The First Fact: Trust But Verify

You said you were going to think about it. Well?

ABOUT WHAT? REMIND ME .

About whether or not I AM is the "first fact," so to speak. Because that's how the Bible characterizes it, but I guess we want to know if this can be known in an extra-biblical way, and you seem like a good source to ask.

The subject is touched on in a book I'm reading called Existence and Analogy. For Thomas. "He who is" is "the most proper name of God," as it "signifies 'existing in itself'" or "complete and absolute self-existence." 

Mascall writes that even "if there is no metaphysic in Exodus there is nevertheless a metaphysic of Exodus," and we aim to find out what it is. The ancient Jews were not a philosophical people, and yet, it seems to me that a whole philosophy leads from and back to those two little words: I AM.

Mascall says that the Septuagint phrase is O Ωv, and that's too good to check. I find it ironic, anyway.

But what does God mean, exactly? Was it intended as a meaningful answer, or was it a clever dodge, a non-answer, like That's for me to know and you to find out? Being that the Jews were scrupulous about not uttering the name, this seems plausible.

Again, the Hebrew scriptures

are supremely unconcerned with metaphysics and highly interested in ethics. The God of whom the Bible speaks is not a philosophical first cause or absolute; he is the living God, who makes himself known in his acts of judgment and salvation.

More of a doer, so to speak -- a man of action.

Some people claim that Thomas begins with an essentially Greek conception of God and then tries to fit the Biblical God into it. We don't like to criticize Thomas, but we may have to as we proceed. At any rate, 

although the Old Testament is written almost entirely in ethical and hardly at all in metaphysical terms, the declarations which it makes about the activity of God have very far-reaching metaphysical consequences (Mascall). 

I certainly agree, but "The Old Testament as little thinks of arguing or proving that God may be known as it thinks of arguing that he exists." It is not as if Moses and the prophets reflect "on the unseen" and thereby ascend "to elevated conceptions of the Godhead," a la Plotinus. 

Rather, the opposite: "the Unseen manifests itself to them, and they know it." They may resist and rebel, but not because God doesn't exist. Think of how different a mentality this is from Thomas, who begins with existence and reasons up to their transcendent cause, which he then identifies with the God of Moses: IT IS leads up to I AM, so to speak.

But it can't be this simple, because I AM turns out to be a WE ARE, which is both very un-Greek and non-Jewish. 

As for the Greeks, their doctrine of the radical simplicity of the absolute principle is at odds with what amounts to a qualified simplicity posited by Thomas, for simplicity means simplicity: no distinctions allowed! Likewise the radically monistic monotheism of the Jews: What part of mono do you not understand?

But for me, the revelation of Trinity is something quite new, which is why it cannot be fully reconciled with Greek or Jewish conceptions. Doesn't mean it's right, but it does mean we have to rethink our metaphysic. 

I'm looking at my Orthodox Bible (a translation from the Greek OT of the Septuagint), and it reads the passage in question as "I AM the Existing One." A footnote says that this "is the name for the Essence of God," which is like "a boundless sea, containing all things yet not contained by anything."

Here again, a boundless sea is boundless (i.e., simple), so perhaps a little Greek thought has slipped into the Greek translation. 

In Dennis Prager's commentary on Exodus, he says the Hebrew phrase Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh has "four possible meanings, each one perfectly accurate":

I am what I am.

I am who I am.

I will be what I will be.

I will be who I will be.

He continues:

The reason all four translations are accurate is Hebrew does not have a word for the present tense of the verb "to be." In other words, there is no Hebrew word for "am" or "is" or "are"....

YHVH actually means "Being," or "Will Be," or even just "Is."

So, God just IS. I IS?

This shall be my name forever.

THIS IS ALL VERY INSTRUCTIVE, BUT--

Don't rush me. The Name implies that God's essence is to exist, or that existence his his essence, AKA the Necessary Being to which being as we know it can only be a distant analogy. Hence the name of the book we're reading: Existence and Analogy.

Existence. "If we grant to a speck of moss or to the tiniest ant the value of its ontological reality," then "we can no longer escape from" the very "hand which made us."

THAT SO?

God is the object of religion; is he also a principle of philosophy? Luther led the revolt against the second idea, insisting that, due to our fallenness, natural theology is a non-starter. Rather, anything we know of God must either be conveyed by the Bible or not conveyed at all.

Does the Bible imply such a thing? Not Paul, who tells us quite plainly that God's invisible attributes are clearly seen and understood by the things that are made. 

TRUST BUT VERIFY.

That's one way to put it. For Thomas,

however noble our concept of God may be it is totally incapable of telling us whether God exists or not; but the actual existence of the most humble and insignificant of actually existing beings is sufficient to demonstrate the existence of self-existent Being itself (Mascall).

IS THAT NOT A BIT CIRCULAR?

No, it's an explanation of how we escape absurcularity. Which we do with any truth statement of any existing thing. The Great Question before us is

Can we, starting from the existence of finite beings, validly affirm the existence of God?

Do the effects imply the Cause? There was a time when

the vision of God in nature seems to have been the normal way of viewing the world, nor could it have been remarked as an exceptional experience. 

I suspect it's a left brain / right brain thing, in that the LCH ideologies of modernity have swamped a more primary RCH contact with the Real. Therefore, LCH arguments for the existence of God are "the price that we have to pay for our increasing sophistication." "Increasing sophistication" is another name for LCH capture.

Which may be why 

Proofs for the existence of God abound for those who do not need them.

I NEED PROOF.

I know. We're getting there. We will stipulate that you exist. The question is how.