What “exists”?
Eric is telling Paul W what theologians mean by “the ground of all being.”
Part of the point of speaking about the ground of being is to distinguish god from things that exist. In this guise, ie, as the ground of being, whatever god is — and this is the most unsatisfactory parts of this idea of god — god does not exist, and cannot be treated like any other existent.
I don’t understand that. I can’t force myself to understand it – because I keep thinking, stupidly obstinately, if it doesn’t exist then it doesn’t exist. If god doesn’t exist then that’s the end of it – it can’t not exist yet also be something called the ground of being.
Unless it once existed but is now dead but continues in human memory as something which theologians have decided to call the ground of being. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s meant…or is it. Is it meant to be a concept or an idea? Do we say that those exist? They do in a sense and they don’t in a sense; what’s the conventional language about them? I should know this. Abstractions don’t exactly exist, but they do in a way…Bugger. My philosophical vocabulary is deficient.
Mind you, if that’s what’s meant, it doesn’t get theists anywhere. Atheists certainly don’t dispute that the concept of god “exists.” We just dispute that it can actually do anything independent of what humans make it do. We just argue that like all concepts it has no “existence” independent of human brains.
In other words, a catalogue of existing things might include ships, sealing wax, trees, planets, galaxies, ……., but god would nowhere appear as an existent. But from this point of view, god is the ground of existence. He enables existing things to be.
Well in that case a concept can’t be what’s meant, since god has to be prior to enable existing things to be. So what is meant? I don’t know. Eric doesn’t either; he’s reporting, not endorsing. But even the reporting is opaque. It’s hard to tell if the thing is as hand-wavy as it appears.
Wha? Huh? Wait… is this the near-mythical “sophisticated theistic argument” that I’ve been hearing about all these long years? I’ve got to tell you, drunken BS sessions have produced more coherent ideas than this “ground of being” nonsense. I was going to say that this is just some sort of clever trick to get around pitfalls in the whole “god” idea… except that it isn’t even remotely clever. It reminds me of the kid in ‘Mystery Men’ who is invisible, but only when no one is looking. Except in that case, it was useful in that he was invisible to cameras and motion detectors, which means that it was at least consistent with the reality of that movie. “Ground of being” isn’t even consistent with anything that theists claim, or even consistent with itself.
Only something that exists can have a positive and current effect on other things that exist. If the “ground of being” is what allows things to exist, then it either exists… or it a term for something else that isn’t ‘God’ and you’re adding false meaning to something that does exist to cover the fact that ‘God’ doesn’t. Then it is just a “God is the universe”-style argument, couched in different words because that exact argument already makes them look so stupid. No one has made a YouTube video showing why “God is the ground of being” yet, but once those become popular you can expect the argument to morph into “God is the matrix of intelligible existential teleological multi-person pantheistic solipsism” or some other barely coherent pseudo-philosophical word salad.
I first read about God as the “ground” or “depth” of “all being” back in college when I had to read Martin Buber. It made no sense back then and it makes no sense now, nearly 40 years later. The best I can do is suggest it means something like pantheism — which really (IMHO) takes it outside the Abrahamic tradition — or something like the “necessary being” bafflegarb offered by the likes of Plantinga, which (again IMHO) is an abstract, empty verbal construct with no actual referent and no particular connection with the God of the Abrahamic tradition that intervenes in the world, answers prayers, and sends folks like you and me to roast in Hell for our unbelief. The overwhelming majority of Jews, Christians and Muslims would have no idea what the “sophisticated” purveyors of God as “ground of all being” are talking about. In any event, that view of God will not fill the pews on Sunday morning.
I guess all that is important is whether or not God is true. Theologians make apologetic claims with absolutely no evidence to back them, and justifying one unsupported claim by another unsupported claim is not a rational justification.
Not that I necessarily agree with the “ground of all being” thing, but playing devil’s advocate, it could be imagined in this way:
Imagine a gigantic computer, capable of perfectly simulating the interactions of ten or more kajillion atoms. Now imagine that computer simulating all the atoms in the solar system. Inside this simulation would be all the people on the earth. From the standpoint of the simulated people on this simulated earth all of which are in some sense “inside” this gigantic computer, does this gigantic computer “exist?” To them, the giant computer would be “the ground of all being”, but it would not be detectable (barring some bugs in the simulation which manifested in some way that betrayed the nature of the simulation.)
