It seems to me the only motivation for believing in god is the wish to be cared for. The wish of the child. — Janus

For me it seems more aesthetic or about meaning making - the wish for life to be significant - as a bulwark against the tragedy of living. But no doubt it is differnt things for differnt folk.

What does 'god as the ground of being' give us? Is that god different than Spinoza's? If so, how? For that matter what does any account of anything that cannot be seen, heard, felt, touched etc., give us? — Janus

Yes, why even use the word God?

Were they not Christians? Why not just return to Spinoza? I think his theology is more sophisticated than any Christian theology, including ideas such as identifying God with "being itself". — Janus

Could be.

Very crudely Spinoza seems to argue (and I have no deep reading of his work) that God is infinite substance: In Ethics, Spinoza seems to argue that there is only one substance in the universe, and that is God. Everything else (you, me, trees, ideas) is a mode or expression of that substance.

He also maintains that God is impersonal who doesn’t think, plan, love, or intervene in the world. "It" doesn’t make choices or have a will. It's more like a set of necessary laws or the structure of being itself.

I'm not sure what this gives us - god as immanence - what is a human to do with such an account? Any thoughts?

Philosophical accounts of theism are not necessarily more sophisticated, so I'd start by pushing back at that built in bias. — Hanover

Sure. I understand that some people might hold a view like this. I am asking for the more philosophical and the more sophisticated versions to see what people think and why. Given (and this is my experience) that most critical discussion of theism tend to involve Christian or Muslim literalism.

That is, to suggest that theism that aims to be philosophical is superior to theism that doesn't, is to implicitely reject theism in its own right. — Hanover

I guess whether one would agree or disagree with this would depend upon the theist or school.

From my perspective, a theism founded in philosophical thinking may be superior to a theism rooted in biblical literalism because it allows the concept of God to engage with the depth and complexity of human experience, rather than reducing it to a fixed narrative or comic book account. Literalism tends to confine the divine to specific events, texts, and cultural assumptions, often locking faith into outdated cosmologies or morality. Philosophical theism, by contrast, might be held to invite a continual process of reflection, integration, and reinterpretation, allowing the idea of God to evolve alongside our evolving understanding of reality. It doesn’t dismiss scripture, but reads it through a broader lens, seeing it as one expression of a deeper metaphysical truth rather than the only one. In this way, God is no longer just a figure in a narrative, but the deeper source from which meaning and existence arise.

Or something like this.

The question of reason is an interesting one. I don’t think I was necessarily thinking of reason as a marker of sophistication, though I can see why many people would. My sense of a more sophisticated theism might actually align more closely with phenomenological or mystical traditions - ones that aren’t strictly rooted in reasoning, but instead emphasize depth of experience, intuition, and presence.

But you've made me think a bit differently about this, so thanks.

the population has been taught that it is not the rich that are responsible for their misery but gays and foreigners, and that a state that supports the poor and the sick is undesirable and cost them too much. — unenlightened

:up:

I'm a bit skeptical of narratives that try to pin all these problems on just the (mis)rule of leaders on one side of the political spectrum — Count Timothy von Icarus

Indeed, Blair's neoliberal all stars, New Labour, were active contributors to the problem.

I don't know... Given the current state of politics, I believe a lack of interest in politics is understandable. — javi2541997

The argument works the other way too. Given what's at stake and how bad some leaders are, this should radicalise the voters. Arguably people's votes have never been more important.

Most interest in politics is little more than team sport, point scoring and empty wins.

I vote most elections and it's either vote Labor or for the most left-wing independent going. I still subscribe to the view that the rich rule the world (badly) and need to be opposed as far as practicable.

Arguably the biggest asset to the Murdochs and Musks of this world is voter apathy. It really helps the fascists if people think all candidates are hopeless and all are corrupt.

:up: Yes, looks that way to me too. Tony Judt wrote a good book on this called, Ill Fares The Land.

Don't you just love election season? — kazan

Not really. I generally avoid the news and I'm not on social media. The cant and mawkish promises are nauseating, and political journalism just feels like a smug version of sports reporting. I generally know how I’m going to vote, regardless of the year or the state of the campaign. Usually, I just hold my nose and vote Labor.

This seems to me to still be a problem of lack of ethical education though. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, that’s my conclusion. It ties into a point I often make: just because someone professes morality or is a strong member of a church doesn’t necessarily mean they behave morally. There's often an assumption that we need to “go back” to Christianity to improve the world, but my question is always, which kind? And how do we determine whether a given church is faithful to the Gospels? As David Bentley Hart often quips there are many atheists he prefers to Christians.

