What If?
What if there existed a perfectly loving god? What would that entail with respect to 1) what such a god would value and 2) our epistemic access to this god’s existence?
This question is not my own, but that of my philosophy of religion professor, Paul Moser. He reminds me of a seminary professor I had, Michael Williams. I would bet that the two disagree on some important confessional matters, namely, the inerrancy and historicity of the biblical texts. However, they have two shared mantras: “god is not god’s name” and “why assume god is a foundationalist?”
I recall Williams talking about the Westminster Shorter Catechism, question four: “What is God?” and complaining that the correct question should be “Who is God?” In class last Monday, Moser argued that Christian theology had gotten off track during the Reformation when propositional knowledge, of the sort found in the Westminster Catechisms and Confessions, was privileged over experiential.
One of Moser’s chief contentions would fit into another former seminary professor’s schemas, that knowing god is like knowing your car mechanic. I don’t know if he is familiar with Esther Meek, although he does know Merleau-Ponty and probably Polanyi. Because god is personal, that means that we know god in ways different than objects in the world. Further, who is to say that god has a responsibility to make his existence plain as day, like a billboard or neon sign?
All this introduction is to say, the questions above (which are a short writing assignment in class) are packed with assumptions.
First, we need to be able to understand what “perfectly loving god” plausibly refers to. Second, we need to determine whether the existence of this entity would necessarily entail anything about (2). It seems plausible that, given a god that is in some analogous way to us, personal, god would have values. Of course, this is an additional worry, that god is not “personal” as we understand the term. Take, for example, the god of process theology. One motivation for this model (grounded, of course in metaphysical assumptions) is to preserve the value of personal freedom. The perfectly loving god of Charles Hartshorne, Alfred North Whitehead and John Cobb, Jr. is a very different one than the Lutheran deity of Kierkegaard.
This is why I think getting a grip on what it is to be “personal”, a “self”, etc. is so important. For example, take this short paper by John Cobb, Jr. in which he makes connections between Whitehead’s metaphysics and the idea of love. He says, “God is the supreme instance of the love that is to be found everywhere” (which is Moser’s starting assumption in the question above). We, as well as god, are better described as events than substances, arising as we do momentarily, taking our shape from our immediate environment and our future concerns directed at our relevant future.
In a manner similar to Derek Parfit, Cobb talks about having concern for our future selves in a way that grounds altruism, the concern for someone who is not our self. The further in the future my self lies, the farther away it is from my natural self-concern. Widening the scope of our concern, then, has benefits not only for me (planning for my future self at 60) but for others who are similarly outside of my immediate scope of concern. This requires an openness, similar to the Buddhist practice of seeing interconnections between all beings.
I need to do more close reading of Kierkegaard, but while there are deep divisions between his presuppositions and those of Whitehead, there are tantalizing parallels, especially in his notion of “passion” or subjectivity. Cobb writes that the problem with Western science is that it views the universe in purely objective terms, omitting the subjective. Here we’re starting to detour into problems of consciousness and emotion… which are connected to the question, but not directly. What can we say about a concept such as “love” in a being such as god, which would seem to have a more profound way of being emotional thatn we? (”Complex” comes to mind instead of “profound”, but has the connotation of “parts” which isn’t what I’m trying to get at.)
We need to be able to make a dent in that conceptualization first, before we can answer the questions about epistemology and values. And I think that we have to make clear what sort of model of self we are working with, and what it does and does not require, metaphysically.
Arbitrary Chatter:
Aaron Boyden: Well, back when I was an... Aaron Boyden: The evaluation of historical... Loden Jinpa: thanks Richard: Thanks Colleen — let me just add... Loden Jinpa: >Finally, I just read the draft...