This topic is generating some interest. I 've gotten a good bit of e-mail on it. Herewith, a summing-up by way of commentary on an e-mail I received. Joshua Orsak writes:
I wanted to email you to tell you how once again you have elevated the medium of the Internet blog with your recent threads on "The God of the Philosophers" and "The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob". As a minister, a person interested in mystical experience, AND with a keen interest and even passion for philosophy, I have always found myself perplexed why we have to bifurcate our heart-based and mind-based encounter with the world like that. Personally, I've always thought of philosophy (of religion) and religion as encountering the same Divine reality in different ways. In philosophy we study God as an object, in religion we encounter Him as a subject.
Your point can be put in a way that does not presuppose the existence of God, and it is better put that way since my claim that the God of the philosophers and the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob are the same, if correct, is correct whether or not God exists. So suppose there is no God. Even so, there is the search for God, a search that is prosecuted in different ways by the philosopher, the religionist, and the mystic. The philosopher applies discursive reason to the data of experience and attempts to reason his way to God. He makes no appeal to faith nor to what Kant called intellektuelle Anschauung. The religionist seeks God via the testimony of witnesses as recorded in scripture. His primary reliance is on faith. The mystic seeks God using the techniques of ascesis, prayer, and meditation. Qua mystic, he avoids both discursive reason and faith in order to attain direct cognitive contact with the divine Reality. The mystic wants to know rather than merely believe, and he wants to know directly, not via the mediation of concepts, judgments, and arguments.
So rather than say that the divine Reality is encountered in different ways by the philosopher, religionist, and mystic, I prefer to say that the divine reality is sought in different ways by these three. 'Encounters' is a verb of success, whereas 'seeks' is not. If S encounters x, it follows that x exists. But if S seeks x, it does not follow that x exists.
Now the question before is whether these three ways of seeking aim in the same direction. That depends on the concept of God with which we are operating. If the concept derives from Judeo-Christian monotheism, which is of course the context of Buber's comments on Pascal, then, as I have argued, the God of the philosophers, the God of the religionists, and the God of the mystics is the same God.
One way to go wrong here is by making the mistake that Martin Buber makes, namely the mistake of thinking that if God is approached via discursive reason, then God becomes immanent to reason. If that were the case, then of course the God of philosophy could not be identical to the God of religion. But as I pointed out, to conceptualize something is not to reduce it to a concept, to judge about it is not to reduce it to a judgment, and to argue about it is not to reduce it to an argument.
Another way to go wrong is by making the mistake that one of my readers made, which is to slide illicitly from the true 'Philosophical arguments for God do not typically establish God as possessing religiously-relevant properties' to the false 'The entity whose existence is proven by such arguments (if successful) cannot be identical to the God of religion.' That is a non sequitur: there is nothing to prevent the God approached via discursive reason from being the same as the God addressed in a Pascalian cri du coeur.
But one can go a step futher and insist that, within the Judeo-Christian monotheism, the two Gods cannot come apart. For God in this tradition is that than which no greater can be conceived, as per Anselm's famous formulation, and so if there were a being that was merely a First Cause (or an entity that performed some other function that did not have a specifically religious significance) then that being could not be God, for a greater could be conceived, namely, a being that did the philosophical job but also was worship-worthy.
In much the same way that biology and medical science studies the person as an object, but in relationships we encounter the same person as a subject. Lorenzo Albacete writes about this in his book GOD AT THE RITZ. He talks about a medical examiner who studies dead bodies all day but still goes home to make love to his wife. How in one 'mode of discourse' or mode of study he is encountering people as objects of study, but at home he encounters a person as a subject to be related to. Both encounters are important ways of learning about the human person, but both are radically different ways of doing so. In the same way philosophy takes God and studies WHAT God is, as an object of study. But in religion we relate to that same God as a person, as a subject we want to know directly, and we find out WHO God is.
Given that the philosopher and the religionist approach the same God in different ways, should we agree with my correspondent and say (to put it in my own way) that the philosopher qua philosopher assumes an objectifying stance in his quest for God while the religionist qua religionist does not, but seeks an encounter with a person, a Thou to the seeker's I? I think that is basically right. And my correspondent's analogy with human persons is apt.
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