It would be like rejecting diets because one grew up around crash dieters who followed off short morning fasts by binging candy bars; that something is done poorly does not mean it is impossible to do well. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fair point. I wasn't intending a rejection. I'm simply suggesting that there needs to be more exploration of what it actually means to be a Christian, or a member of a given religion. What are the practices and behaviours and how do we know they are faithful? Being religious, or even a believer, is not, in itself, necessarily good or true.

Great quote you provided by Spinoza -

...But some people think the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus rests on the assumption that God is one and the same as ‘Nature’ understood as a mass of corporeal matter. This is a complete mistake.
— Spinoza, from letter (73) to Henry Oldenburg

I think Hart is pretty great, although I think he sometimes writes at a level that is probably going to be overly abstruse for general audiences, which is fine for some contexts, but he does so in books he publishes for general audiences. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, he is a prodigious scholar and "superbrain" so I can imagine it must be challenging for him to write for the general reader.

There are similarities for sure. I sometimes think "Platonism" and "Neoplatonism" are unhelpful labels, even though I still find myself using them. Often, they get used for things that are only in Plato in embryonic form, or obliquely, and which are then not unique to, or even originating in the proper "Neoplatonists." — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

Christian Moevs - The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy - Introduction: Non-Duality and Self-Knowledge - pg. 5-6

That's a great overview.


I'm also curious: if God is Being itself, what are the implications for divine action? A God who acts throughout history would seem unlikely in that case. I'm assuming that God can’t or doesn’t act like a being in this world, but instead provides the conditions that make action possible. But what exactly does that look like, beyond the obvious?

Do you have any initial thoughts on my original post? This seems like it's right in your wheelhouse. I can't help but feel that the idea of a "ground of being" starts to move into the territory of universal consciousness. Some people really dislike perennialist or syncretistic interpretations of spiritual traditions.

That is very interesting and looks like a lifetime of study is requited to get on top of.

David Bentley Hart, mentioned at the outset of this thread, is an Eastern Orthodox Christian and often refers to himself as an "unreformed Neoplatonist" when poking fun at post-Kantian metaphysics for instance. Hence the common terms "Christian/Jewish/Muslim Neoplatonism." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do you rate Hart as a theological thinker? When he writes of God:

He may be said to be “beyond being,” if by “being” one means the totality of finite things, but also may be called “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity underlying all things.

How should one understand this? It certainly has a whiff of Neoplatonism. But also aligns with Hinduism. In Advaita Vedanta, Brahman is described as Nirguna (without attributes) and beyond all categories, including being and non-being. Brahman is also seen as the inexhaustible source or ground of all contingent existence.

Nice. I've never quite got my head around natura naturans, do you consider it a useful frame? I think I've heard you say Spinoza is not a pantheist but a... I forget... is it an acosmist?

Thank you.

Nicely worded. Much of this matches the reading I have done. Do you find this model resonates?

I guess some more nuanced information on what it means to say God is Being itself. What does it mean to say God is the fundamental existence or essence that underlies everything in the universe?

I’d like someone who is across the literature to outline a clearer picture. Tillich aside, the notion of Being seems intriguing. As I said earlier, I also see an overlap with idealism, although I expect this too is a superficial resemblance.

It’s superficially similar to deism. I think Tillich would say that there was no creator who, disinterested, has moved on (as in Deism) but rather we are all expressions of God as ground of being. God is the condition that makes us and all things possible. But as I say, this is not my area: I am interested in how these ideas are more fully understood.

Of course, Jung's ideas were developed in the last century when the dialogue between science, religion and science were in need of so much reconciliation. — Jack Cummins

It may be worth looking into Bernardo Kastrup's study of Jung. He sees Jung as an early form of analytic idealism. The Book is Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Here's a taste:

I shall argue that Jung was a metaphysical idealist in the tradition of German Idealism, his system being particularly consistent with that of Arthur Schopenhauer and my own.

The consistency between Jung’s metaphysics and my own is no coincidence. Unlike Schopenhauer—whose work I’ve discovered only after having developed my system in seven different books—Jung has been a very early influencer of my thought. I first came across his work still in my early teens, during a family holiday in the mountains. Exploring on my own the village where we were staying, I chanced upon a small bookshop. There, displayed very prominently, was an intriguing book titled I Ching, edited and translated by Richard Wilhelm, with a foreword by one Carl Gustav Jung. Jung’s introduction to the book revealed the internal logic and root of plausibility of what I would otherwise have regarded as just a silly oracle. He had opened some kind of door in my mind. Little did I know, then, how far that door would eventually take me.

