Abstract
This paper argues that the monotheistic concept of God, understood as a unified transcendental ground of being, truth, and value, is ontologically false. It begins with the concept of the One God as an idea, and examines the nature of the aggregation of ideas by which this concept of God is described. After showing the transcendental logic undergirding all of these conceptualizations of God, it asserts a distinction between externally grounded concepts (e.g., matter) and internally grounded concepts (e.g., pain), arguing that all attributes ascribed to God—such as goodness, love, and justice—belong to the latter category. Because internally grounded concepts derive their conditions of possibility from subjective experience, their unification into a single, objective, external being constitutes a categorical error. Even categorically-ambiguous attributes like Truth and Being, when unified within a single divine essence, collapse into forms of human experience rather than independent realities. The paper concludes that the idea of God in Abrahamic monotheism is best understood as a phenomenological construct arising from the internal structures of human language, and therefore cannot exist as an external, ontologically real entity.
1. The Transcendental Ontology of God
When people discuss “God,” they have some idea of a thing (an entity, being, force, or concept) which they are labeling as God. You and I are not God; a particular rock is not God; a lake is not God. And yet the vast majority of humans have not seen or met God (claims to such experiences are often interpretations of divine presence behind other events; God is not so much experienced directly as inferred). Indeed, the contest around his nature and even his existence is evidence of his hiddenness. In the absence of direct experience (revelation), God is spoken of as an idea.
Such ideas can be real, even if they are not experienced directly. Many elements of matter were theorized and inferred as ideas before they were discovered or synthesized (Gallium and Scandium being examples). But the nature of the idea matters, since some ideas can exist in principle, while others cannot, due to the nature of the idea itself. Noam Chomsky famously composed the nonsense sentence “colorless green ideas dream furiously” as an example of correct grammar with incorrect semantics. The thing it describes could not exist in ‘real life.’
So if we cannot experience God directly, we must ask: what sort of idea is God?
“God” has meant many different things to many different people. For the sake of this paper, I will be referring to “God” in the monotheistic (and especially Abrahamic) concept. This concept of God is often described as all-powerful, all-knowing, and wholly good; he is described as eternal and unchanging, as the supreme creator, and as personal. He is described as not one good thing among many, but goodness itself. Thomas Aquinas said God is ipsum esse subsistens — the persistence of being itself.
And perhaps most importantly, he is one.
The gestalt of God that emerges from these descriptions is a god of foundation: there cannot be beautiful things without beauty; there cannot be good things without goodness; there cannot be knowledge without truth; there cannot be loving without love; and there cannot be beings without being. In the very idea of God, the ontological, moral, and cosmological arguments all merge into a transcendental argument which demands the grounds and justification for what is, and for which God is the complete — and perhaps the only possible — answer.
Aside from the fact that the Abrahamic monotheisms all follow this theology, it is noteworthy that other ways of knowing God — historical narrative and personal revelation — are themselves contingent upon an idea of God which precedes the experience. The death and resurrection of Jesus would mean nothing, without a preceding notion of sin and the necessity of salvation. Similarly, revelation of the sort received by Moses and Mohammed is necessarily interpreted in light of a concept of a universal God of foundation that precedes the revelation itself. In other words, our knowledge of a hidden God is, itself, transcendentally contingent upon an idea of God. This paper is concerned with the origins of this idea.
2. Zeno’s Transcendental Argument
Immanuel Kant is often credited for inventing the transcendental argument. Kant argued that we must “know” certain things prior to experience in order for us to make sense of our experience. Such a priori knowledge might include the idea of causality, or the reality of the external world, or certain laws of logic, like the law of identity. It is through this kind of prerequisite necessity that the idea of God emerges in monotheistic religions.
But Kant did not invent this structure (indeed, it would be strange to say a 3,000 year old religious idea was invented in the 18th century). Kant only articulated a complex form of this argument from foundation, as it pertained to knowledge. The logic of this kind of necessary prerequisite goes back to Zeno, who would use this logic of prerequisite necessity to create paradoxes. His paradox of motion, for example, asserted that motion is impossible because to get anywhere, you must first go halfway, as a necessary prerequisite for going the full distance. This requirement entails its own prerequisite, of going halfway to halfway, and so forth, such that infinite distance must be crossed in order to go any finite distance.
This paradox turns on a sort of equivocal use of “infinite,” since infinite distance is not the same thing as infinite divisibility — much as “many” does not mean the same thing, in describing “many sorrows” and “many pleasures.” “Many” accentuates and describes, but does not have a meaning apart from its referent.
Suppose we were to make our own version of Zeno’s paradox, where instead of divisibility, we focus upon the concept of motion itself: for discreet motion (i.e., from point A to point B) to be possible, motion itself must exist — motus ipse. Therefore, any discreet act of motion implies an eternal grounding for motion.
Perhaps we could call this a “first motion”… or a “prime mover.”
Such an entity we would call God.
But there is also stability in the world. Some things stay still… at least for a time, just as things that move do not always stay in motion. Indeed, by Newtonian laws of inertia, maintaining motion, on a particular course, might be considered a kind of stillness. One might ask: why are things still? Does the stillness of objects also require the preexistence of stillness itself?
If so, since both motion and stillness are enclosed within being, the foundations for motion itself and stillness itself are together, in the entity of being itself. This leaves us with a new kind of paradox: if we are to assume that this divine ground embodies some essential qualities of the thing for which they themselves are a foundation, then we would be faced with a being who is both like motion and like stillness. The logic which required us to seek justification for everything in the first place prohibits us from holding something as being like two states which are definitionally exclusive. And if this foundational deity is not like the things for which he is a foundation, then we ourselves would have no ground for claiming any knowledge of his nature whatsoever.
