DTC, that is, Deep Thinking about Christianity, or some such similar thing, is a series of nontechnical posts that contain my responses to the biggest intellectual challenges to Christianity. As I explain in the preface, I hope that both naturalists and believers will benefit from this series. The Introduction contains a prospective outline.
In the previous entry, I explored the notion of divinity in brief. I found that both physicalist and metaphysical realist viewpoints should entail similar notions of the divine. That is, those who believe in only the physical have rational grounds to still acknowledge mysteriousness at the limits of their knowledge of the physical. Similarly, metaphysical realists admit to the existence of metaphysical objects; I, if not metaphysical realists themselves, find this to be incredibly mysterious. Many metaphysical realists follow in the Platonic tradition in that they consider these metaphysical objects to be more fundamental than matter itself. At least for these individuals, an obvious similarity with physicalists is found: that which underlies physical reality is mysterious, yet is inherently real. As I concluded in the previous section, whatever these mysterious things are, if they cannot be comprehended by human intellect, then I argue that they are good candidates to be considered divine or at least caused by the divine. Yet, this presents a problem, as continuing the exploration of divinity seems futile — we can’t comprehend it. Perhaps only one thread remains to be tugged: If the substrate upon which material existence… well… has its existence is caused by the divine, or is itself divine, what does that say about our existence in this substrate, or about the existence of physical objects in general? Can we discover something about the divine based on the very fact of existence itself, or from the way that existence is?
Hold up… What even is existence? What does “real” even mean?
While Christians believe that all things are caused by God, admitting that anything is divine is a step too far for many materialists, especially if they are also atheists. Nevertheless, I believe that materialists and metaphysical realists alike have compelling reasons to ponder the nature of reality, and to conclude that it is sufficiently fundamental and mysterious to dub it “divine”.
Why does something exist rather than nothing? Why is reality the way that it is? These evergreen questions haunt the minds of children and professional philosophers alike. Well, at least I thought about them when I was a child. Although we may occasionally have existential concerns about the nature of reality, reality itself is not something that can be easily disregarded. Its “realness” is profoundly definitional. While there are compelling questions about our ability to perceive reality, it is exceedingly challenging to do away with a belief in reality entirely. Reality is both obviously real and intuitively understood, yet it intimates something of the divine.
The field of natural theology asks and attempts to answer the question, “What does reality reveal about God?” There is just one problem: tackling this question head on inevitably requires solutions to the various (nearly) intractable problems of epistemology, hermeneutics, metaphysics, ontology, and so on — essentially all of the deepest questions humans have considered — besides the empirical questions of science that reveal and perhaps interpret reality to the human intellect.
Rather, let’s consider being.
Reality is hard to pin down as a concept. The best path of reasoning I am aware of is to consider the verb “being” in an intransitive way; not being like something, not being a thing, but just being. Being connotes what is at the heart of reality. Yet, how can “being” be the idea that is at the heart of reality, when there are a wide range of things that many people consider “real” which being in the material world? Indeed, things such as first-person phenomena are considered real by most phenomenologists, spiritual beings are considered real by many spiritual people, and ideas are considered real by various others. Thus, the answer to “what does it mean to be real?” I.E., “what constitutes reality?” varies widely depending on the context and the beliefs of the individual who is answering.
My two cents is that there is something more fundamental beneath the realist claims of these various groups — “being” may be the best term for this thing. As we’ve already explored, the intuition or belief that there is something mysterious, a good candidate for the title “divine”, beneath material existence is nearly built-in to the views of both metaphysical realists and physicalists. Accordingly, we must not limit what we consider to be real too narrowly. We cannot, for example, say that reality is only constituted of physical things, as that would exclude whatever is more fundamental. Likewise, it seems wrong to attribute fundamental existence to things like ideas, spirits, or whatever else, as, if these things are “real”, they have their being in some more fundamental substrate as well. On the one hand, the realness of material objects exist in a particular “material” way — even a substrate which facilitate material existence — while on the other hand, whatever else is real may exist on some separate substrate. Perhaps the material world is the only thing that is knowable, perhaps not. What these things have in common regardless of their substrate is that they have being in that substrate. I might even say that this is definitional; being is that which existence/reality is predicated upon. My take is that reality is best understood to be multifaceted and best described by the singular notion of being.
If this is the case, then anything that is real, regardless of what is included in that category, has being in common. We must consider being to be the same for the existence of physical objects and for whatever other sorts of existence exist. It must not be conceptually tied to material existence, or existence in the realm of idea, or any other particular sort of existence, but must be truly an abstract concept which can be instantiated in a variety of substrates. Being, then, is not exclusively a material phenomenon, metaphysical substrate, or illusory phenomenon, but something deeper than all of these things. What can we say about such a thing? It is, truly, mysterious. It is beyond the reach of understanding, at least through our flawed perception of even a single facet of it. Only by considering reality as a construct spanning multiple distinct or partially-distinct categories of existence do we begin to grasp its true nature. In this way, even as our definitions fail to capture it, it being beyond such compression or simplification, our intuitions begin to comprehend the existence of being itself.
It would be presumptuous of us, at this point, to assert that the divine actually is this being. However, as we defined in the previous section, it is actually quite appropriate to consider this mysterious notion of being to be at least caused by the divine. Reflecting further on these ideas naturally suggests the possibility of an idea we might call “divine being”: that which underlies the multifaceted reality. At any rate, how might we attempt to cross the divide between what we know of being and what actually is divine? A brief history lesson is in order, which is what I will begin with in the next post.