God or What?

The idea of God has a long and noble history, graced by most of the great minds in history.  God is generally assigned several divine attributes: omnipotence, omniscience, transcendence, perfect benevolence, necessary being.  God is also some sort of person, though his attributes force us to strain our notion of person in order to fit him in that category.  He is responsible for the creation of the universe, especially of humanity, and for handing down morals.  In Christianity, God also raises the virtuous up to Heaven and casts the vicious into Hell after death.

There is, of course, the obvious question: does God exist?  The answer is Yes, sort of.  The idea of an old man in the sky creating the universe in six days strains credulity to the breaking point, especially under the light of modern physics, geology, and natural history.  However, if we take God in a much looser sense--a being with the aforementioned divine attributes--there is good reason to think that such a being does in fact exist.  And when we look at what we find very closely, we will see an interesting degree of congruence with several ideas about God from Christianity.

So, how do I know that there is a being that can be called God without much straining of the conventional notion?  I've never observed such a being with my senses, nor has anyone with any kind of instrumentation.  Is there some kind of rational argument to this effect?  Well, actually, there are several, and I'll touch on a well-known one in a moment.  The best reason I can think of is that I can fairly easily think of a being whose existence I don't think anyone would even bother denying and which possesses the properties attributed to God.  What is this being?  It is Being.  Everything which exists in any respect, taken as a unity.

So, does the unity of all that is really exist?  Well, things exist, so there is Being.  And in order for there to be two Beings, then in some sense the two Beings must be together in order to distinguish one from the other.  In other words, for there to be two Beings, there must be a unity between them.  Alright, so does Being have the attributes of God?  Let's go through them one by one.  Starting with necessary being, is it possible that Being not exist?  We can rephrase this so as to ask is it possible that nothing exist?  But then, as first observed by the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides, Non-Being has the property of Being, which is contradictory.  Thus, there must be something, and so Being has necessary existence.

What about transcendence?  Well, Being is quite conspicuously not any particular thing in space and time, and space and time must be included in Being themselves.  Thus, Being is outside of space and time.  Omnipotence?  Everything which can happen exists as a potentiality and so is included in Being.  Omniscience, every truth has being as a truth, so Being includes all true knowledge.  What about perfect benevolence?  I'll get to this in more detail later, but for now consider this argument.  Existence is better than non-existence, so if Being is benevolent, then everything which is possible would exist.  But everything which is possible does exists, as a possibility.  We're not dealing with benevolence in the sense of volition (I'll get to that later), but we've got something close enough.  So there you have it, Being has all the attributes one would ask of God, and I would be very interested to hear anyone try to argue that Being does not exist.

So what about God as he is usually conceived in theology?  Let's look at a classic argument for the existence of God: the Ontological Argument.  The ontological argument, put simply, goes thus: (1) God is the greatest conceivable being; (2) We have in our minds an idea of such a being; (3) However, we can conceive of a greater being than the one in our minds, namely, one which exists outside our minds; (4) Therefore, God exists outside of our minds.  Being seems to satisfy this condition for being God, since it is impossible to conceive of anything greater than all that exists.  However, if God is supposed to be distinct from some other thing which exists, then Being fulfills the requirements of the proof even better because if there is God and non-God, then I can conceive of something greater than God, the unity of God and non-God which is Being.

In Christianity, God has several other attributes: issue of moral and physical laws, creation of the physical universe, creating man in his image, saving and damning souls, and a three-aspected nature.  Since this post is getting a little long and several of these require very in-depth analysis, I'll stick to the first two for now and develop the others in a later post.  For now, let us consider, if there exist moral and physical laws, then they are part of Being.  Similarly with the physical universe: not only is it part of Being, but either something that exists caused the matter in it to start moving or something brought it into actuality out of mere potentiality.

I'll stop here for now to pause and point out what we've learned up to this point.  We've discovered that something fitting the description of God exists, and not only that it exists, but it is something whose existence seems so obvious that to question it almost boggles the mind.  If nothing else, this exploration should reinforce the idea that when dealing with matters of philosophy, it is always advisable to ask "What exactly do you mean by that?" before accepting or dismissing any idea.  To end on a cliffhanger, in my next post I'll answer some more questions about God that lead to surprising answers.

Challenge to Statists

A state is a compulsory, territorial monopoly of judicial services and enforcement.  A statist is someone who believes that a state is a positive good or a necessary evil.  This post is a challenge to statists in two parts.

The first part of the challenge is this: why is a state necessary for the functioning of society?  The answer is that it isn't--there have been societies surviving and thriving for centuries without a state.  Medieval Europe is an outstanding example where landowners served as primary judge on their own lands, kings and royal magistrates served as courts of appeal, merchant courts met to apply the law merchant, admiralty courts to apply admiralty law, and church courts to apply canon law, and these courts could and did enforce their own decisions.  These courts even competed with each other for disputants: for example, two merchants could have their case heard in a noble or royal court or in a merchant court, or even in a church court if they swore an oath to God as part of the transaction under dispute.  Somehow, this anarchy survived for over a thousand years and produced a thriving society.  A statist must explain how a state is superior to this system of competing jurisdictions at producing justice, and given the performance of states in the past two-hundred or so years, this is a very tall order.

The second part of the challenge is moral.  A statist who believes that a state is a positive good must demonstrate how a compulsory territorial monopoly is morally superior to any other method of providing judicial services and enforcement.  To put the matter starkly, let us suppose that there is a territorial monopolist of these services, one whose jurisdiction extends beyond its own property.  An anarchist (at least one of the stripe I represent) raises no objection as long as certain conditions are met.  If the monopolist's extended jurisdiction is based on contracts with the particular people, these contracts must have been freely agreed to and must allow the people in question to cancel them without relocating.  If it is based on restricted titles to land, there must be a way for landowners to remove those restrictions.  The statist must explain why such requirements are villainies deserving repression.  Why must a territorial monopoly be compulsory?  Why must people be forced submit to an authority other than that of justice itself?  Is the state automatically the executor of justice?  In that case, the Holocaust was a just deed, and those who died deserved what they got.

A statist who claims that a state is a positive good must answer both of these challenges; one who considers it only a necessary evil must merely answer the first.  If he cannot give a answer to his required questions, then he must become a philosophical anarchist.  The weakest position permitted by logic and honesty is "I oppose the state, but don't see how to get rid of it anytime soon."  On this count, have no fear--the state is busy destroying itself all on its own.  Someday it will come crashing down.  I only wish it that would get on with it.