But there is also a weird standard here of "Christianity must be judged by the defense given of it by any random church-goer." I suppose this perhaps comes out of a certain sort of Protestant theology as well (one athiesm has inherited), and the idea of the "buffered self" who simply applies reason to commonly accessible "sense data" (as opposed to notions of "wisdom"). Yet I would hardly think this standard should be applied generally, and so would question if it is fair as applied to the faithful.

Does Nietzsche's philosophy stand or fall based on the description the average Nietzsche fan on the internet would produce for it? Given my experiences, this would be grossly unfair to Nietzsche. Nor would I expect the average person who embraces any given interpretation of quantum mechanics to necessarily understand it very well. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Very nicely put. And funny.

I don't know if that will clear much up. My description is probably only going to be so helpful because the area you are asking about is incredibly broad, since in the "classical metaphysical" tradition all of ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, physics, and even the philosophy of history hang together quite tightly, while the Doctrine of Transcendentals and the Analogia Entis run throughout them. It'd be like trying to explain the whole of "Continental Philosophy" in a post, although the classical tradition does have a good deal more unity (but also spans 2,000+ years). — Count Timothy von Icarus

In understand completely. It's a big subject. I'm not really trying to clear anything up personally, I am more interested in promoting nuanced discussion of the notion of God - a more philosophical account, let's say.

I come from a Baptist background. We were taught that the Bible is allegory and literalists are problematic creatures who reduce the notion of God to a petulant authoritarian. I guess we were taught that literalism was a disenchanted view of scripture. God remains ineffable.

Is Neoplatonism central to this notion of God as Being itself? The world emanates from The One.

Neither Hart nor Tillich are working with new ideas. What they are expressing has been Christian orthodoxy for pretty much all of (well-recorded) Church history. It's the official theology of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, encompassing a pretty large majority of all current and historical Christians (and many Protestants hold to this tradition to).

It is, for instance, what you will find if you open the works of pretty much any theologically minded Church Father or Scholastic: St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, St. Maximos, St. Thomas Aquinas, either of the Gregorys, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Gregory Palamas, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, that's pretty much what I thought, based on my rudimentary reading.

All I'm really trying to do here is generate more interesting discussions about God.

As a point of reference, Philip Goff moved from atheism to theistic personalism rather than classical theism because he thinks the problem of evil excludes classical theism — Leontiskos

Very interesting and I can see how this could make sense to someone.

While theistic personalism is more readily given to caricature, there is an open debate as to whether it is inferior with respect to, say, the problem of evil. — Leontiskos

Yes, and I am interested in how these accounts might shape people's thinking.

First - does it make metaphysical sense, can it be useful, to see the universe as having human characteristics - a personality, a purpose, goals. Second - is it factually true that there is a conscious, aware, powerful entity who, perhaps, created and has control of the world. To the first question I would answer a strong "yes." To the second I would give a shrug. — T Clark

I tend to find that any set of ideas is going to be useful to someone (even if not to me). But the question is always could you not swap one set of useful ideas for a set even more useful?

So that means, if someone says "I believe in God", that would by synonymous with saying "I believe existence exists"? — flannel jesus

No. You need some familiarity with the literature to understand the concepts. Bear in mind this is not my area of expertise. The arguments are nuanced. The point of my OP is to get input from folk who are across this literature.

For Maximus the Confessor (a church father writing in the 7th century), being is foundational: it starts with God, and everything that exists participates in God's Being. But God is also beyond being in a way we can’t fully comprehend. Hence my OP around mysticism and the lack of certainty.

In particular, atheists often attack the most crude arguments for theism as opposed to being open to more in depth analysis. — Jack Cummins

Indeed.

Tillich's idea of God as 'ground of being' has more depth than anthromorphism, because it goes beyond the idea of God as a Being as disembodied. His thinking may also be compatible with the thinking of Schopenhauer and Spinoza. — Jack Cummins

Could be. In the writings of some of the early Church Fathers, the notion that we are participating in the Being of God and that all we know ultimately owes its existence to God reminds me of a type of idealism, wherein God is more like cosmic consciousness or a great mind from which we are all expressions.

God is the One who is, and all things that exist owe their existence to Him. For He is the true Being, and all things are in Him, through Him, and for Him."


