More engagement with T.J. Mawson’s book, Belief in God, for my philosophy of religion class. I posted these, along with the one on personhood, which I shared in my last post here, in the discussion forum we have set up for our class. I thought I’d share them here too. These are clearly raw responses to the reading material we are engaging with.
Immanuel Kant
Divine transcendence can be thought of as God’s otherness; His otherworldliness; His awayness vis-à-vis the world.
According to Mawson direct knowledge and direct control are aspects of what it means to have a body. And yet I find this strained to the breaking point. He uses the “body” analogy as a way to construct a concept of a God-world relation. Again, I find this methodology to be flawed. I understand that it is the way of being a speculative/analytic philosopher; but it seems ad hoc, really. Given its “ad hocness” (or we could say “abstractness” vis-à-vis the would-be knower) I’m unsure how this can lead to an “open” notion of godness. That is to say, even if Mawson et al. can construct a concept of godness, and in this case, with reference to transcendence, and even if he can construct it in such a way that it is self-referentially coherent: it nonetheless remains a construct of his own making (and thus a purely coherentist permutation; i.e., lacking the need for real correspondence). I’m unsure how this type of self “projecting” can end up mapping onto an eternal living God. To me it seems like a project in constructing a procrustean bed, and then inviting God to lay His head on its pillow.
Divine immanence. In Mawson’s context it is in reference to God’s relation to the world; His presence in the world (it can also be in reference to God’s inner life, when considered from within a Christian and triune frame). Within Mawson’s system the world becomes God’s body. Not in the sense of the Church; which is how Christians understand God’s body, in participation with Christ’s body. Because of Mawson’s prior thinking on incorporeality, which he pushes into divine transcendence, he seemingly is forced to concede that the world is God’s body. For Mawson, this is how he explains God’s direct knowledge, control etc. And yet, what I find ironic, is that Mawson is in fact a Christian theist. His conception of God’s body, in Christian theological terms, could be referred to as ‘panentheism.’ That is to say, that the world is God’s body in the sense that God might grow and develop in relation to the world. Even so, panentheism sees a distinction, still, between God and His body (the world), wherein God remains its Creator and controller, so to speak. That said, I’d be curious to see if Mawson would own the label of being a panentheist. Or maybe he would prefer the language of pantheist proper; which is to say that God grows alongside and by being in the world as a participant. From a theological perspective, Mawson’s development on a doctrine of divine immanence needs further clarification in order to have some semblance of what in fact he is ultimately getting at with his notion of “God’s body.”
What is an omnipotent being? This seems to be a rather ironic question to ask, at least when left up to purely human machinations. It seems to be too big of a question. How can the human mind (even if it is “hived”) imagine something in such a way that it could ever transcend the would-be knower’s own finite self-limitations? There is a way, a way that developed in the medieval period, known as the via negativa (‘negative way’). This way attempts to develop a concept of godness by negating finiteness, for example. So, indeed, if we posit that humans are finite, if we negate that, we might end up with an infinite (pure) being or some such. So, on this way, if human beings are defined by being rational/intellectual, then to negate that, and extrapolate, the omnipotent being ends up being simply the Biggest brain in the heavens. What I am describing has also been called the analogia entis (‘analogy of being’); Thomas Aquinas, early on, is famous for deploying it in his Christian synthesis with Aristotelian categories. In a less particularized way, in the sense that Mawson is attempting to do an analytic philosophy rather than a Christian theology, per se, Mawson, and philosophers in general use the ‘analogy of being’ to conceive of a concept of godness. I.e., since human beings clearly aren’t “all powerful,” in its negation and extrapolation, the divine being must indeed be almighty, all powerful. I would suggest these are matters too great for the discipline of an analytic philosophy to pierce in any meaningful way. Apocalypse (unveiling/revelation) is required.