Perhaps we are all inside such a simulation right now, for all we know. Does this hypothetical computer “exist”? Is the case in which we are in such a simulation from the case in which we are not in such a simulation?
Er, last sentence in my above post should read:
“Is the case in which we are in such a simulation *distinguishable* from the case in which we are not in such a simulation?
What springs to my mind is waves. Water waves, for instance, have water molecules as their “ground of being”. Water molecules are what support the existence of water waves, even though the waves themselves are not molecules, and therefore do not exist in exactly the same sense as molecules.
So, I suppose the ground of being could (at least in my theologically uneducated, atheist mind) be seen as some sort of aether that supports matter? Maybe the ground of being is the 4- (or 11-?) dimensional space-time itself?
Of course, any suggestion of this kind is open to testing and falsification, something which most proponents of the ground of being would undoubtedly belittle as insufficiently sophisticated…
I’ve always found the ideal-real distinction useful in epistemology. Ideas can be true or false, but they don’t exist anywhere. Existence requires a location. It is why a bodyless mind is an oxymoron.
It fits nicely with the math-science divide as well. Math is about ideas and logic and proof; science is about reality and evidence and demonstration. Which is why it is nonsense to talk about proving reality or demonstrating an idea. Rather it only makes sense to talk about proving an idea or demonstrating reality.
Interesting how religious people so often fall afoul of basic logic and epistemology by believing in locationless existence and failing to recognize the difference between evidence and proof.
I have eventually arrived at the conclusion that attempting to reason about the core existential question of “why is there anything?” (or equivalent) using a <i>human brain</i> is folly. Our intuitive notions, honed over countless millennia of natural selection in a macroscopic environment, are woefully inadequate at that level.
I frankly thing that asking, “What caused the first cause?” or similar questions are as silly as asking “What does a proton taste like?” or “Are quarks soft to the touch?” We are asking questions that simply do not make any sense in that domain.
We can still learn a helluva lot about the core existential question(s) using empirical methods, and that may even at times give us some intuitive insight as well. At other times, we may be forced to accept the “shut up and calculate” approach. But trying to <i>reason</i> about it? Absurd in the highest.
One way to conceive of it is to approach it from the other end. What does it mean for something to exist? Existing things — even quasi-existing things like concepts — occupy some particular span of space and time. (Concepts occupy space in the sense that they are located in the brains that conceive them.) In this sense, then, space-time (we can’t separate space and time, according to post-Einsteinian physics) itself isn’t something that exists, it is the logical, physical, and metaphysical pre-condition for anything to exist, the context for the very possibility of existence rather than an existing thing. This reasonably coherent and clear view, it should be noted, makes a complete hash of the cosmological argument: All of our ordinary understanding of cause and effect depend on space-time in exactly the same way that existence itself does, so it literally makes no sense to ask what caused the universe, i.e. space-time. When cosmologists ask “What happened ‘before’ the big bang?”, they are speaking metaphorically and they know they are, because words like ‘before’ and ‘after’ cannot be applied to space-time, only within it.
According to theologians, God is outside of and independent of space-time, so God cannot ‘exist’ in the ordinary sense. They posit that God is outside/independent of space-time, and further declare that space-time depends on God, in order to solve a whole slew of problems that arise in conceiving of God any other way. I say “posit” rather than argue, because of course there is no evidence for any of this, and all the arguments for it circularly assume the existence of God to get off the ground at all.
This notion of ‘depends on’ is especially tricky. It’s usually called ontological dependence, and it’s metaphorically compared to the ways properties (like color and shape) depend on the objects that have those properties, such that properties cannot exist independent of objects having them. (There would be no redness without red things, or some variation thereon.) However, that’s just a metaphor: Space-time is not plausibly conceivable as a property, and there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that space-time logically depends on anything else as a pre-condition. It’s all just make believe and self-satisfying twaddle.
I don’t know much about Hinduism, but this “ground of all being” sounds remarkably similar to what I’ve heard of Vishnu. From wiki:
I’ve also heard Vishnu described as being currently asleep and the cosmos is his dream. Should he ever awake, we and all of reality would vanish. In this view, god is the ultimate “reality.” We are merely, as SteveC said, a simulation. Reality isn’t <i>really</i> real. It only looks that way to us. It is we humans who don’t really exist except in the mind of another being. I guess you could by way of analogy, as Mickey Mouse is to us, so are we to Vishnu. There are levels to “reality” and we aren’t at top. Just like the Matrix movies, I suppose.
