Three Theisms: Ontic, Alterity, and Onto-Theological and their Liabilities

There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. One way into the problem is via the following aporetic triad:

1. There are things other than God that exist, and they all depend on God for their existence.

2.  For any x, y,  if x depends for its existence on y, and x exists, then y exists. (This implies that nothing can depend on God for its existence unless God exists.)

3. God is not one of the many things that exist, and so God does not exist.

It is easy to see that the limbs of the triad cannot all be true. And yet each has some plausibility, at least 'in-house,' i.e., among theists.

(1) or something like it will be accepted by both ontic theists and alterity theists, assuming that they are not pantheists. Roughly, an ontic theist is a theist who maintains that God is a being among beings, an ens among entia, while an alterity theist is one who maintains that God is radically transcendent, radically other, to such an extent that he cannot be identified with any being.

(2) won't be accepted by the alterity theists, but it is to my mind exceedingly plausible! If everything other than God depends on God for its existence, then God must in some mode or manner exist; otherwise he would be nothing at all. And on nothing nothing can depend.

(3) won't be accepted by the ontic theist, but alterity theists find it plausible. If God is other than every being, then he is no being. If to be is to exist, then God does not exist.

Since the limbs cannot all be true, one of them must be rejected.  I am assuming, of course, that there cannot be true contradictions.  There are therefore three main ways of solving the problem.

A. The quickest solution, call it Blanket Atheism, is by rejecting (1).  There is no God in any sense of the term.  No being is God, and there is no God 'beyond being.'   There is just the natural world (and perhaps abstracta) but nature is not God, and so God does not exist. Reality is exhausted by space-time, its occupants, and (perhaps) the Platonic menagerie.  To put it another way, concrete reality is exhausted by space-time and its occupants.

B.  The alterity theist rejects (2) while accepting (3).

C.  The ontic theist accepts (2) while rejecting (3).

But there are two other C-options, two other options involving the acceptance of (2) and the rejection of (3).

One could take a monistic tack, roughly along the lines of Spinoza.  Accordingly, (i) there is a sense in which God exists -- God is not natura naturata, but natura naturans -- ; (ii) God exists in the primary sense of 'exists'; (iii) God alone exists, hence is not one of many existents, and so does not exist in the sense in which Spinozistic modes exist.

This is what I used to think, back in the '80s.  See my "Two Faces of Theism," Idealistic Studies, vol. xx, no. 3 (September 1990), pp. 238-257.  But I moved away from this position in the '90s and took an onto-theological turn that found expression in my existence book.

That is the other C-option.  Accordingly, God is not an existent among existents as the ontic theist maintains.  Nor is God somehow real but nonexistent as the alterity theist maintains.  Nor is God the one and only existent as the monist maintains.  Rather, God is self-existent Existence, yet transcendent of the created realm, pace monism.  This is roughly akin to the position of Aquinas.  Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.  God is not a being (ens), but self-subsisting  Being (esse). So God is Being (esse) but God also is.  God is both esse and ens.  Gott ist beides: Sein und Seiendes. Thus there is no 'ontological difference' (Heidegger) in God. God is Being but also the prime 'case' -- not instance! -- of Being.  (Being has no instances.) But God is in a mode of Being unlike the mode of Being of anything else. So God is not a being among beings, nor does he have properties in the way Socrates has properties. I have gone over this in painful detail in many other entries.

If we take the Thomistic tack, we can navigate between the Scylla of ontic theism and the Charybdis of alterity theism. We can avoid the untenable extremes. God is not a being among beings, but God is also not nothing as he would have to be if he were wholly other than every being.

But this too has its difficulties.  I will mention one. How could anything both be and be identical to Being? How could anything be both ens and esse? How could Existence itself exist? This is unintelligible to intellects of our constitution, discursive  intellects. So now I am contemplating the final step: Into the Mystic.

The above triad strikse me as an aporia, an insolubilium.  The 'solutions' to it are mere stopgaps that generate problems of their own as bad as or worse than the original problem. For example, if you 'solve' the triad by embracing Blanket Atheism, then you face all the problems attending naturalism, problems we have rehearsed many times. The original problem looks to be absolutely insoluble. One has to blast through it, as through a koan, into the Transdiscursive.  The philosopher, however, hovers at the boundary of the Sayable, marking it without overstepping it, incapable qua philosopher of effing the Ineffable, but able -- and this is his office --  to point to it while refuting both denials of it and bad theories about it.

Comments

[Dave Bagwill]

Thanks for the clarity of the post, Bill. It is so clear that I can forward this to a few of my correspondents who have been looking for just that view into just that problem.

Gotta say, this sentence is a fitting conclusion:
"The philosopher, however, hovers at the boundary of the Unsayable, marking it without overstepping it, incapable qua philosopher of effing the Ineffable, but able -- and this is his office -- to point to it while refuting both denials of it and bad theories about it."

[BV]

Thanks for the comment, Dave. Before reading your comment, I corrected a typo, then changed 'Unsayable' to 'Sayable.'

The philosopher stands this side of the Sayable and can at most 'point' beyond the boundary into the Unsayable.

What I didn't mention above is the analogia entis which supposedly allows for a kind of literal God-talk that avoids both univocity and equivocity. But I havee never quite understood how this is supposed to work.

[duarte meira]

Maybe your aporetic triad is in need for some second thoughts about the ontological difference between pure being (as actus purus devoid of any passive potency) and existence...
(But we must be cautious of a long standing confusion between esse and existere.)

[BV]

Duarte,

I don't think you understood my post at all. Tantum esse est actus purus. No doubt. But how is that relevant to what I argued?