I Am, Therefore God Is

The sole thing that the I is able to prove is that it exists; the sole thing that it can refute is whether it may be God.

Thank you, and drive home safely.

EXCUSE ME, I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT THAT.

Go right ahead. I slept late, so I don't have much time. You, on the other hand, have another 2.8 billion years to babble on about nothing.

SCIENCE IS NOT MY DADDY.

Then who is? 

the ultimate function of the Five Ways is to make it plain, by calling attention to five outstanding features of finite being, what the fundamental character of finite being is. And that fundamental characteristic is a radical inability to account for its own existence (Mascall).

In short, "the very essence of finite being is to be effect-implying-cause." In God -- or whatever you want to call it -- these three words are one, if that makes sense to you.

I suspect that the principle of effectimplyingcause may be located in the eternal procession of the Son from the Father. In response to your last statement, that is your daddy. 

We will have much more to say about this in a future post, but the Cause of causation is always now. It did not begin 13.8 billion years ago, nor will it end 2.8 billion years hence, so relax.

CALMER THAN YOU.

You must admit that you have undergone a great deal of change over these past 13.8 billion years. After all, for over two thirds of that time you contained no living beings, and it has only been 100,000 years since you've had anyone with whom to babble. Again,

The mere fact of change, then, is an indication that finite beings are not self-contained; they receive influences from outside themselves.

Expressed symbolically, the situation is not O → finitude but 

          O

          ↓ 

← finitude →

Even if finitude went on "forever," for as we said a few posts back, endless finitude is eternal insufficiency.

Now, man is plunged into finitude, with this difference: he knows it. We might even say that the dawn of man is the dawning of this realization. 

The events of Genesis 3 express this in mythopoetic form; expressed symbolically, once upon a timeless we lived in a kind of easy ↕ between finitude and infinitude, until something happened to disrupt the lines of communication, ⇞⇟.

RIGHT -- THE SNAKE CAME ALONG AND ATE EVERYBODY'S STEAK.

Don't be so literal. Then again, it's hard to think of a better symbol of horizontality. Unless it's a snake eating its own tail.

Anyway, we have one solid "datum for an argument for the existence of God, namely the existence of beings whose existence is not necessitated by their essence (Mascall). 

And even before the realization of the relation of finitude to infinitude -- or contingency to necessity -- is the realization of relation, full stop. This is a relational cosmos anchored in the relation between the first and second Persons of the Trinity.

Of course, in adverting to the Trinity we have shifted from our side -- from natural philosophy -- to Godside, which is to say, revelation. And that is the subject of a future post(s). For the moment, let's stay in our lane, or silo rather.  

With the finite tools at hand, "we can form no clear and distinct idea" of God, rather, "We can define God only in terms of his self-existence," an existence that "is not conceptualizable." 

This is simply O, with no content other than its own necessary existence. It leaves open the question of why it should want to create anything outside itself. What are we doing here? And why? 

That is all for today, except to remind ourselves that 

There are a thousand truths and only one error.

 O and Ø, respectively. Much more to come.