a higher order than the former. For example, it is 83° outside, but it didn't have to be. Conversely, the principles of identity and sufficient reason must be, in this or any other cosmos. 

G-L writes that "Contingent truths or facts are of the lowest degree [of truth]; above these rank the necessary conclusions of the sciences, and in the highest place are the first principles," or what Schuon calls the "principial" realm -- although here Schuon departs in important ways from G-L, and perhaps this would be a good place to discuss those differences.

Basically, G-L follows the the classic formulation of the three levels of abstraction, from the scientific to the mathematical to the metaphysical, each less material and contingent on the way up. But Schuon doesn't leave it at that, rather, with further degrees of being in divinas, which is to say in God.

Not to say that he's correct, but he does have a point. To make the point, I'm going to transition over to a very compact summary of the degrees and modes of reality contained in a book called Philosophy of Science in the Light of the Perennial Wisdom.

One way or another, there's no way to avoid a confrontation with the degrees of being. Most obviously, we know that there are things and that there are minds (or subjects or consciousness), and what are we going to do about it? We can live with the dualism, or we can (for example) default to an unsatisfactory material monism that again essentially slits the throat of intelligence, but what's really going on in the cosmos? 

I guess we'll find out in the next post.