Note this remark in the IEP entry on Aristotle, written by Joe Sachs, whom I believe to be a noted scholar, in respect of 'substance' in philosophy:

a word designed by the anti-Aristotelian Augustine to mean a low and empty sort of being turns up in our translations of the word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the highest and fullest sense of being. Descartes, in his Meditations, uses the word 'substance' only with his tongue in his cheek; Locke explicitly analyzes it as an empty notion of an I-don’t-know-what; and soon after the word is laughed out of the vocabulary of serious philosophic endeavor. It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of it by its friends.

He seems to be using the concept of "Substance" to attribute the concept of God.
Any idea what the "substance" meant in Spinoza? Could it be Aristotelian? Or something else? — Corvus

The meaning of 'substance' in philosophy is anything but obvious, but it's much nearer in meaning to what we would think of as 'subject' or 'being' than what we would usually call 'substance' in the day-to-day sense. The philosophical term 'substantia', 'what lies underneath' or 'the bearer of attributes', was a Latin neologism used to translate 'ouisia' in Aristotle's works. For the meaning of 'ouisia' see
The Meaning of Ouisia in Plato (and the following section for Aristotle).
Also 17th Century Theories of Substance.

From which

In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers (Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes) held that reality comes in degrees—that some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a being’s reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is.

That is also reflected in the Christian doctrine that souls are created directly by God, and so are in greater proximity to the divine nature than material particulars. Also that the word 'creature' reflects the etymology of 'created being' (whereas God is 'uncreated being', and knowledge of God 'the wisdom uncreate').

So in this sense, Spinoza's 'single substance' might be better conceptualised as a 'single subject', although with many caveats and qualifications.

Naturalist philosophers have to do more work, since they don't have this handy fits-all puzzle piece. — Relativist

But this misses the point, which is that for those who actually believe in God, it has real consequences. Whereas to believe that it's simply a 'puzzle-solver is a meaningless hypothetical.

The real power of modern physics is to render the goings-on of material bodies amenable to mathematical logic, and to extend it by methodically devising new mathematical concepts to describe as far as possible the unexpected behaviours of bodies. This enables great power by the application of logic to science and engineering with no regard for any purpose save the instrumental, the effective, to ‘what works’.

He's a kind of outlaw hero now. — Tom Storm

And as such Trump has thoroughly corrupted the body politic, although the rot had already had to have set in.

I'm guessing public education taught you wrong and you just need to reset. — Mark Nyquist

I've at least bothered to read some books on it.

I'm guessing public education taught you wrong — Mark Nyquist

That is an ad hominem argument.

The person who wrote the book is the source of the information (in his brain). He encodes it into a book. The book is encoded physical matter. The person reading the book hopefully decodes the book in the way it was intended. — Mark Nyquist

But your description is simplistic and vague. There are many unknowns in all phases of this process. What the relationship is between the physical activities of the brain, and the symbolic forms that characterise language and logic, is not at all understood. And furthermore, they belong to completely different kinds of description.

An example I often give is that an idea (like a formula or a recipe) can be represented in all kinds of different languages and symbolic forms without loosing its meaning. The representational medium, paper and ink, or physical bits on a hard drive, is different in each case, but the meaning stays the same. So how can the meaning be something physical when it can be transformed into different physical media and symbolic systems? The form changes, but the meaning remains constant through such transformations. And I say that challenges a physicalist account.

Simply asserting that conceiving of a universal is not the outcome of a physical process is unpersuasive in light of understanding things like this: — wonderer1

That's a good video, and a good source, but I would question the sense in which neural networks are a purely physical process. Such systems are reliant on human invention and programmed by humans to produce outcomes. They reflect and embody human intentions. Surely all of those processes are instantiated in physical systems, but the overall process is intellectual rather than physical, as it relies on ideas. Saying that it 'proves' or 'shows' that intelligence is physical begs the question, by assuming that the computing process can be wholly understood in physical terms, when an intrinsic foundation of the process is mathematical in the first place. And it's far from settled that mathematics can be reduced to the explained in physical terms. In fact it seems rather the contrary, as physics itself is highly dependent on mathematical abstractions.

an all-out what? Trump is subject to enormous amounts of media coverage. There's regular media - NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, critical of Trump. Then there's Trumpworld media, which will back him and repeat his lies ad nauseum. Why he's the favourite, nobody really can tell - it has to do with the way he's captured the grievances of a large section of the electorate who generally hate politics and politicians and feel that he represents them and who for various reasons buy into his delusions. Although it seems obvious to anyone not inside the bubble that it's a con.

