Existence of God

Orthodox Christianity is true. God, as revealed in the totality of Divine Revelation, exists.

How do I intend to show that? Not by any of the scientific arguments, because God is not a scientific phenomenon. The way we would go about proving God would be analogous to the way things like the laws of logic are proven: by transcendental arguments.

Transcendental arguments

What is a transcendental argument? Simply put, it is a deductive philosophical argument of the form:

X is a necessary precondition to Y
Y
Therefore, X.

In other words, a transcendental argument takes a fact, typically a feature of experience, for granted, and then deduces what must be true for that fact to be possible.

Humans, in all acts of speech, rational thought, and predication in general, presuppose that reality operates in a certain way.

Transcendental categories

Consider the sentence:

The cat is green.

This sentence assumes or presupposes that there is an entity, namely a cat, that shares in catness, a universal of which that cat is a particular instance, that my perception of the cat actually maps onto reality, that there is meaning behind the sentence I spoke as opposed to a meaningless word salad, and so on.

To illustrate this further, imagine two cats - one green and one blue, and two dogs. You can group them in sets - the set of two cats, and the set of two dogs. This obviously presupposes that there is such a thing as a set. Those two sets have one property in common, namely that they each have two members. This presupposes that numbers actually exist. It also presupposes that you, the perceiver of the imaginary cats and dogs, actually exist, that the laws of logic hold for you to be able to draw a meaningful connection between the two sets, that there actually is such a thing as meaning, etc.

There are all these transcendental categories (sets, numbers, laws of logic, meaning, universals, particulars, identity over time, ethics, reality of the external world, and many others) that we presuppose in every act of predication. Without them, human discourse, thought, and even knowledge itself, would be impossible.

Epistemic justification

Given all these transcendental categories, they should be epistemically justified. Now what is that?

Epistemic justification is what makes a belief knowledge rather than mere opinion.

Why is it necessary? Because, without it, every claim becomes arbitrary. If the atheist says that logic just is and that he doesn't need to justify it, then I can say that God "just is." This is called being arbitrary.

One might say that logic, numbers, math, meaning and so on are self-evident. This used to be the dominant view throughout the Middle Ages, and this epistemology is called classical foundationalism. The problem with saying that certain principles are self-evident is - how do you know what's self-evident and what isn't? "Oh, it's self evident." But that's circular, and classical foundationalist epistemology doesn't accept circular arguments.

So how do we epistemically justify the use of transcendental categories? When you look at all these categories, they operate together - you cannot separate one from another, or reject one and keep the rest. They're a packaged deal, so to speak.

You can't separate sets from numbers, nor can you separate sets from universals/particulars, nor can you separate numbers and math from logic, nor meaning from any of those. If these transcendental categories are to be justified in some way, that justifying principle would need to be all-encompassing, because the categories are interwoven.

Therefore God?

Therefore, I propose a Divine Mind, in which numbers, sets, logic, universals etc. are all located, and to which we have access because we're made to have access to it - we're made in the image of God.

In every act of predication, humans presuppose God - the unifying and justifying principle behind the transcendental categories that are necessary for reason. And that is the transcendental argument for God's existence.

Now how does this prove the Bible, and not simply some form of Platonism or some basic bitch pantheism?

This is a fair critique, but the argument doesn't end at proving some generic, impersonal divine mind. It, in fact, leads you to the Holy Trinity. How? Because it solves, among other things, the one and many problem, which lurks in every act of predication and abstraction.

The one and many problem

Let's say there are two cats - one is green, and the other is blue.

The one

You can abstract both of them into cat, then you can abstract that into feline, then mammal, animal, a being, and then being itself.

In the process of abstraction, you lose more and more details about the subject being abstracted. You know much more about an object if you know it is a cat, than if you know it is an animal, or worse, an eukaryote, or even worse, merely that it exists.

The abstract concept of a cat holds no particular meaning in itself: try to picture an abstract cat in your head. You can't. If you do picture a cat, you've pictured a particular cat, not the universal nature of cats.

Then flip the principle in the other direction.

The many

If we are to zoom in on the uniqueness of the green cat and the blue cat, we would have to put aside the abstract notion of "cat" and instead speak of this cat and that cat in particular. But then, in calling them both "cats," we equivocate on the word cat and so the word loses its definition.

We can no longer meaningfully speak of the blue cat or the green cat as "cats" in any concretely determined sense, so the designation of them as "cats" loses its meaning in predication.

The problem

If you abstract the green cat and the blue cat into a single category of "cat," you end up with an abstract universal that destroys all particularity.
If you honor the particularity by referencing them as this cat or that cat, the abstract "cat" loses its meaning due to equivocation.

So which one has ultimacy? The abstract or the particular?
The one, or the many?

This is a philosophical problem that goes all the way back to the Greeks.

If all you have is abstract unity, then there is no way to relate that to the particulars of experience.
If all you have is abstract particularity, then there is no way to relate that to the unity of experience.

The solution: the Holy Trinity

God is one being, existing as three co-eternal, co-equal persons, each of them fully God - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Unity is no more fundamental in God than diversity, and diversity in God is no more fundamental than unity.

In God, there are no particulars not related to the universal, and no universal not related to the particulars. God Himself is the harmony between unity and diversity, between the one and the many. In God, the one and the many have equal ultimacy.

No other world religion believes in a doctrine akin to the Trinity, it's only found within Christianity.
The only coherent articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity is found within Orthodoxy.

Therefore, Orthodox Christianity is true.


Resources used:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MZErPk3_MU
https://www.apologeticscentral.org/post/how-the-trinity-explains-the-problem-of-the-one-and-the-many

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Pub: 13 Jul 2022 17:09 UTC
Edit: 20 Feb 2024 00:24 UTC
Views: 516