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God and Ontology (Mirror) - jaybreak - 08-07-2020
This is cross posted from my blog here: God and Ontology.
A part of one of Ed’s recent blog posts, and then one of his comments:
Quote:Don’t be a sucker for the philosophical arguments to support any part of this conflict. Obey what your convictions demand within the context; don’t listen to any other voice. Christ is a Person, not a body of ideas. He lives and speaks to us only in our hearts, where our convictions stand. If your mind can make no sense of it, seek His face in prayer until you know what God requires of you. Nothing else matters. There is no appeal to some objective standard on which humanity can or should agree, because humanity is morally blinded by the Fall.
Quote:The myth is that reality is objective, something that is the same for everyone, that we can all know the same reality. It assumes the reality is stable — even static — and that everything about it is ultimately explainable.
This is the common assumption underlying the whole of Western Civilization as we know it today. I take the position that reality is best understood as a person. We can all know reality like we know the same person, but we should expect reality to treat each of us individually. Thus, reality only appears to be stable and consistent across the human experience. Further, it is not possible to really know reality. There will always be surprises and things held back.
But it’s not that I say reality is that way, only that it is the best approach to consider it a person: sentient, active and willful. My experience with reality should be somewhat different, and yours is just as valid as mine. In that sense, reality is fungible — one person’s experience is just as good as another. We should avoid questioning someone else’s experience in that sense. We can surely decide their experience is too foreign to hang around them, but it serves no purpose to deny someone’s experience just because it is significantly different from ours.
This is why miracles are so rare in Western society. All of Creation should be treated as if it were alive, sentient and willful. Jesus spoke to the storm, spoke to dead bodies, and to invisible beings called “demons.” The results indicate that this is the way we should view the world in which we live.
I don’t disagree with Ed, but I’d like to clarify what he means.
By “objective reality,” most philosophers mean (partly) that anything in existence can be sufficiently understood by human faculties. If not now, then eventually by some dint of progress. Now while anything that exists is, technically speaking, an object humans can understand to a degree by way of attributing characteristics to it, it’s a mistake to understand some things as just objects. The pencil next to me on the table is an object that I can understand sufficiently for the time being, though there’s plenty about it I couldn’t describe if I found the descriptions relevant. My wife is also an object (hello, feminists), a long list of descriptors, but she’s certainly not just an object. And I certainly don’t have an ontological relationship to her as if she were just an object, and the fact that she is an object is irrelevant to that same relationship.
So it’s extremely misleading to describe the enduring, ultimate reality of the supernatural realm as objective. Sure, it some ways, the metaphysical domain and God are objects, because they exist, but their significance doesn’t lie in that fact but in our relationship to them by way of conviction. How, and in what manner, are we drawn to them, what is the standing of God in relation to our own existence, and what does our sensus divinitatas (per Calvin, Plantinga)—the non-material faculty or “sense” of divine conviction—tell us about Him? Those are questions only we as individuals can answer with any non-falsifiable certainty. Those are the pertinent questions, over whether He exists or not, or whether we can coherently describe Him or attribute this or that quality to Him.
When we regard things as merely objects to be understood, we are underhandedly categorizing them as being graspable by the human intellect, a collection of knowledge-collecting faculties that have been badly damaged since Eden and are not reliable for understanding the supernatural domain.