Descartes and God

Speaking of Descartes’ philosophy of God, his contemporary Blaise Pascal said, “I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy, Descartes did his best to dispense with God. But Descartes could not avoid prodding God to set the world in motion with a snap of his lordly fingers; after that, he had no more use for God.” It has seemed to me, and also to many of his critics, that despite his avowed Roman Catholic faith Descartes’ conception of God fell more into the deist camp than the orthodox Roman Catholic one. Descartes used God to guarantee trust in our senses and the “formal reality” of the world outside our own minds, but this seems to be all God does. At the very least, Descartes’ God is a sort of generic monotheistic deity, holding all of the basic godly properties but without the added weight of the Incarnation or activity in history, much less any opinions on sin or redemption. But, it can be argued, such doctrines were not relevant to the task at hand in the Meditations, and the Catholic Church could take it from there.

The (first) Cartesian argument for God’s existence can be summed up quite simply but understood only in the context of the larger work. As Descartes writes in the third meditation, on page 101, “By the word ‘God’ I mean an infinite substance, eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipotent, and that by I myself and all other existent things, if it is true that there are other existent things, have been created and produced. But these attributes are such—they are so great and so eminent—that the more attentively I consider them, the less I can persuade myself that I could have derived them from my own nature. And consequently we must necessarily conclude from all that I have previously said that God exists.” Descartes here explicitly gives us his definition of the God he is working with: infinite, immutable, eternal, independent, omniscient, omnipotent, and the creator of everything. Notably, Descartes does not include goodness in this list. The concept of perfection, says Descartes, does not admit of deception, because all deception is a sort of lessening. We may assume that Descartes therefore subsumes goodness under the banner of perfection, something which, while not listed in the description in Meditation III, is essential to the proof in Meditation V.

Descartes’ first and most substantial proof is a form of the classic ontological argument. It rests mainly on the assumption that the magnitude of reality of the effect cannot exceed the magnitude of reality of the cause. Thus, if we have the clear and distinct idea, or effect, of an infinite being with so many “great” and “eminent” properties that we do not possess, then the cause must be at least equal to the magnitude of reality of that effect, which seems to be infinite. The idea of a thing having more or less reality than another thing is somewhat alien to readers today, but basically signifies how perfect or independent a thing is.For example, if my copy of the Meditiations were burned in a fire, the other students’ copies would survive. The copies are independent of one another. However, if my copy of the Meditations were to burn, the whiteness of the cover would not survive, because the whiteness is dependent on the substance. The “accident” of whiteness is thus less perfect than the “substance” of the book. We can say, therefore, that because the whiteness of the book has less of an independent existence than the substance of the book, it is less real.

But more than a strange conception of a thing having more reality than another thing, there underlies Descartes’ argument the assertion that the concept of the infinite predates our concept of the finite. Without this assertion, we could simply say that God is an amalgamation of other concepts, like a unicorn or Gary Busey. As Descartes writes on page 101,

And I must not imagine that I do not conceive infinity as a real idea, but only through the negation of what is finite in the manner that I comprehend rest and darkness as the negation of movement and light. On the contrary, I see manifestly that there is more reality in infinite substance than in finite substance, and my notion of the infinite is somehow prior to that of the finite, that is, the notion of God is prior to that of myself. For how would it be possible for me to know that I doubt and that I desire—that is, that I lack something and am not all perfect—if I did not have in myself any idea of a being more perfect than my own, by comparison with which I might recognize the defects of my own nature?

So we see here a two-part argument for the positive conception of the infinite: infinite substances are more real than finite substances; and the fact that there seems to exist some sort of standard by which to measure imperfection. Descartes does not attempt to prove either of these claims. But he achieves, through the argument resting on these two assertions, a basis for believing in a cause of his ideas, namely, God. Added to this, by way of the natural light, is the fact that God is not a deceiver, and Descartes has a mechanism for reasonably believing the content of his sense perception.

