Wednesday 25 May 2016

Multi-headed Deus

Today's post is a response to this article.
 What has philosophy of religion to tell us? It's a genuine question, but my introduction thus far implies it almost creates its own neutral God figure that is in fact worshipped by none, but intensely studied. 

It seems to me you cannot solve the Deus issue. For all I KNOW, neither might be correct. In fact, they may both even be wrong about deus existing at all, in which case the discussion, were we to somehow have access to this information of a deus-free ultimate reality, would concern two incompatible views, yet united in their subject matter (number of identities, creator, or whatever) and ultimate reality.

If the Spinoza Deus had two heads and the Aquinas Deus had three, but it was somehow known that in fact such a being did not exist at all (with any number of heads), then this fictitious "knower" could correctly infer that the Spinoza and Aquinas Deuses are indeed not the same Deus, since the only reality behind the two-headed and three-headed beings is experiential, and these two experiences differ.

If we now downgrade the knower to a regular sceptic, who doesn't know the gods/God views are fictitious but suspects it, then we have three incompatible views, but each view sharing some points of agreement. E.g the sceptic and three-headed view both believe that the two-headed view is only an experiential reality and not an ultimate one. The two-headed and three-headed views agree that a multi-headed Deus ultimately exists independently to their own existence as experiential mortal beings.

Anyone for an orange deus?😉


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