Of course, it’s all totally unprovable and a complete waste of time to consider. The fact that “serious” theologians have come to rely upon such fantastical notions quite clearly demonstrates their sheer desperation.
I’m honestly starting to think that it doesn’t matter what definition of God that you go for. It’s all starting to look like one big game of <i>Call My Bluff</i>, but one where all of the cards held by the other side actually say “Bluff”.
No matter what definition you choose to attack, you’ll get that condescending look accompanied by “That’s not the God that I believe in”.
Cynical atheist is cynical.
Obfuscatory theologians are par for the course.
(I posted this over at CID in response to Eric; reposting here because it’s relevant to some of the above comments.)
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OK, thanks.
I think one relevant theological term (I forget whether philosophers usually call it something different) is “metaphysical priority.”
Something is metaphysically prior to something else if the latter can only exist in case the former exists.For example, in Newtonian physics, space is metaphysically prior to distance, and space and time are both metaphysically prior to motion—you can’t have distance except in space, and you can’t have motion except through space, in time.
(Einsteinian physics is a bit different, but the same idea applies. You have world-lines extended through spacetime, so spacetime is prior to distance and motion, even if there are funny tradeoffs between space and time depending on frames of reference.)
This is the basic idea behind the Argument from Contingency, which is a non-temporal version of the Cosmological Argument. (The First Cause argument is the simple temporal one.) You look at stuff that can’t exist except by virtue of something “metaphysically prior” to it existing, and follow the dependencies back (“down”) until you get something that’s prior to everything else, and nothing is prior to it, and you call that God.The most metaphysically prior thing, which is prior to everything else, is assumed to something you’d want to call God, as opposed to just being a merely weird thing that just is, and enables the existence of everything else, e.g., the basic laws of nature as described by a physical Theory of Everything.
It seems to me that there are fine philosophical puzzles about the most fundamental or metaphysically prior entities—e.g. in what sense do the most basic “laws of nature” exist, except as regularities among other things that exist?Still, there’s no reason to call any of it God, and good reason not to, unless you assume that there’s Something More going on than physics—e.g., that the most fundamental thing is mental or mindlike, or has irreducibly mental or teleological properties. (Like Tielhard de Chardin’s inexorable tendency toward the Omega Point, which is something like a magical Lamarckian essence.)
Everything we know from science so far says that’s wrong. Goal-directedness is a very high-level property of complicated things, and as you go down through levels of metaphysical priority (or supervenience) you get to simpler and dumber things, nothing like minds or goal-seeking.It seems to me that whether you talk about supervenience or about metaphysical priority, you have the same problem—it only works to call that God, and worship it, if you think of “more fundamental” things as ultimately reducing to something irreducibly mental or teleological. If you think of them as absolutely mindless and mechanical and goalless, it doesn’t seem the least bit God-like.
The plausibility of such interpretations depends, in turn, on believing in dualism, either overtly or covertly—buying some assumption that mere mindless material reality can’t be fundamental, and that it’s more plausible that something mindlike wills it into existence or directs it in interesting directions by virtue of its irreducibly interesting mind force or an irreducible tendency toward interesting forms.In my limited exposure to sophisticated theology, it seems that such assumptions are always made, either explictly or implicitly. A theologian may say outright that mere matter couldn’t just be, and must have been willed or thought into existence by a Creative Essence or The Logos or whatever, or may just blithely identify the most metaphysically prior thing with God without any real argument, and at some point start ascribing mental or teleological properties to it.If I’m right, there is always an inversion of the scientific view that material reality is temporally and metaphysically prior to mental or teleological properties. If there’s not, it just doesn’t feel right to call it God and worship or revere it, and you’re left with atheism.
Oh, I think it really is as hand wavy as it appears. I’m just trying to remember back to the days when I tried to read — or did read — Tillich’s Systematic Theology. And then of course he has an extra level of significance just for Jesus which I don’t pretend to understand even a little bit. Thankfully, perhaps, it is now forever a part of my past!
Oh crap, forgot that cutting and pasting here results in a single huge paragraph. Sorry. I’m not intentionally aping Hume and Mill.
