Roll Over Shankara and Tell Einstein the News

They say that reality is the thing that doesn't go away when we stop thinking about it. But reality includes not only empirical facts and scientific laws, but metaphysical principles such as the one mentioned yesterday, effect-implying-cause: we never see a cause without an effect, and vice versa. 

Moreover, on the temporal plane cause-and-effect are simultaneous, whereas causation must be ontologically prior to its effects, or nothing makes sense. To understand something is to understand its cause.

ONCE AGAIN THIS IS ALL VERY EDIFYING, BUT I AM WHAT DOESN'T GO AWAY WHEN YOU STOP THINKING ABOUT ME, PRECISELY.

Oh? Kant didn't think so. He thought you were just a form of our own ideas about you.

KANT WAS AN ASS.

We agree, but why do we agree? Must be because of the analogy of being, which is one of our first principles: that there is an analogy between creature and Creator, even if the dissimilarities are always greater then the similarities.

I'm with you: I say we can learn a great deal from the sheer existence of the Universe, among which is the fact that you cannot be self-sufficient. Or, either you are or you aren't, and if you are, then you are unintelligible.

Even revelation must implicitly accept the doctrine of analogy, for any statements about God -- who is infinite -- 

must be expressed and plainly are expressed in language from the finite world.... the revelation has to be thought about to be received, and can be thought about only by the aid of words or finite images (Mascall).

Now, revelation comes in many forms: there is revelation proper, but so too is existence itself a revelation, not to mention the phenomenon of life and the miracle of subjectivity. 

And what can we say about the surprising relationship between intelligence and intelligibility? Einstein claimed that The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible.

That's you in the spotlight, regaining your religion. Because I've got news for Albert: the doctrine of creation implies that the most comprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible. It is precisely what we would expect of an intelligent and rational Creator. Absent this doctrine, then the universe is not only incomprehensible but we could never know it. 

You know the gag: If God doesn't exist only he knows it. And if he does, only man could not know it.

YOU AND YOUR WORDPLAY. I DON'T PLAY.

OM he don't play. But God does. We're not nondual Vedantins, we're personalists.

In fact, your very existence implies the existence of a particular kind of God. Not just any God could have pulled this off. Ultimately he must be something like a triune God, but that's for a later post. At the moment we're still trying to reason up from our side of the finite-infinite relation. 

Now, the doctrine of analogy is what makes it possible for us to speak meaningfully of God, not in the past but in the Now, any Now. And if two men -- or a man and a Universe --

affirm and deny that God exists, they are in fact disagreeing about the nature of reality [i.e., That which doesn't go away just because we're not thinking about it], and not merely expressing different emotional or aesthetic attitudes (Mascall). 

So you and I have very different conceptions of reality -- of what does not and cannot go away.

YOU ARE MAKING AN ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, BUT THINKING DOESN'T MAKE IT SO.

No, we are making an existential argument with the assumption that thinking -- about finite things -- tells us about reality. Otherwise to hell with it.

Yes, we are assuming a realist philosophy, "which holds that words are not merely noises and thought is not merely about ideas, but that speech with its words and thought with its ideas are ultimately about things."

Granted, you are a Big Thing, but you're still a thing. And if you are not an intelligible thing, then you are no-thing at all, and Kant is right. But we've already stipulated that he is an ass.

Look, you and I are not so different. Indeed, the fact that we are different means that there is a sameness underneath the differences.

YOU'VE LOST ME.

We're talking about Being, "which must embrace everything, including its differences; if differences were not instances of being, they would be non-existent, and no two things could be distinct from each other."

SO? THE ONE AND THE MANY. WHY CAN'T I BE BOTH?

You can be, but by virtue of what principle? Because "every being must be, and must be in some determinate way," and "the way in which it has being depends in the last resort upon its relation to the self-existent Being which is the prime analogate of all."

You exist -- you are -- but you are not Being itself, rather a function of Being, or in relation to it: "being designates that which has relation to existence." Any finite existent is composed of existence + essence, but there is one being whose essence is to exist--

"AND EVERYONE CALLS THIS GOD." I CALL IT ME.

Can't be: "The world requires as its cause a being totally transcending it in every respect."

WE'RE JUST GOING IN CIRCLES.

And I say there is a way -- only one way -- up and out of absurcularity: "The crucial moment" occurs when 

we apprehend finite being as what it really is, as existent and yet not self-existent, as effect-implying cause. Its essence is really distinct from its existence, in the sense that there is nothing about the kind of thing that it is that necessitates that it exists.

So, the analogy of being is what doesn't go away when we pretend not to use it. "You cannot get necessity from contingency by multiplying contingency." And

the more fully we understand the world, the more clearly we can see that the world does not explain itself and therefore its explanation must lie outside itself. Considered as a closed system the world is unintelligible.

But the world is intelligible; and open, and in relation. Much like the Trinity which is its ultimate principle to which (or whom) we are analogous.

But That! touches on the next post.