“Physicists believe in a “true world” in their own fashion…. But they are in error. The atom they posit is inferred according to the logic of the perspectivism of consciousness—and it is therefore itself a subjective fiction ~ Nietszche — Joshs

An intriguing passage, but even if atoms are not the supposed ultimate indivisible particles of atomism, they are also something more than a subjective fiction.



'IBM in atoms' was a demonstration by IBM scientists in 1989 of a technology capable of manipulating individual atoms. A scanning tunneling microscope was used to arrange 35 individual xenon atoms on a substrate of chilled crystal of nickel to spell out the three letter company initials using single atoms. It was the first time that individual atoms had been precisely positioned on a flat surface (wiki).


On a side-note, do you think Nietzche's 'will to power' can be traced back to Schopenhauer?

I think Trump is going to win the Republican caucus. — L'éléphant

He will likely win the most number of delegates, but the nomination conference is not until July, and there are, shall we say, legal issues which might become apparent well before then.

Jean Jacques Rousseau



Hey how could you not love that face? Radiates warmth and humanity.

Newtonian mechanics never purported to deal with the microphysical, so they are not really bets understood as different paradigms, but as different areas of investigation. — Janus

not the point. Newtonian mechanics ushered in the 'scientific revolution' which was another paradigm shift. It was far more than just 'accurate observations' as it involved the collapse of an entire cosmology and the ushering in of a wholly new worldlview.

Your remark reminds me of a famous anecdote, that on the day after the sinking of the Titanic, an Aberdeen newspaper was headlined 'Aberdeen Man Lost at Sea' ;-)

We encode and decode matter to communicate brain to brain — Mark Nyquist

Just like that, eh ;-)

They're both paradigms, as per Kuhn's terminology. Quantum physics represented a significant departure from classical physics, particularly in its rejection of deterministic, Newtonian mechanics and its introduction of probabilistic and wave-particle duality concepts. Kuhn used quantum physics as an example of a scientific revolution because it challenged and replaced the existing paradigm of classical physics. The transition from classical to quantum physics marked a fundamental change in the way scientists viewed and understood the physical world, and it exemplifies Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts in scientific development. He gfives the Copernican Revolution as another example to illustrate how scientific revolutions occur when a new paradigm replaces an older one. The acceptance of the heliocentric model required a significant change in the way scientists thought about the cosmos, and it represents a classic case of a paradigm shift in the history of science.

However the form,

Brain; (mental content) — Mark Nyquist

How about the relationship between books and stories. In what sense is the meaning of a story contained by a book? Is it physical in the sense that the ink and paper is physical?

The previous one was the shift to the Copernican solar system and the ensuing 'scientific revolution'.

How about the 1927 Solvay Conference in Physics as the mother of all paradigm shifts in modern science and philosophy? I say it marks the boundary between the Modern and Post-Modern periods. The subject was Electrons and Photons and the world's most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory. The leading figures were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Seventeen of the 29 attendees were or became Nobel Prize winners, including Marie Curie who, alone among them, had won Nobel Prizes in two separate scientific disciplines. ... Essentially all of those names who had contributed to the recent development of the quantum theory were at this Solvay Conference and the essentials of the newly-devised quantum mechanics were presented and discussed. (wiki)

Not only did these advances make possible almost all the technological breakthroughs seen in the 20th century, it also undermined many previous assumptions about the nature of matter, not least the supposed mind-independence of the objects of physics. This in turn gave rise to the philosophical conundrums posed by wave-function collapse and entanglement, still the source of unresolved debates about the nature of reality and the mind's place in it.


Participants at the 1927 Solvay Conference: A. Piccard, E. Henriot, P. Ehrenfest, E. Herzen, Th. De Donder, E. Schrödinger, J.E. Verschaffelt, W. Pauli, W. Heisenberg, R.H. Fowler, L. Brillouin; P. Debye, M. Knudsen, W.L. Bragg, H.A. Kramers, P.A.M. Dirac, A.H. Compton, L. de Broglie, M. Born, N. Bohr; I. Langmuir, M. Planck, M. Curie, H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, P. Langevin, Ch. E. Guye, C.T.R. Wilson, O.W. Richardson

. And, they want to know what his essence is — Rob J Kennedy

But do they use that actual terminology: 'what is your essence'?

