This is the same idea as in the Goethe quote in my last post: "one is only truly thinking when that which one thinks cannot be thought through", that is, describing what I am calling 'dynamic intellect'. But what also intrigues me is the idea that this is what Aquinas was getting at with the 'five ways'. Like any modernist thinker (which I am trying to cease to be), I had pretty much dismissed them as "proofs", but apparently, like Barthians, I have misinterpreted what is going on. But I haven't read Turner's book yet, just the preface, so it remains to be seen if his argument convinces.
...for Thomas, as for the long tradition which he inherits, you begin to occupy the place of intellect when reason asks the sorts of question the answers to which you know are beyond the power of reason to comprehend. They are questions, therefore, which have a double character: for they arise, as questions, out of our human experience of the world; but the answers, we know, must lie beyond our comprehension, and therefore beyond the experience out of which they arise. And that sense that reason, at the end of its tether, becomes an intellectus, and that just where it does, it meets the God who is beyond its grasp, is, I argue, the structuring principle of the 'five ways' of the Summa Theologiae[p. xv].
Anyway, that such questions do arise out experience is what happened to me with respect to consciousness, as all-too-briefly discussed here. I conclude that consciousness could not exist unless the eternal is real, but that, of course, does not resolve the mystery, which is how the eternal and spatiotemporal relate, and that cannot be "thought through". Nevertheless, I can say that by reason alone, reflecting on normal, everyday experience, one can grasp that there are real mysteries to which "the answers...must lie beyond our comprehension, and therefore beyond the experience out of which they arise."
4 comments:
I'm curious to understand what you mean here:
"I conclude that consciousness could not exist unless the eternal is real, but that, of course, does not resolve the mystery, which is how the eternal and spatiotemporal relate, and that cannot be "thought through"
What do you mean be the eternal? I don't see how the eternal and spatiotemporal are different necessaraly.
For some reason I'm reminded of Spinoza's "Ethics". Here he talks about the existance of the eternal (infinite) versus the finite.
The eternal, in its strict theological sense, just means non-spatiotemporal, as opposed to meaning time everlasting. So to say that God is eternal is to say that God is not a spatiotemporal object, that God's reality lies outside of space and time.
What I'm saying about consciousness is that I think its reality also lies outside of space and time -- otherwise one could not be aware of time passing (see the referenced post for a slightly longer argument).
To ask, and hence to try to "prove" if God exists is already to doubt God's existence absolutely, and it reflects a commitment to the presumption that God does not exist until it absolutely proven otherwise.
Once it is presumed that the existence of God is in doubt or in need of proof, the dreadful dilemma of presumed separation from God has already solidified, and neither inner reason/philosophy/theology nor outer revelation has sufficient power to liberate the individual from the subtle and fundamental despair that is inherent in such actively presumed Godlessness.
If you actually read my post you would have noted that I am not trying to prove the existence of God, or anything else.
Post a Comment