Defining God

Posted on October 27, 2008
Filed Under Heidegger, Religion |

Sorry for the delay in posts folks. Things got busy. In the meantime Enowning had a great little quote from a blog on God and Heidegger.

Heidegger claims, [it is] god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine God. Here this means only: god-less thinking is more open to Him than onto-theo-logic would like to admit. Purely rational philosophical deduction had defined God very finitely: God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent. This is the definition of the metaphysical theistic god. Heidegger is claiming that one who thinks without a strict, traditional, theistic perception of God, or without a perception of God at all, may have a more divine relationship with Him than those who perceive him as merely the causa sui because by reducing Him to merely the first cause, the onto-logical thinker places this transcendent being into a theistic box. By defining God, humans have limited God.

Now some Mormon thinkers have appealed to Heidegger in defense of the Mormon position of God being embodied or at least more limited. I just don’t think this ultimately works (in terms of Heidegger).

The way I read Heidegger - which is not necessarily correct - we end up with a dichotomy we can’t escape. Certainly the God of the philosophers is not a God we can worship. Yet simultaneously is there a God we can? (In Heideggerian terms) Put an other way I think Heidegger leads us to a place where God is impossible. We demand an unlimited God yet simultaneously can’t worship such a being.

The post above takes a different tract. (A common one in the last couple of decades in Heideggarian influenced religion thought) That is the problem with the God of the philosophers is that it limits God too much. This gets one back to a more Anselm like view of God.

Where I think this helps Mormons is that if we take the Levinasian view that humans are themselves “beyond metaphysics” then God and man become closer. Yet clearly there are limits on men. Maybe some apsects escape the economy of metaphysics but that says more about metaphysics as problematic than man as limited or unlimited. God, as we understand him, is less limited than us. But do we, as Mormons, want to go so far as to completely say he is unlimited? The traditional strength, in my view, of Mormonism is that it limits God more than the philosophers.

Comments

5 Responses to “Defining God”

I agree that a strength of Mormonism is its position of a relatively limited God. I recently co-authored a paper, entitled “The New God Argument”, that uses this strength as part of an argument for faith in God:

http://transfigurism.org/community/files/11/sunstone_2008/entry4821.aspx

An unlimited God becomes a senseless God. Questions then arise as to how unfair it is that some are born here and others there; for example? After all, can’t God just magically make everyone wonderful people?

And why make his Son suffer? What is the point of that, if Heavenly Father is all powerful?

If God could just wave some magicwand in the end and make us all happy he would. But he is the guiding Father that his children must follow to become as he is. A carpenter can’t just make his apprentice into a carpenter. The apprentice must learn by application.

I’m not sure there is a necessary connection between limit and reasons. Although it does mean at a certain point we can’t reason anymore. That is reason has no ultimate ground to enable there to be a pure trail of reason. (Which was the point of a causi sui afterall.) Of course I personally don’t think a causi sui provides more explanation than some ungrounded ground. Indeed I think they end up being somewhat similar.

However I think for the kinds of questions we’re apt to ask the limited and unlimited end up being in a similar place unless one demands that there are no reasons, however vague, that can be provided.

4 Gerald Smith on October 28th, 2008 7:57 am

If God is unlimited, how can we begin to understand him enough to worship him sufficiently? Especially in a Christian concept of God as Father, how does one approach a Father that is unapproachable, impassable, and without passion, parts, feelings?

In making God absolute, we make a being that humans cannot comprehend, nor be like. That was the focus of basing the Trinity on Hellenistic ideas. We are of a different substance than God, otherwise God would be polluted and impure.

To have a God that can be known, because we can know ourselves, means He is approachable. If being a father on earth to mortal children is applicable, then I can begin to understand His role as Father. But if He is something altogether different, without similar emotions, then how can we approach Him?

Is it Him who is then limited, or us?

5 Michael Dorfman on October 29th, 2008 1:10 am

If God is everything, God is nothing. To speak of an “unlimited” god is to render the notion of god useless. The challenge, philosophically speaking, is to come up with a set of limits that a) does not offend reason, and b) points to a being still worthy of our attention.

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