Do you remember Gattica, a 1997 movie set in a future society where genetic engineering and DNA testing are used to determine a person's potential and worth? The main character, Vincent Freeman, played by Ethan Hawke, has inferior genetics and must fake his DNA identity in order to pursue his dreams and goals. The film explores themes of genetic discrimination and the consequences of a society where DNA determines one's destiny. Now that would be 'ascertaining essence'. Otherwise the kind of surveys your friend undertakes are more likely just 'wellness checks' and what HR departments do to monitor staff. The most recent contract I had, those surveys were sent out automatically every fortnight, eliciting my workplace responses. Pretty standard business practice.

why is it the things that by nature must necessarily be the closest to us, most intimately connected to us, the things that must be us, are the hardest things to see? How is it I could be a mind that cannot know what a mind really is? — Fire Ologist

Excellent question. Isn't it because it is too near to us to grasp? Focus requires some distance, you can't see something pressed right against your eye, although that analogy also fails, because whatever is pressed is still something other to you, a foreign object of some kind.

I'm inclined to the view that the self is both unknown and unknowable. And that what we think of as the self, mainly comprises those things and circumstances to which we are attached and that we identify with. And a lot of what we cling to as self, is precisely to avoid the unknowability of the self, by identifying with something habitual and familiar.

If that sounds Buddhist, it is, not that I write as a Buddhist but as someone who has committed some time to studying the topic. There's a specific book: Early Buddhism, the I of the Beholder, Sue Hamilton-Blyth (and note the similarity with the thread title). This explicates this analysis in great detail (although it's a hard book to get and quite expensive).

But overall, I think you're on the right track, and asking the right questions.

Another saying comes to mind, from the ascerbic G B Shaw - 'youth is wasted on the young'. (Something to which I can personally attest, having wasted a fair bit of mine.)

He also said recently that he hopes the economy will crash in the next twelve months so that he doesn't have to take the blame for it if it crashes later. As always, his only interest is self-interest.

**this OP should be merged into the Trump thread**

Medicine has specific areas of applicability, obviously a very important one, but not medicine is not applicable to everything.

I’ll look into it! And Tallis wouldn’t know who I am - I emailed him after picking up a copy of Aping Mankind about 10 years ago, and got a reply, that’s all. I’m not overly familiar with all his output, but I know he’s critical of Darwinian materialism.

But dispensing with the idea of god (the ultimate consciousness) because of the failings of a few fallible humans is throwing out one big baby with some very dirty bathwater. — Pantagruel

I’d agree with that. But don’t forget, for a great deal of the cultural history of the West, belief was dictated by the ecclesiastical authorities. The meaning of orthodoxy is ‘right belief’, and for long periods of time, the penalties for not adhering to orthodoxy were severe. And the Religious Wars in Europe were very much fought over what constitutes right belief. I think this is what caused the throwing out of the baby with the bathwater, but in some sense, it was the Churches who had sullied it with the violence through which they prosecuted ‘wrong belief’. (I think it was Paul Tillich who said that this aspect of theism was the single greatest cause of atheism.)

But then the question becomes, if right belief is *not* described by orthodoxy, what might it comprise? A lot of people, including many here, will nominate science. But the problem with that, is that science excludes the qualitative as a matter of principle. It is concerned solely with what is measurable. It is a means of control as much as anything.

So, this is the question which has elicited the thirst for alternative religion outside the strictures of religious orthodoxy. And it brings to mind one of the books I have most liked from the past, The Heretical Imperative, by sociologist Peter Berger. Berger argues that contemporary society, characterized by pluralism and secularization, compels individuals to make personal choices about their beliefs. This contrasts with traditional societies, where religious belief was generally an unchallenged given (another means of control!)

Berger explores the idea that in a modern, pluralistic society, individuals face the “heretical imperative,” a term he uses to describe the necessity to choose one’s faith actively, rather than passively inheriting it. (Note that ‘heresy’ originally meant ‘having a view’. You weren’t supposed to ‘have a view’ - you were to receive the religion as given, no questions asked.) This situation leads to a range of responses, including reaffirmation of traditional beliefs, embracing of secular worldviews, or the adoption of a methodological doubt approach, where individuals continuously question and reassess their beliefs.

Berger also delves into the implications of this imperative for religious institutions, highlighting the challenges they face in maintaining relevance and authority in a world where belief is a choice. He proposes that these institutions need to adapt by becoming more open and accommodating to the diverse spiritual needs of individuals. In the book, he presents the metaphorical choice “between Jerusalem and Benares” to illustrate the fundamental decision modern individuals face in responding to the Heretical Imperative. This choice represents two distinct religious paradigms.