Very interesting post and questions raised. I’d put it this way: abstractions don’t exist except as thoughts, and thoughts exist but only as physical, measurable activity in the brain, no? So if “God” is a thought then “He” is a manifestation of someone’s thinking and exists in that sense–as evidence of a psychological state, so to speak, not as a separate or real entity. As for “God” being the “ground of all being”: again, how’s that possible except as an intellectual abstraction or a thought? Moreover, as an intellectual concept, it doesn’t seem to provide a useful distinction between “God” and things that really exist if we believe that there’s nothing more fundamental than the universe. Nothing is “enabled” from outside it so far as we know. So I guess we should conclude that what has been described in the posts (by Eric and Paul W) is just imaginative language.
One of the most interesting aspects of physics over the past century or two is the way that reality has become much less than it seemed. There is no cosmic clockwork maintaining absolute space, and there is no universal reference frame from which position and motion can be absolutely determined. It might make some sort of sense to talk of a grounding if there were such absolutes, but no more. The more we see symmetries in physics that show the simplicity of reality, the less realtity seems to needs any kind of maintenance to keep it going. We see just what we would expect in a situation that is not “grounded”. The universe is very slowly falling apart. The universe as it is now is nothing more than extremely sparse and very cold ash compared to the situation a short time after the origin.
The idea of “grounding” is alchemic thinking.
It’s the ever moving goalpost. God can be the “ground of being” when irritations like the problem of evil are raised, but he’s anthropomorphic enough when defending homophobic or anti-abortion dogma. The emperor has no clothes whether they are silk or sackcloth.
Ha! I wondered the same when being taught imaginary numbers in school.
The idea that there must be something prior in order for there to be something isn’t such a bad idea. All of our investigations, though, seem to show that it isn’t so. That would indicate that either the prior something is entirely beyond our comprehension or that there’s nothing like that.
One form of realism would say that in the first case (it exists, but we can’t find out it does) it’s true that there’s something, but another realist position would be that in neither case is something prior real, because nothing that has no effects is real. If “something” has no effects it plays no role in any theory of what exists. So, it doesn’t exist. I think that’s right.
If our idea of a ground of being is that it makes no difference to existence then it’s an idea only, no different from any other idea of something that doesn’t exist. I imagine that you would have to think that anything one has an idea about necessarily exists in order to allow for such a ground idea to be considered true. In that case,no concept can be about something that doesn’t exist. Sorry, too late, you thought of it, so it’s there.
This is fun.
I’m left wondering whether to theologians the claim really seems to mean something in a way that it clearly just doesn’t to any of us…and if so how, and what. And probably why. (Not bothered about where though.)
I’m fascinated by how much of theology is the reification of feelings. It’s not just meaning and purpose: I have seen theologians talk about how the universe is a ‘gift’. Emotionally, such talk may seem to work, but it all falls apart when analysed intellectually, at least as far as I can see.
@Deepak: well you can use imaginary numbers but you fail if you haven’t eliminated them before you get to the answer. Especially in engineering school.
And this is supposed to be sophisticated? Even I can do better than that:
Fields exist, but we cannot detect them directly. What we see are disturbances in the field. Thus, just as the electromagnetic field is the ground of all being for photons, so the God field is the ground of all being for the faithful.
QGD: Quantum God Dynamics.
Now, where’s my Templeton money?
Auden: “I can see…what leads [Paul] Tillich to speak of God as ‘Ground of Being,’ but if I try to pray: ‘O Thou Ground, have mercy upon us,’ I start to giggle.”
Sili, you shouldn’t joke about it. The arguments from intuition work just like that. A possibly undetectable check is in the mail, I’m sure of it. :-)
Is this ‘ground of all being’ stuff Thomism? I’ve read a bit of Edward Feser’s blog, and it sounds similar.
It appears to be a baffling re-definition of what words mean, to me, but maybe trained philosophers understand what it’s all about. Feser wrote a critique of new atheism, called The Last Superstition. It also appears he’s homophobic, so start the countdown, as The Hitch might say.
The impetus for all this divine numinosity and hiddenness is presumably the advance of human knowledge the shrinking of the gaps into one might hope to squeeze a god and the end of miracles . It does seem a long way from the Yahweh who walked in the garden, took in the scent of burnt offerings and indulged in prodigious smiting. Where did that god go? Did this god ever exist for “ground of being-ers”? So what would “sophisticated” theologians say to the people who originally told these stories? Were they wrong? How would anyone be able to determine that, apart from the obvious dismissal of god from the old jobs of Earthquake Control, Pestilence Progenitor and other such tasks which have now been outsourced to the firm of Natural Phenomena?
We’re still trying to fire him from the desk of the Origin and Diversification of Life, but that’s still a work in progress, thanks to the undue influence of his union reps amongst the general public.