The statement that God is not a deceiver is somewhat akin to the statement that God is good, but it is not equivalent. God could very well not be a deceiver and still be totally unconcerned with human life. So Descartes has yet to remove himself from the generic monotheistic conception of God, and remains at this point a deist. At the end of the third meditation he allows himself a moment to reflect on the magnificence of the God he has just proved, the possessor of so many great properties and attributes. This God is, if one may say, a god of milk and water. Descartes is very careful to keep a broad enough conception of God that he does not offend the reigning Roman Catholic Church, but keeps God at enough of a distance to allow free and autonomous reign to the rationalism and humanism that prevailed in the intellectual circles of the time.

But what about the second proof? Descartes uses the concept of clear and distinct ideas to once again demonstrate God’s existence. He writes on page 120,

It is certain that I find in my mind the idea of God, of a supremely perfect Being, no less than that of any shape or number whatsoever; and I recognize that an actual and eternal existence belongs to his nature no less clearly and distinctly than I recognize that all I can demonstrate about some figure or number actually belongs to the nature of that figure or number. Thus, even if everything that I concluded in the preceding Meditations were by chance not true, the existence of God should pass in my mind as at least as certain as I have hitherto considered all the truths of mathematics. . .

In this argument Descartes adds to his conception of God that God is a necessary being, or that God’s existence is a necessary part of God’s essence. This echoes very closely Saint Anselm’s response to Gaunilo’s objections to his ontological argument. So Descartes now has a sort of shortcut to trust in sensory perception, by reasoning that a clear and distinct idea of God has a property of necessary existence, and that a God containing all perfection would not be a deceiver, and thus one can trust the senses.

Throughout all this, Descartes never makes any statements about God being personal or interacting in any historical or direct way with the world or with human beings. While it could be concluded that such concerns are not relevant to the task of the Meditations, the conception of God as it stands in the Meditations is too close to a deist one to be ignored. Descartes does not say that God does not intervene in nature, perhaps fearing reproof from the Church, but it is not a stretch to assume that this is what he believes.

Bibliography

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/philosophers/descartes-god.html

Kant and Barth on God: Knowing and Needing

Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics sets up two important ideas which form the basis for his philosophy of God and God’s relationship to human beings. The first is that humans naturally seek to surpass the bounds of their reason and unite all of their knowledge into a cohesive whole. This leads to conceptions beyond the pale of knowability as Kant defines it, and results in conceptions of freedom, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God. Humans desire God’s existence, Kant says, and it is natural for us to reason towards God. The second idea is that God is essentially unknowable. Kant speaks of knowledge of a supreme being as a “dialectical illusion” (Kant 102). We require God as a way to unify our experience, but can never actually know whether God exists or not. While Kant views the idea of God (as well as acting as if God existed) to be practically necessary, the vast gulf between the noumenal and the phenomenal ensures that knowledge of God according to reason will never be attainable. Karl Barth, one of the most important and influential theologians of the Twentieth Century, can perhaps be placed in dialogue with Kant on this point. After an overview of Kant’s arguments for the two ideas mentioned above, we will examine a striking similarity, as well as a possible avenue of critique of Kant’s position, in Barth’s conception of revelation.

Kant distinguishes between the phenomenal world, consisting of the way in which things appear to us as objects of experience, and the noumenal world, consisting of the way things are in themselves, independent of our experience. Kant claims that outside of the phenomenal world and the objects of our experience, we cannot have determinate knowledge. “It is true,” he says, “we cannot provide, beyond all possible experience, any determinate concept of what things in themselves might be” (Kant 105). This holds true even for those ideas which we have always deemed most important and essential to human existence and thought: ideas of God, the immortal soul, and freedom. This is what Kant means by “idea” in his technical sense: necessary concepts whose objects are by definition outside all possible experience and thus beyond the limits of our reason to discover. But they are not therefore unnatural or wrong, Kant says. “[The ideas] are just as intrinsic to the nature of reason as are [the categories of the understanding] to the nature of the understanding; and if the ideas carry with them an illusion that can easily mislead, this illusion is unavoidable, although it can very well be prevented ‘from leading us astray’” (Kant 82).