“Jerusalem” symbolizes the Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—which are monotheistic and have a historical, prophetic tradition. These faiths emphasize a personal God, ethical demands, and a linear view of history leading to an ultimate purpose or end. They tend towards dogmatism and exclusivism, that there can only be one true religion.

“Benares” (nowadays Varanasi), on the other hand, represents the Eastern religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. These traditions are more mystical, focusing on inner spiritual experiences, encompassing principles of re-birth and karma with a cyclical as distinct from liner view of time and existence. This metaphor underscores the diversity and complexity of religious choices in a pluralistic society.

Viewing the ‘theism/atheism’ divide against that background reveals that it is considerably more nuanced than the apparent black-and-white, yes-or-no issue that single-minded adherents of both sides of the debate would care to contemplate. After all, some of the Eastern religious paths are hardly theist in a Semitic sense, but they’re certainly not atheistic in the secular sense, either.

Oh - and the word I had in mind was 'being', athough both the essay and the book draw heavily on phenomenology.

I rescuscitated the thread because the book that was based on the original Aeon essay is being published in April.

Yes, I can see you two wouldn't get along. Talis is a reactionary from the post-modernist pov, but then that probably applies to me also :yikes:

I will say, when I did my two-odd years of undergraduate philosophy, late 70s-early 80s, my exposure was pretty mainstream - Descartes, Hume, Rosseau, logical positivism, philosophy of science, are the ones I recall. I'm sure that there were classes on the post-moderns but at that time, in that university, I didn't come across them. Most of what I've subsequently learned about them, which is not much, I've gleaned from references here, although I saw a really interesting video, The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real: the Register Theory of Lacan. That really resonated with me, but it's about all I know of Lacan.

'Being modern' or 'the modern worldview' is itself an over-arching paradigm, because it embodies many unspoken axioms or presumptions about 'the nature of things' or 'the way things are' that are themselves philosophical in nature. And it is, of course, constantly changing (hence, post-modernism, post-secular and other such descriptors.) But then the task of a critical philosophy is bringing these presuppositions to conscious awareness - which is difficult, as they are like the spectacles through which we view everything and it's hard to look at them, instead of through them.

I believe I have mentioned this before, but if you can find yourself a copy of Tallis' The Knowing Animal, I think you will very much enjoy it.

I think it is his best work, by far, and I have read quite a bit of him. — Manuel

I wrote to Tallis after getting one of his books, and he replied very positively. I will look out for that title! (Looking at the Amazon page, one of the reviews comes from James le Fanu, another UK writer from a medical background, who's book Why Us? also really impressed me, about 10 years ago, which is of a similar genre. )

:up:

(duplicate)

I think it's because pre-moderns had a fundamentally different 'experience of the world' as or them, it was an expression of the divine intelligence. So they had an 'I-thou' experience (per Martin Buber) rather than the experience of separatness which is the hallmark of modernity.

For example, do you think the typical US Evangelical Trump fan, or Iranian Ayatollah fan, is likely to be an Eagleton and Hart fan as well? — wonderer1

No, of course not. It's all become massively distorted, a quagmire of confusion and ignorance. But then the mystics, those with the most penetrating insight, are often condemned or put to death by religious authorities.

The day of reckoning cometh.

It's going to take a lot of mug-shot t-shirt sales to cover that one.

He takes it further and says that there is no objective or universal truth that stands independently of human interpretation. While you would accept the possibility of something approaching a Platonic realm. Nietzsche also subdivides perspective into both cultural and individual blindspots. His somewhat brutal visual approach to this struck me as apropos. — Tom Storm

I generally avoid comment on Nietzsche as I’ve never felt compelled to read him and don’t know his writings very well. But I don’t agree with his perspectivism, that literally everything is a matter of perspective. I accept the Buddha’s teaching that there is an unborn, unmade, unconditioned. But that this can’t be made subject of propositional logic, as it is subtle, deep, and profound, discernible only by the wise, and has to be discerned by each one for themselves (to paraphrase the canonical text.)

The problem with objectivity as usually construed is that it is anchored to sense-perception - that only what can be validated by senses and instruments can be taken into consideration. And as I said before, it’s a matter of fact that all sense-objects are conditioned. This results in a sense of misplaced absoluteness. The stakes in philosophy are much higher than that.

As for ‘we behold these things through a human head’ - ‘going beyond’ I take to be the point of enlightenment or sagacity. One of the books on my Amazon Wishlist which I’ll probably never get around to is To Think Like God, an account of Parmenides and Pythagoras, the title makes the point. But in our culture, such enlightenment is generally lumped in alongside religion by those who understand neither, and then dismissed on those grounds as ‘mere belief’. Can of worms, I know.

