1st May 1999 : Anthony Owens
VARIOUS RESPONSES TO COMMENSAL 96
I'm not trying to annoy, honest (Theo C96/16). I try to be pithy and to the point. See, you’re driving me to tautology now. Can we have a little bit of pithy first and then I'll get serious ?
Thanks to John Stubbings (C96/7), even if he is no longer there. For painting read sculpture, music, prose, and poetry: all derived from once-useful procedures or occurrences. Painting. pictography, though Albert Dean (C96/19) is right: still useful: like those road signs which make you think, "Does that mean I have right of way or he does? Aaargh!". Sculpture.. randy cavemen: need I say more ? Have you never wondered why early sculptures had no clothes on ? Music: various volumes of running water plus a bit of wind and thunder heralding rain. Great news if you're thirsty, or had just got your Spring veg. in. Prose: tales to let the kids know what's what. Poetry: ditto, with some memory-aiding repetitive features. Nothing to do with Art for Art's sake. That came after the good became the pleasurable. A cul-de-sac for the human mind.
Speaking of cul-de-sacs (take your teeth out now Theo, I wouldn't want you to break them), leads naturally to mathematics. I've already proved that 1 + 1 = 2 is a departure from reality (C90/8); and no matter how innovative we get at measuring space or how useful it might prove, I can't see any way back to reality if the very first mathematical step we took is away from it.
Are you quite sure that causality has gone 'out of the window’; or does 'statistical predictability' simply measure the width of our own blinkers. Consider the sentence, "if we wanted to know why the alpha particle was emitted at that particular time we would have to know the microscopic structure of the whole world, including ourselves, and that is impossible". The implication is that the particle is not emitted statistically; and that the 'microscopic structure of the whole world' is not only involved in the event but the world state before the event could be used to forecast it but for the impossibility of discovering what that state was. Who wrote it ? Werner Heisenberg; Physics and Philosophy; Pelican, 1989. That's good enough for me.
Gödel's proof of God's existence (C96/35) seems to me to depend on questions of existence. Can an entity exist of itself, unchanging ? If so, any negative of it is not necessary. God, as the perfect Being, must be capable of such existence. Thus Gödel's argument, as I see it, fails at the first hurdle. If Gödel is assuming that evil is the negation of God then, as George A. Sargeant says (C96/36), being God-like could be negative from Gödel's argument. A perfect Being must include both positive and negative within itself (note that Being and not-Being are not opposites) or it lacks something and would thus not be complete, completeness being a necessary attribute of a perfect Being. I have always interpreted the doctrine of the Trinity as meaning that evil, personified by the devil, is the negative of God the Son. This implies that the devil does come from God the Father, which might seem to pose a theological problem. I reconcile this by assuming that in the act of creating perfect good, perfect evil came about as a necessary consequence, but not a deliberate creative act.
Though I balk at Stan Tenen's proposition (C96/37) that 'Atman and Brahman are One', I would agree that we are God-like in our recognition of good and evil. I would also agree that consciousness and physicality are aspects of the same thing. Physicality is the illusion in which evil is trapped while consciousness escapes at death.
Proving this, indeed proving the existence of God is quite another matter. Is God Plato's geometer ? Mathematics may be eternal, but while it may also be always incomplete that isn't the same as fully infinite. In fact mathematics recognises an infinity of infinites: all limited to mathematics of course. Semantics has never been its strong point. Is God Origen's miracle-worker? If science could provide a complete description of the workings of the world and everything in it; and if an event could be shown to be counter to it and attributable to God: perhaps; but I wouldn't hold your breath ! Is God Aristotle's unmoved mover; or Aquinas' first cause? If God can, must, be infinite, why cannot moves and causes ? Is God Anselm's best possible being; on the grounds that a best possible being must exist because if it didn't exist then it wouldn't be the best possible. This seems to leave open the question as to whether God could improve, which contradicts His C.V.! Is God Rousseau's private experience? As it was private, you'll have to ask Rousseau ! Is God Leibnitz's designer ? One might suspect that He could have done a better job, which ought to be impossible!
My favoured option starts at the point where some sort of existence cannot be doubted: Descartes' 'Cogito ergo sum': Before anything can exist it must be preceded by the potential for its existence. Therefore the potential for all that did, does, or will exist must have some form of existence of itself. The problem is whether the potential is used up in becoming actuality. If not; and one might use the conservation of energy as an analogy; then it follows as a bonus that anything that did, does or will ever exist must be capable of re-existence.
Of course, if one could prove the existence of God incontrovertibly this might seem to be inconsistent with free will, which might seem to be also impossible to prove. Then there is the inequality inherent in any proof. Why should only those who understand it benefit ? This would hardly be a mirror of God's perfection. Is this proof that God's existence must necessarily be unprovable ?
The analysis of previous proofs is based on, Bertrand Russell; A History of Western Philosophy; George Allen & Unwin, 1983. (The truncations, adaptions, comments and errors are mine, of course.)
Anthony Owens