Our minds are naturally led to posit the idea of God. Despite the fact that knowledge of God in Godself is impossible,

who does not feel compelled, regardless of all prohibitions against losing oneself in transcendent ideas, nevertheless to look for peace and satisfaction beyond all concepts that one can justify through experience, in the concept of a being the idea of which indeed cannot in itself be understood as regards possibility—though it cannot be refused either, because it pertains to a mere being of the understanding—an idea without which, however, reason would always have to remain unsatisfied? (Kant 106)

Kant also notes that the transcendental ideas serve to show us the boundaries of the pure use of reason, as well as how to determine those boundaries (Kant 107). Metaphysics, says Kant, is placed in us by nature itself (Kant 107); so in a real sense, we have an inborn desire for God and God’s rulership over the universe. God is one of the three things which satisfy and complete reason, along with the soul and an intelligible world (Kant 108).

The problem, of course, is that we can never know God as God may be in Godself. But though we cannot know, we must still assume God exists in order to unify our reason and satisfy our innate desires for answers to questions which transgress the boundaries of pure reason. Kant’s solution is, rather than attempting to know God in Godself, we should see what we can learn about God in relation to the world as it appears to us. Only when God inhabits the boundaries of our reason can we discern things about God. We can speak of God only in analogical or symbolic language, avoiding Hume’s criticism of anthropomorphism.

God’s nature can therefore be constructed in the way of an analogy like the one Kant uses at the end of section fifty-seven. As the artisan is to the watch, the commander is to the regiment, or the captain is to the ship, so is the unknown to the world. In other words,

watch : artisan :: world : ?? (God)

So Kant writes that while we are “compelled to look upon the world as if it were the concept of a supreme understanding and will” (Kant 111), we avoid the problem of thinking about God in the noumenal by not cognizing according to what things are in themselves, but “only according to what it is for me, that is, with respect to the world of which I am a part” (Kant 111).

Kant summarizes this strange tension in the following paragraph, noting that this solution bypasses Hume’s argument against theism.

We thereby admit that the supreme being, as to what it may be in itself, is for us wholly inscrutable and that it cannot at all be thought by us in a determinate manner; and we are thereby prevented from making any transcendent use of the concepts that we have of reason as an efficient cause (by means of willing) in order to determine the divine nature through properties that are in any case always borrowed only from human nature, and so from losing ourselves in crude or fanatical concepts, and, on the other hand, we are prevented from swamping the contemplation of the world with hyperphysical modes of explanation according to concepts of human reason that we have transposed onto God, and so from diverting this contemplation from its true vocation, according to which it is supposed to be a study of mere nature through reason, and not an audacious derivation of the appearances of nature from a supreme reason. The expression suitable to our weak concepts will be: that we think the world as if it derives, as regards its existence and inner determination, from a supreme reason; whereby we in part cognize the constitution belonging to it (the world) itself, without presuming to want to determine in itself the constitution of the cause of the world, and, on the other hand, we in part posit the basis of this constitution (the rational form of the world) in the relation of the highest cause to the world, not finding the world by itself sufficient thereto (Kant 113, emphasis in original).

Karl Barth’s theology rests heavily on revelation. For Barth, God is “wholly other” and impossible to know by human beings—unless God reveals Himself to human beings Himself, which is what He does. As Kant holds that humans cannot reach upwards to God because of the phenomenal/noumenal distinction, Barth holds that humans cannot reach upwards to God because of His infinite nature. But Barth couples the impossibility of a human reaching-upward with the event encompassed by Jesus of God’s reaching-downward. In Kantian language, God comes into the phenomenal world to impart truths of Himself to us.