This whole ground of being ploy is a dodge to get around the fact that there’s no evidence for any god whatsoever. In conspiracy circles, the lack of evidence of a conspiracy is used itself as evidence of just how powerful and far-reaching the conspiracy in question is.
When my son recently asked me if I believed god was real, I asked him if numbers were real. God, as I conceive of it, exists in the same domain as mathematics. Of course, I’m a mathematician. If I were a musician, I’d argue that God exists in the same domain as music. Of course, it’s also arguable that math and music occupy the same domain.
There may be millions of instantiations of a particular work in those domains. Consider the “Happy Birthday” song or the quadratic formula. Does the essence of such concepts exist separate from the minds that are engaged with them?
Depending on how you answer that question, I could be classified as a deist, an atheist, or an agnostic. Myself, I prefer to hold both concepts in abeyance, reluctant to declare certainty over any the various conjectures about our universe. It might be described as a computer simulation or a dream of Vishnu or an enormous explosion randomly appearing out of nothing. Nor am I certain that songs and numbers can be said to exist apart from all the instantiations of them. Yet in some ways, I think mathematics has a stronger claim to existence than material objects do.
I do not think the speculations of this thread are a waste of time – imaginary numbers opened up entire new domains of mathematics. Einstein contemplated the universe and it’s beginnings and as a result, penetrated deeper into reality than any other human. Besides, it’s fun!
That’s about as far from the common usage of the term “God” as it’s possible to get. The mathematical domain contains no doctrines about the use of condoms, or about the naughtiness of sex, or about why zygotes have souls.
There should be some sort of term that describes the vast gulf between the ‘essencey’ God of theologians and the “stop doing THAT at once!” God believed in by billions.
Yes. It is pretty far from the usual Christian conception. Perhaps we could call one the derivative of the other? The Westburo Baptist god could be considered one of the infinitely many possible integrals of the “essence” of existence god.
@Steve Zara #29
There should be some sort of term that describes the vast gulf between the ‘essencey’ God of theologians and the “stop doing THAT at once!” God believed in by billions.
How about The Gap of the Gods?
It’s Aquinas’s argument from contingency, meant to stop the infinite regress: “The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be. But it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not. Therefore, if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there could have been nothing in existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in existence, because that which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing. Therefore, if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence — which is absurd. Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. But every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impossible to go on to infinity in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes. Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.”
It’s all logical possibility, not physical possibility.
One way to challenge this is to deny the premise that anything contingent had a time when it did not exist.
possible worlds talk – Possibility and necessity, and time, are orthogonal to each other. Time is a set of coordinates for referring to existences in a particular world. Saying “Tuesday” versus “Wednesday” is picking out two different times in this world (leave aside modal modifiers,) whereas talking about things being possible or necessary is talking about where they are in possibility space. The claim that “everything but God is contingent” is the claim that everything but God exists in at most some possible worlds, but not all of them. But this doesn’t say *anything* about the temporal duration of any existent in any possible world, because it isn’t making a claim about time.
Suppose it is possible for my cat to exist, ie my cat exists in at least one possible world. In *this* world – our world – my cat didn’t exist at some time T. but consider some other world in which my cat persists for the entire length of that world. There isn’t any obvious contradiction that I can see in asserting that that world is a possible world; it seems logically possible for something to persist for the temporal length of a universe, regardless of the empirical facts about *this* world. If that’s right, and that world where my cat exists forever is a possible world, then you can’t argue that just because something could have not existed that it follows that at some time it didn’t exist. Aquinas doesn’t argue for this premise, and while there might be some contradiction involved, I’m not seeing it. /possible worlds talk
Apart from that there’s the objection made above by Steve that even if there is a ground of all being, it’s a far cry from that to claims about any particular religious text.
Perfectly simple.
God is all-poweerful.
God can do anything.
One of the things god csn do is not exist.
Even if god does not exist, it is still all-powerful.
I’ve gone on about this before, but you can make any assertion you like about the properties of something that doesn’t exist, without entering into contradiction, excluding assertions about its existence. The mathematician above (Beth) will recognise this: the elements of an empty set can simultaneously have inconsistent properties. Talking about their existence is a claim about the set, not about its elements.
@Caryn: Aquinas seems to be struggling a bit there.