This variation of a Euthyphro problem gets past the usual Christian answer to Euthyphro itself: when asked whether things are good because God wills it, or whether God wills things because they are good, the standard Christian answer is that God’s nature is goodness, and his essence and will are one. In other words, God is goodness. But the reasoning which led to this conclusion leads to many other conclusions as well, including paradoxes and contradictions, and invites us to ask if we can really know God’s nature based upon what he is asserted to be foundational for.
But more importantly, the paradoxes created by transcendental logic open a line of questioning into the very nature of the transcendental logic.
3. Taxonomies and Categories of Language
When we consider a statement like “belief in X entails a priori belief in Y,” where Y is a metaphysical foundation for X (as beauty is for the beautiful, the Good is for good things, or being itself is for beings), we ought to examine the semantic relationship between X and Y. In most cases, the transcendental ground for a thing is labeled in accordance with the nature of the thing that it supports. Entailed in this order is a chronology of knowledge, where apprehension and awareness of the specific precedes the knowledge of its foundation: in other words, we would not understand beauty without precise instances of beautiful things.
What is important is that the very concept of beauty would not be knowable to us apart from this organic, experiential foundation in the particular. It may be possible that all of these particulars are contingent, and contingent upon some ground for their particularity, and that the order of the acquisition of our knowledge is in no way indicative of the primacy of being. An example of this might be the case of matter: our knowledge of particular forms of matter precedes our understanding of matter in the broader, physical sense. And it is perfectly valid to say that the existence of matter necessarily precedes — and is the ground for — particular instances of matter. In this way, we can construct a taxonomy of matter (such as the periodic table of elements) where the pre-existence of the material substrate of protons, neutrons, and electrons serves as a foundation for the rest.
We may construct similar taxonomies of life, charting genetic relationships according to kingdom, phylum, etc.
But could we construct a similar taxonomy of pain?
Pain is, in an important way, not like matter or life. Whereas material and biological objects refer to things outside of ourselves, pain refers to a subjective and internal experience. This internality does not prevent us from making taxonomies of pain (as Justin Schmidt did with insect stings), but when we look for a transcendental foundation for things like pain, we run into a categorical problem in our language, where the search for a transcendental foundation itself assumes an external, objective source for internal states. Not only does this not need to be the case, but the internality of the experience implies an internal contingent foundation. In other words, the transcendental foundation for discreet pain — pain itself — cannot be some outside entity, but somewhere in ourselves. This is because the ontological nature of the concept in question is subjective. This metaphysical point is illustrated via negativa by those with congenitive analgesia and cannot feel pain. Pain can point to objective, outer causes (such as a hot stove), but the pain itself, as the experience of pain, remains within the subject. Therefore, if all phenomena are assumed to have some contingent ground which makes them metaphysically possible, the necessary ground for pain is, likewise, internal to the subject.
If we delineate kinds of ideas, according to whether the transcendental foundation for their possibility is external or internal, we would place “matter” in the category of externally-grounded ideas, and “pain” in the category of internally-grounded ideas.
When we track the application of transcendental logic (prerequisite necessity) to phenomena in the world, we find that the contradictions that emerge when we juxtapose certain kinds of entities — like “justice” and “mercy” — are always the result of assuming some external foundation to an internally-grounded thing. Since “justice” is experiential (at least when taken in the usual sense, wherein perfect justice is seen to be in paradoxical tension with perfect mercy), its nature is of something that is grounded internally, rather than externally. To search for an external grounding for justice would be to misunderstand what justice is, in the sense in which it is being used.
To say that an idea’s transcendental grounding is internal is not to say that the experience is not real, nor is it even to say that its grounding is not real. However, to say that an idea or experience finds its transcendental grounding internally means that its justification is not objective, and cannot be real apart from the human experiencing it. “Pain” is real to us, but is subjective by nature, and therefore not real apart from the person experiencing it. Because of this, any claim of an objective grounding for pain — a “pain itself,” dolor ipsum — can be rejected as ontologically false based upon the nature of what pain is.
4. The Ontological Rejection of the Truth of God
With this categorical delineation in mind, let us return to God. With two notable exceptions, God’s attributes are universally subjective in nature. His nature as a ground for love, justice, mercy, goodness, glory, and even power are all internally-grounder concepts, whose very nature places their transcendental grounding (or, more likely, their essential, phenomenological distillation) in the mind of the experiencing subject, and not in the outside world.
The two exceptions are the ideas of God as Truth (aletheia, or logos), and God as Being (ipsum esse). Here, there is interpretive room for the concepts from which the grounding idea of God would be external, as with matter, since both Being and Truth can be understood to refer to what is.
But there is also room for Truth and Being to refer to internally-grounded concepts — in this case, Truth and Being do not refer to what is, but rather to what is known and what is experienced, respectively. The question is which sort of category of terms — internally-grounder or externally-grounder — these are meant with, in the context of a singular God.
Here, the oneness of God itself guides us in understanding the meaning. The concept of God’s nature is that of a single being, whose nature is unchanging, and the unity in this nature guides us in understanding the sense of being and truth that is spoken of in relation to this nature. If God’s foundation for love, goodness, justice, and mercy are one with foundation with being and truth, then his foundation is for that of an experience of being and of truth — i.e., of consciousness and of knowledge — rather than of existent matter, which could be confused with the tohu va-bohu of an unknown and unexperienced but existent universe. The unity of God in his nature demonstrates a unity of God’s ontological essence in the unified and distilled consolidation of all positive human experiences such as goodness, beauty, love, etc. By their nature as human experiences, these experiences which form our concept of a single God find their transcendental foundation internally, within the human mind.
This means that God — in all Abrahamic, monotheistic concepts — does not and cannot exist outside of the human mind, by the nature of his being since he was first conceptualized.