Here's a snippet from the essay which drives the point home.
— Wayfarer

I think much of this is correct, but what I find is that usually, at one point or another, these interlocutors have a tendency to overstate their case. It's pretty easy to fall into an excessive subjectivism when you are pressing hard against modern "objectivism." It's like when you are driving a motorcycle in high winds, leaning hard just to stay straight, and then the wind drops away and the bike swerves. — Leontiskos

On further thought, don’t agree. I looked back to when I first posted this five years ago, the response was vitriolic, it was taken as an attack on science. But it is not an attack on science. They say at the beginning:

This (their criticism) doesn’t mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals. …..

The Blind Spot arises when we start to believe that this method gives us access to unvarnished reality. But experience is present at every step. Scientific models must be pulled out from observations, often mediated by our complex scientific equipment. They are idealisations, not actual things in the world. Galileo’s model of a frictionless plane, for example; the Bohr model of the atom with a small, dense nucleus with electrons circling around it in quantised orbits like planets around a sun; evolutionary models of isolated populations – all of these exist in the scientist’s mind, not in nature. They are abstract mental representations, not mind-independent entities. Their power comes from the fact that they’re useful for helping to make testable predictions. But these, too, never take us outside experience, for they require specific kinds of perceptions performed by highly trained observers.

What I would take issue with is the use of the word ‘experience’ in these passages What I think is being referred to is closer in meaning to the capacity for experience - in other words, being. When they say ‘experience is just as fundamental’ - you can respond, ‘well, sure, isn’t that what ‘empiricism’ means?’ Empiricism, after all, means ‘verifiable in experience’. But that’s not what they’re trying to highlight. They’re pointing to the experiential aspect of even so-called objective measurement. When they say ‘experience is present at every step’, I think what they’re saying is simply ‘science is an activity of beings. The facts it discloses are registered and understood by beings - by human beings.’ But we don’t notice that, because of the ostensibly objective and observer-independent nature of scientific observation. We think that these facts are entirely observer-independent, which in one sense is true, but in a deeper, philosophical sense is not.

That’s what I see as the point of this essay, and the book that comes from it, and I think it needs saying. I talk to people here almost every day who don’t see this point (I don’t mean you.)

(I think there’s a connection here with Heidegger’s ‘forgetfulness of Being’, although he traces that back to metaphysics rather than to science per se. Although it’s also the case that scientific method was also an outgrowth of metaphysics e.g. E A Burtt’s ‘Metaphysics of Modern Science’.)

Actually I will provide more of a reason for the section in Deacon's book that turned me off it. it's the discussion about the homuncular fallacy, and in particular passages like this:

Why should ententional explanations tend to get eliminated with the advance of technological sophistication? The simple answer is that they are necessarily incomplete accounts. They are more like promissory notes standing in for currently inaccessible explanations, or suggestive shortcuts for cases that at present elude complete analysis. It has sometimes been remarked that teleological explanations are more like accusations or assignments of responsibility rather than accounts of causal processes. Teleological explanations point to a locus or origin but leave the mechanism of causal efficacy incompletely described. Even with respect to persons, explaining their actions in terms of motives or purposes is effectively independent of explaining these same events in terms of neurological or physiological processes and irrespective of any physical objects or forces.

...Like an inscrutable person, an ententional process presents us with a point at which causal inquiry is forced to stop and completely change its terms of analysis. At this point, the inquiry is forced to abandon the mechanistic logic of masses in motion and can proceed only in terms of functions and adaptations, purposes and intentions, motives and meanings, desires and beliefs. The problem with these sorts of explanatory principles is not just that they are “incomplete, but that they are incomplete in a particularly troubling way. It is difficult to ascribe energy, materiality, or even physical extension to them.

In this age of hard-nosed materialism, there seems to be little official doubt that life is “just chemistry” and mind is “just computation.” But the origins of life and the explanation of conscious experience remain troublingly difficult problems, despite the availability of what should be more than adequate biochemical and neuroscientific tools to expose the details. So, although scientific theories of physical causality are expected to rigorously avoid all hints of homuncular explanations, the assumption that our current theories have fully succeeded at this task is premature.

But I take it from what follows, is that he hopes and believes that physical theories will succeed, once they incorporate and understand his particular conceptual vocabulary with its absentials, teleodynamics, autogens, and so.