James Kincade, in his article in the Journal of Religion, describes the similarities between Kant and Barth. He notes that Barth himself takes on a kind of “Copernican revolution,” but instead of placing our minds at the center he places Christ there. The theology of the time had been attempting to make religion palatable to the human mind, as Schleiermacher and others had done. Barth, like Kant, turned the whole system upside down, demanding that the human mind make itself compatible with God’s revelation. This revelation, according to Barth, is independent of us (or our experience as such). “It is God’s search for man which is important—not man’s search for God,” writes Kincade (Kincade 167).

Like Kant, Barth wholeheartedly rejects natural theology (Fackre 5). It is impossible to reason from experience to God in Himself. Here Barth is still within the Kantian system. However, instead of closing the book on the matter, Barth instead explains that God has Himself decided to reveal knowledge of Himself as He is to humanity. “The act of self-disclosedness in Jesus Christ is an expression of the character of God as intrinsically self-disclosive. . . While there are reaches of mystery in the divine being, God does not tell us ‘one thing in history while being something else in eternity. His secondary [or phenomenal, in this case] objectivity is fully true, for it has its correspondence and basis in His primary [or noumenal] objectivity’” (Fackre, partially quoting Barth, 5).

Does this work? Can the noumenal disclose itself to the phenomenal, or does it forever remain outside of it? Kant, by his own admission, begins with a deistic conception of God and adds predicates to it. Kant writes, “For if one only grants us, at the beginning, the deistic concept of a first being as a necessary hypothesis . . . then nothing can keep us from predicating of this being a causality through reason with respect to the world, and thus from crossing over to theism” (Kant112). This conception, almost assuredly chosen in order to respond to Hume’s arguments against theism, cuts off God’s real activity within the bounds of the world of experience. God is forever outside and never within, only acting through the intermediary of reason. God-in-Godself is never present, and we only learn of God by analogy through reason.

In Barth’s view, however, the full revelation of God-in-Himself occurs in the incarnation of Jesus, who is God in the flesh. God here takes a full and active role in the world of experience. If we are justified in believing or knowing about other human beings in the phenomenal world, we are also justified in affirming God’s existence. While it does not solve the problem of knowing anything about God-in-Godself, since even other human interactions are “filtered” through the phenomenal, we do not transgress the bounds of reason by drawing conclusions about God or God’s nature. By having God exist for a time fully in the world of experience, Kant’s tension between the unknowability of God as pure reason and the practical desire for and necessity of God’s existence are solved. This is, in a way, Barth’s solution to this Kantian antinomy.

This approach may seem odd, and perhaps alien to what Kant’s concerns were, but if we examine the concepts in play we see that Barth’s idea of revelation can actually quite easily and naturally respond to Kant’s claims. Kant says that God-in-Godself is essentially unknowable. Though humans desire to posit God as a unificatory principle for their knowledge, experiential knowledge of a being which exists outside of the world of experience (i.e. as pure reason or soul) is impossible. Barth would respond by denying that God exclusively exists outside the world of experience. By coming into the world within a body, God gives the same justification for claims of His existence as claims of other people we encounter or read about. It is a short step from claiming the incarnation and trustworthiness of Jesus, who vouches for the rest of the written revelation of God, to build Christianity within the bounds of reason.

Works Cited

Fackre, Gabriel. "Revelation." Karl Barth and Evangelical Theology: Convergences and Divergences. Ed. Sung Wook Chung. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006. Print.

Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.

Kincade, James. "Karl Barth and Philosophy." Journal of Relgion. 40.3 (1960): 161-169. Print.

The Death of God-Language?

The way I see it, there is a major problem with theology today, and it is this: it is not theology. As is obvious, theology means instruction about God. I think it would be reasonable to assume that if I picked up a book on theology, I would find lots of God-language and, at least in a Christian context, I wouldn’t have to look too hard to find reference to Jesus Christ. But it turns out I am insane. A wide swath of theology today has divorced itself from God and rattles down the road of history without Him, like a car without an engine. And just like an engineless car, this theology will only roll downhill. God is the focus and the drive of theological study. Without Him in the mix, we are simply talking. I cannot understand how theology can be theology when the word and the propositional content are separated. But perhaps I’m old-fashioned.