— Maximus the Confessor, "Ambigua," 7

But they're still atheists in the normal sense. In the sense that pertains to zeus and odin. They're only not atheists when you define god in such a loosey-goosey way that it could mean just about anything. — flannel jesus

The idea of a more sophisticated theology is not "loosey-goosey." It has deep roots, going back to the early Church Fathers who wrote extensively about the nature of God. The literalist accounts of God that have emerged in modernity are more likely the "loosey-goosey" ones. There is a deeper, richer tradition of theism explored in writings that span centuries and continue to this day. We need someone who is deeply read in this material to contribute to this discussion.

I would be real curious to understand the desire there, the desire to take the word "god", which for many means "a being like odin or zeus or ra or krishna or yahweh", and then turn it into "being itself". Where does that come from? Why do people do that? — flannel jesus

Because this is how God has traditionally been understood in classical theism. It's not an evolution; it's a return to earlier thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor.

The idea of Being needs to be set aside from that of being. Bentley Hart writes:

God so understood is not something posed over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a “being,” at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being.

Here is a taste of that these ideas look like when gently elaborated.

https://firstthings.com/god-gods-and-fairies/

I just don't see the point. — flannel jesus

That's fine. Thanks for stopping by.

I have known atheists who have become theists after reading more sophisticated writing on the notion of God. Many atheists are interested in enlargening their view of what is meant by the concept of God.

Does your disbelief in Zombies need to evolve? Does it need to evolve into disbelief in Being Itself? — flannel jesus

Well, since you've brought this up, my disbelief in zombies could change if there were a more compelling narrative and reasoning that convincingly explained how they might exist. If I'd only ever understood zombies as part of comic book fiction, but then encountered a serious scientific case for their possibility, I might come to believe that zombies could, in fact, exist.

Similarly, I might come to accept the idea of ghosts if they were understood as something other than the spirits of deceased people. For example, what if what we perceive as ghosts are actually echoes or residual events from the past, repeating in a way that some people are able to sense due to time anomalies or unusual conditions?

i'm not sure I'm following you. Take a paragraph or two to articulate your point.

Isn't it obvious that ideas develop? If you're going to say you don't believe in God, you'd better be sure what you mean by 'God,' right?

The development happens when someone quotes Tillich, Hart, Gregory of Nyssa, or some Thomist, and the atheist may find themselves recognising that belief in God could be more complex than Richard Dawkins would have us think

Are you an atheist?

and the answer is never "being itself" — flannel jesus

Perhaps not immediately. But I’ve certainly heard these discussions over the past 30 years, and they sometimes do explore this concept. But even if they didn’t, perhaps they should, and that’s another aspect of my point: is it the case that atheism should evolve its thinking about the notion of God beyond the cartoon versions?

but they have nothing to do with what Atheists think. — flannel jesus

I doubt that, I'm an atheist, and this is an area of interest for me. Many atheists I know have wrestled with the ideas of Jung, Tillich or Robert Sokolowski and getting more comprehensive and philosophical notions of what is meant by the idea of God seems important. When someone says they don't believe in God, the reasonable next question is: "What do you mean by God?"

I have a good friend who is a Catholic priest. He agrees with Christopher Hitchens on most matters of religion, but he's not an atheist. He just thinks that the cartoonish depictions of God offered by literalists are refutable and dumb.

Arguments against the latter "god" (absolute) are far less consequential culturally and existentially, it seems to me, than arguments against the former "God" (creator). — 180 Proof

Yes, I think this is probably accurate. I'd be interested how others see this.

I think they are mean you too have foundational beliefs that lack empirical proof, like causality and the existence of other minds. If causality isn't provable, it's equally as logically to assert teleological explanations are valid. — Hanover

In my experience (and I’ve debated many in person), they generally point to specific things like flight, crossing roads, or the efficacy of medicine. The more philosophically inclined ones - presuppositionalist Christians - are more likely to take the path you mentioned. Yes, we all hold presuppositions.

The claim “atheists live by faith too” trades on a confusion about what faith means. Atheists acknowledge basic assumptions but generally would treat these as provisional and open to revision, not sacred truths. Foundational beliefs like causality are not equivalent to teleological or theistic explanations, because they don’t posit an agent or a purpose we must subscribe to without evidence.

If you identify a difference use, you don't get to just declare your use correct and the alternative use incorrect. The OP asks what is faith, and it's clear it's used differently by different groups.

