metonymy4u

In this time of faith, the concept of god is discussed quite frequently. But discussing god often involves us in intellectual contradiction. For example it is difficult to understand why an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent god would allow the slaughter of innocent babies. And yet it happens every day. It is difficult to understand why god allows the compassionate, loving and the kind among us to die and preserves the brutal, the violent and the hateful. We are told that god works in mysterious ways. That he gave humanity free will. That we will never understand his ways. The contradiction is already apparent: we affirm the mystery and the certainty. The mystery of evil and the certainty that we are given free will.

Of course, many will say that it is at just such a point of contradiction that faith has to take over from reason.

But let’s not leap to faith just yet, so that we may see if reason can take us a bit further.

Immanuel Kant proposed a solution to the problem. Kant said that our idea of god is an idea of an absolutely necessary and free being whose actions inevitably manifest its intention, unaffected by the contingencies of material existence. Moreover, he said that such a concept is bound up with our ideas about moral agency which in turn motivates our understanding of good and evil, crime, punishment and merit (as opposed to mere prudence). In short, in order to conceive our own freedom, Kant said we need to think the existence of some sort of cosmically ultimate and necessary type of freedom, and we call this god. And the contradictions that we experience in our discussions of god are a natural consequence of conceptualizing something that can never be had in actual experience. Because no one ever experiences absolute freedom from contingency. Our actions are always subject to external influences of some kind or other. So the idea of god is like the idea of all circles or all natural numbers – a useful notion to poeticize our understanding of life. And, we don’t seem to be able to live without it. But that does not mean that it is actually out there in the world. That which our reason finds unavoidable is not thereby guaranteed existence. Necessity does not imply reality any more than speaking implies knowing.