Let me tell you my context: I am a white, male, middle-class American college student. I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church but am now Reformed Baptist. Some of my assumptions and commitments are that the Bible is absolutely authoritative and that it is divinely inspired. As such, I cannot speak to or about the experiences of many, many Christians. But my context does not dictate silence. I too have a voice, and though people like me have been speaking for centuries, it does not mean that I cannot speak now, and it does not mean that they were wrong then. In this paper, I want to argue that theology is only itself when it speaks of its subject, that is, God. I want to argue that the Bible has Something to say, and that the Gospel has been discarded in favor of the doctrines of humans. This position is controversial because it is traditional. It is unorthodox precisely because it defends orthodoxy. This paper is the refuse of secularism, dropped into the bag of common sense and set aflame on the doorstep of modern man. This is, in the colloquial parlance, the ding-dong-ditch of the death of God.

We have to pause for a moment, lingering on the brink of this earth-shattering epistle. Isn’t one of the primary assertions of contemporary theology (as set out in the handouts on secularism, assertions of contemporary theology, and the rise of modernism) that a conception of Christianity limited to the authority of the Bible and founded in an orthodox conception of Jesus as the historical God-Man and Savior a result of the exclusion of other voices from the discussion? Should we not listen to other, and (reportedly) equally valid, interpretations of the central meaning of the Message? Yes and no. In my erudite opinion, anyone who proposes a view of Christianity which rejects the Bible as the standard of knowledge and God’s message to the world, as well as replacing the historical and actual death of Jesus with myth-language or some sort of “higher” interpretation of what seems to me to be a common-sense reading of the text as a historical account, must examine their motives. Are they truly trying to reveal to people what they think the true message of Christianity has been all along? Or are they hijacking traditional language to mask the replacement of orthodox systems with their own ideologies in order to make it easier for the Church to swallow? I think this is what Tillich does, and I think it is ultimately dishonest. When a normal (and by normal here I mean not an academic) person on the street talks about God, they are not talking about the impersonal ground of being. Let’s not turn theology into a country club and have high and educated discussions in our ivory towers full of code words and secret meanings that the rest of the populace is oblivious to. Many contemporary theologians argue this, but does their message reflect it? If what you mean by “God” or “Gospel” is not what your audience means, are you truly communicating?

The sort of linguistic camouflage that Tillich or Hick presents is ultimately the enslavement of the universal to the particular. Culture and prevailing human thought forms, the absolute rulers of our minds, have dictated that we must reject the supernatural in favor of scientism and place absolute truth (and its supporters) in the furnace; in that place there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. And so Christianity, which does not anymore realize that it is a Message from Above rather than a human construction, blindly follows the spirit of the age which is itself the age of blindness to truth, and both fall into the pit. This spirit says that there is no universal truth, no claim to knowledge which applies to all peoples in all situations. And it is right, if it limits itself to speaking of humanity. But humanity, that limited, ignorant, pain-filled mass, is exactly where the Gospel did not come from. The Gospel is the message to the world, not the message from it. God reached down from the heavens and men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. And He spoke universally. It is ridiculous to say that the universal message of salvation and life does not apply to some situation. All you have succeeded in saying is that you don’t understand the concept “universal.” If the Bible is universal, it speaks to you. It applies to you. Take it and use it. Your context can dictate superadded meanings to the text, but do not mistake them for the primary ones.

What about liberation theologians like Gutierrez who claim that poor and oppressed people are not concerned with abstract metaphysical claims, but rather practical and particular changes to oppressive and evil worldly systems? Well, in a certain sense I understand that pure theology is perhaps not the most pressing need of the downcast. But in another sense the Gospel of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is of utmost importance. Let’s assume that the orthodox Christian conception of the world is correct, and that after this life there are two eternal destinations contingent upon a person’s response to the work of Jesus, namely, heaven and hell. Now, if one assumes that an eternity of happiness and fulfillment are available upon acceptance of Jesus, then that eternal reward infinitely outweighs any improvement to the conditions of this life. Does this mean that Christians should ignore social reform? By no means! I like Gutierrez and I think he makes an important point, but I think he takes it too far. What I mean is that if we focus only on preaching a message of liberation from social or worldly oppression we are denying the oppressed a much greater good—liberation from sin and the wrath of God.