That is, you're as much guilty of the equivocation as they are if there is no agreed upon definition. — Hanover

Not really. I agree the word is used differently. I'm explaining why I make a distinction and advocating for my preference. This is a site devoted to hairsplitting definitions, so I don’t think this was remotely off track.

But let's look at the example again. Comparing faith in God with faith in plane flight, say, seems to conflate two very different things. When an evangelical says (as they often do; and I’ve heard this from Catholics too), “But you atheists live by faith all the time,” they’re committing an equivocation fallacy.

They’re comparing faith in air travel (something we can demonstrate exists, something based on empirical evidence, engineering, and training) with belief in a god, which is an idea we can’t even properly define. That seems like faulty reasoning to me.

When I board a plane, I’m not taking a leap of faith in the same sense that a theist might use the word. I know that airplanes are real physical objects, built through well-understood principles of aerodynamics. I know that pilots are trained extensively, undergo certification, and are subject to routine evaluation. I know that aircraft are maintained by engineers following strict protocols, that the air traffic control system is in place to coordinate safe routes, and that there are black boxes and regulatory investigations when things go wrong. All of this is grounded in observable, repeatable, testable processes.

So when I "trust" a plane to get me to my destination, it's not a blind or metaphysical faith—it's a reasonable confidence based on experience, statistics, and a mountain of evidence. That’s a far cry from faith in a deity, which lacks comparable foundations. Equating the two just muddies the waters.

I think these differences are worth pointing out since they are overlooked by some theists.

Perhaps I could substitute the word faith with confidence yet this would merely be linguistic. — kindred

Indeed, that’s generally what I recommend. If you have a good reason for believing something, you don’t need faith. Reasonable confidence in one’s skill and training based on evidence is not the same as faith. Some theists attempt an equivocation fallacy by equating faith in God with faith in things like air travel.

I recall the issue being a fairly serious concern back in the 1970’s. it had nothing to do with technology although back then TV was sometimes blamed. My dad remembers books being blamed back in the 1930’s.

I can’t see ready agreement on projects, goals or methods, but as a variation on the old peace corps idea it might attract some people if it is voluntary and word of mouth is positive.

I've witnessed this. Almost no ethical instruction at all. Ethical positions are simply delivered to the students as fact. I am at the point where I think that teaching kids to question ethical axioms will get them in trouble. — Jeremy Murray

Which I would have preferred when I was a student at school. I went to a very expensive elite school. It was Christian, and we had a daily chapel service. This school was modeled on Eton and followed old British pedagogical traditions. This was 45 years ago. We were given ethical instruction and read pointless New Testament stories, which had no impact on most students and were at best a source of mirth. The poor and minorities were generally held to be human trash. Everyone was acutely aware that the real goal of the school was to get one into a law or medical degree, to then make money and gain power. Many of my fellow students joined their millionaire—and sometimes billionaire—fathers in family businesses.

For the most part, despite an energetic display of Christianity and a lot of rhetoric about the centrality of morality, this school was merely churning out neoliberal toadies who, on leaving school, often treated people poorly. Which I also observed in the subsequent decades.

I do see a lot of 'moral cruelty' from the woke these days. — Jeremy Murray

There as a lot of moral cruelty in many positions including the Christianity of my early life which held to bigotry, racism and the position that we were better than others because we were part of a winning team (eg, the West and its values). We seem to be going through a period of adjustment and a period of backlash.

:up:

:up:

I went to a Billy Shorten campaign speech at a local town hall before the 2019 Federal Election. My partner then was helping the local Labor candidate to try and unseat the corrupt Liberal incumbent. Penny Wong worked the crowd up into a frenzy. "Ladies and gentleman, I give you next prime minister of Australia: Bill Shorten!" Bill trotted up on stage and turned to face the audience. His grey, anxious, face sucked the air and excitement from the room. There was a mass exhalation from the detumescent crowd. I knew instantly he wasn't going to win.

I might have mentioned I once handed out How to Vote for Greens in a state election. — Wayfarer

My partner helped support one of their campaigns. Disorganized, collectivist shenanigans.

That's the price of having good coffee. — Banno

Could be... I only drink it at home.

So I will be holding my nose and voting Labor (although I think mine is a safe Labor seat.) — Wayfarer

I did this throughout the 1980's as they gleefully thrust neo-liberalism upon us.

I think Albanese a mediocrity — Wayfarer

And boring too.

I have Greens Adam Bant and Ellen Sandall as my Federal and State reps.