Here’s my idea: when a person reflects on the nature of reality and forms imaginary models of the world in their head, I think the distinction between the thought of a thing and the thing itself has a tendency to become blurred (this may be how it is within the brains of most life forms — consciously distinguishing self from other may not be necessary to achieve goals.) It then seems self-evident that there is something sustaining those models, and that this something is mind-like. In other words, the Ground of Being is our own mind, which we’re looking at as if we were outsiders even though we are at the same time “inside” and equivalent-to.
Spiritual-talk and high theology is rife with references to holism and unity: the simple confusion of the inner world with the outer world — and vice versa — is seen as deep, meaningful, profound. It’s a discovery we seem to make whenever we slow down a bit from the ordinary hustle of getting things and doing things. It’s also one of the defining hallmarks of a ‘mystical experience’ — with neurological explanation for this sensation of Cosmic Oneness.
The extent of the division can stop at any stage. There may still be some sense of disconnect and God is “out there” or “transcendent” and we are dualists; or there is no longer any way to distinguish God from self and we turn to idealistic monism.
The “Ground of Being” concept only seems comprehensible and even familiar to me if I think of it in terms of my own mind perceiving and imagining the world. So I suspect that is what the theologians are drawing from, that they seem to think it needs less explanation than it does. It’s a sloppy intuition that falls apart under analysis. Which is probably why theologians don’t really analyze it, they describe it endlessly, and yet vaguely.
Of course, the problem with “ground of all being” as a theological concept is that it’s most often used in a bait-and-switch.
The “sophisticated” theologian talks about the god who does nothing but exists anyway. OK. And then in the next breath, Jesus is totally real, waiting to trump the end of the world with a flaming sword, so you better give all your money to Harold Camping, just in case.
It’s a classic con.
Perhaps then a suitable expression for the gulf between the god of the theologians and what everyone else believes is the “Jesus Gap”. How do you get from “ground of being” to the guy on the cross?
I wonder whether religious belief by its nature prevents people from escaping their primitive fears; however sophisticated they make their “theology”, they can’t get away from them. Despite their proclaimed ideas about god they keep their myths. They are afraid to let go. Here’s a possible scenario:
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Ground: we are a bunch of unwashed goatherding tribesmen with a primitive male wargod (pmw).
Salvation: Thanks to pmw we win all these wars and massacre all these people. Good-oh!
Terms & Conditions: pmw says DO and DON’T!!!
Being: God, this is bloody hard.
. . .
Ground: Things are bad, so pmw is punishing us for doing all those DON’Ts.
Salvation: This bloke says he’s the pmw, who is actually really very nice, really, and will punish himself instead of punishing us poor unwashed goatherds.
Terms & Conditions: But we have to believe it, otherwise we will have a very very bad time for ever and ever.
Being: Yes, yes, we believe, please don’t hurt us! Please!!
. . .
Ground: There are STILL some bloody Philistines around and they keep saying that it’s all a load of goats’ testicles because.
Salvation: Of course, we don’t really believe in pmw, no, no. We believe in mw. Well, w, actually… Oh no no, m, of course. Oh bugger. Well, definitely not p, anyway.
Terms & Conditions: But we STILL have to believe it, otherwise we will have a very very bad time for ever and ever. Possibly.
Being: Yes, yes, we believe, please don’t hurt us! Please!!
Some idle speculation:
We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be.
In nature, “things” that “are” are forms of matter, stuff, energy + thermodynamics etc. The “things” may be temporary, the “stuff” doesn’t seem to be. Things are instances of stuff. Stuff is something in space-time. So if anything is the ground of existence, it seems to me to be space-time.
Here is a cat. A cat is an idea in my mind (and possibly in the cat’s mind too), but it is basically stuff doing its thing, which in this instance is being what I call a cat. At some point (from my perspective) it stops being a cat. It does something else instead. End of cat.
But every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not.
How is necessity “caused”? I thought that a necessary thing just is, because it’s necessary. Isn’t the point about God that it is necessary, so it just is? Of course, if stuff is being a cat, then the cat is both necessary and contingent, but that isn’t saying anything at all.
We “cause” things: build bridges, breed cats, blast the opposition…essentially, we are just moving stuff around. But we are stuff ourselves, we are just a flow of stuff, and it is only an illusion that we seem to be agents and “cause” things. We’re just part of the flow of stuff, and what we “do” is part of the flow (can’t think of a better analogy). We are stuff being people. Causation, then, is just the way we perceive. It doesn’t actually occur, even if the construct is useful.