While most contemporary theologians argue that the legitimacy of established Christian doctrine is less than solid (in part) because entire swaths of people were left out of its formulation, I want to argue a more practical point. I want to assert that the ecumenism of orthodox Christian creeds and doctrines are at this point irrelevant on the ground level. Key terms and ideas have been established in lay consciousness for hundreds to thousands of years, and a radical reevaluation of these concepts and a reassignment of their referents seems to me to be simply impractical. Words like ‘God’ and ‘salvation,’ the role of Jesus in the doctrine of the Christian church, these things are already defined in the public lexicon, and use of the same words with totally new referents, many of which (such as Tillich’s or Robinson’s conception of God) stand in stark contrast or outright opposition to the traditional and pre-established concepts behind those words. This strikes me as somewhat disingenuous. It is as if theologians want to capture the allegiance of unwitting laypersons with comfortable language while at the same time undertaking a secret revolution and rejection of everything those laypersons hold ‘Christianity’ to be.

So what then are we to say to theologians like Kwok Pui-lan and other syncretistic or inclusivisic writers, or to “Christian” pluralists like John Hick, or to proponents of liberation theology like Gustavo Gutierrez? Is there no place for them in the discussion? Once again, yes and no. I suggest that this more modern or liberal approach to Christianity, characterized by the reassignment of traditional language, should be given its own vocabulary. New ideas should have new ways of speaking. Old and firmly established ideas should retain the old words. Christian theology should retain traditional God-language as being about the personal, transcendent, God of the Bible as interpreted for thousands of years. New conceptions of God should be easily identifiable and fall under their own umbrella. Those who attempt theology without God should no longer claim to be continuing the course of orthodox thought, but rather depart from it to make their own world with their own history. Let the people decide which they prefer, rather than attempting to sway them with the shell of familiarity masking an alien worldview. I am not here arguing with scholars like Susan Thistlethwaite who challenge the inclusivity or appropriateness of God-language in terms of gender, etc. I am arguing with people like Hick, who call themselves Christian and depart from virtually every standard of definition for what Christianity means.

Theology without God is impossible. We have fooled ourselves into accepting it only because God-language has fallen prey to a linguistic Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, or to some other equally appropriate pop culture reference. The point is, the only reason we think it even exists is because it looks the same on the outside. But it isn’t. This is something new; this is idolatry. We worship ourselves or we worship the universe or we worship life or love or being or any of a million other things, anything to avoid worshiping the God we once knew. We have said that the traditional idea of God is irrelevant to modern society… have we ever considered that the dictates of modern society are irrelevant to God?

The point is that the idea of a transcendent and active God is only irrelevant because we have abandoned it. In our rush to seek fulfillment in individualism and self-actualization, we have made man the measure of all things, and thrown out the Ruler. And then the theologians come and say that theology must speak to the culture, and so theology must discard God. But what if theologians concerned themselves, not with “limping after reality” but with proclaiming the Reality of God? Let culture drift in the sea of relativism, and let true theology be the port that the ship of faith returns longingly to, tired of the restless waves and storms of changing cultural norms and social pressures. Theology will endure not by being water, but by being stone. Let us look to our Rock and shape our theology around Him, and not try to chisel Him small enough to fit into the box we want to give Him.

In this paper I want to sound the death knell of the death of God. Let us move beyond the declaration of God’s death at the hands of a mustachioed German iconoclast to the divine declaration of His death on a tree on the outskirts of a Middle Eastern city in 33 AD. Nietzsche said, “God is dead, and we killed him.” This was the cry of the Gospel writers, and then the triumphant Yes of “He is risen!” Let us not forget it.