But what occurs to me, is the sense in which science seeks to subordinate the issues that it investigates to its methods and vocabulary. To explain something, in scientific terms, is to provide a full account of why it is the way it is. But when the subject is the nature life and mind, then we're really considering questions about the meaning of being, as such. And can such questions really be subordinated to scientific explanation? Isn't that more than a little hubristic?

(By way of contrast, for example, Buddhist philosophy seeks to provide an account of why life is the way it is, through its structure of the four truths, the eightfold path, and liberation from Saṃsāra. But it is not seeking a scientific explanation, that is, one that is third-person in the sense that scientific explanation is.)

Yes, Deacon sees through the (to me) obvious flaws and shortcomings of mechanistic materialism, but he's still first and foremost scientific in orientation, seeking, I think, instrumental explanations rather than philosophical insight for its own sake. I can see he's obviously a very clever academic and his work has its merits, but I don't think I'm going to invest the time required to fully absorb the book.

So, I am asking to what extent does the existence of 'God', or lack of existence have upon philosophical thinking. Inevitably, my question may involve what does the idea of 'God' signify in itself? The whole area of theism and atheism may hinge on the notion of what the idea of God may signify. Ideas for and against God, which involve philosophy and theology, are a starting point for thinking about the nature of 'reality' and as a basis for moral thinking. — Jack Cummins

The first article that drew me to philosophy forums was a scathing review, by Terry Eagleton, of Richard Dawkin's book The God Delusion, way back in about 2008 or so. Some background. Terry Eagleton, whom I hadn't heard of prior, is an English leftist literary critic and academic. I've subsequently read a few of his other books, which are often very erudite and betoken a huge range of reading.

Anyway his critique of Dawkins was called Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching, and speaking of punches, he didn't pull any.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects. — Terry Eagleton

(Notice the out-dated references, places it quite well. I subsequently joined the Richard Dawkins forum, long since inactive, which was exactly as you would expect, manned and moderated by the most vociferous of Dawkinsian atheists, against which hapless evangelicals would dash their arguments to pieces against their massed polemical barbs. It was after that, that I found another forum, and then the precessor forum to this one. It's remained an interest.)

Anyway, I was interested, in particular, in Eagleton saying that 'it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist.' 'Ah', you might say. 'But isn't that just atheism?'

Well, no. And the reasoning is given by a Bishop (of all people) in a newspaper opinion piece called (tantalisingly) God does Not Exist:

If God does exist, then that is not God. All existing things are relative to one another in various degrees. It is actually impossible to imagine a universe in which there is, say, only one hydrogen atom. That unique thing has to have someone else imagining it. Existence requires existing among other existents, a fundamental dependency of relation. If God also exists, then God would be just another fact of the universe, relative to other existents and included in that fundamental dependency of relation. — Bishop Pierre Whalon

Read the article for further elaboration. But that theme is something central to what is inelegantly described as apophatic theology, the theology of negation: you can't say anything about what God is, because God is beyond all description. ('You don't say!')

Finally, one of the better books on the topic, notwithstanding its frequent polemical passages, is David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God. He 'gets' this understanding of the meaning of 'beyond existence' in ways that most do not.

Now there are sophisticated atheists that do understand what it is they are seeking to deny. But a lot atheism speaks of God as a poor empirical hypothesis ('Where's the evidence?') or seems to envisage him as a kind of cosmic film director or CEO ('why are so many people suffering around here?? Who's in charge? :rage: )

That's some background and references. It's also worth mentioning that Paul Tillich, in particular, was a modern theologian who put great emphasis on negative theology and the God beyond existence.

An atheist that rages against God objectively all the time obviously gives "God" a lot of attention. — Vaskane

'Atheists are those who still feel the weight of their chains' ~ Albert Einstein (bona fide).

Interesting JSTOR review of Deacon from a process-theology oriented academic:
Is Terrence Deacon's Metaphysics of Incompleteness Still Incomplete? (free but requires registration.)

I'm going to call it a day with Deacon, I have other fish to fry.

Ironically, right now Trump seems to be holding up an immigration bill in the Senate that would help address the border that the GOP seems to approve of. — Mr Bee

It's not 'ironic', it's a deliberate tactic. He's furious that if the bill goes any way to addressing the problem, then it will reflect positively on Joe Biden. He wants the problem to be as bad as possible, so he can use it against Biden and then take credit for solving it himself.

I don't expect people to blame him. — Mr Bee

The Senate Republicans and the moderate Republicans in Congress are all furious about it.