What God is not
I saw another thread discussing what time is not, and now I am curious about what you guys might think about this one.
In my case, I think God is not me.
So, what is it that God is not, in your opinion?
In my case, I think God is not me.
So, what is it that God is not, in your opinion?
Comments (83)
Fixed it.
"One abyss calls to another
The abyss of my spirit
Always invokes with cries
The abyss of god -
Say which may be deeper."
Meister Eckhart
God is the not that is not not.
Are you turned on by darkness ?
Thanks for casting light on this topic.
God is everything you believe it to be
And he is the subject of belief
So therefore what he is not
Is a known entity.
You don't know god,
You can't know he exists
He can exists without anyone knowing
And the faithful believe in him.
My opinion is that there is probably is an intelligence behind the creation of universe, but it hard to classify its exact nature.
People exist. Things in the universe exist. The planets in their courses exist. While there are clear limits to our knowledge, everyone knows what it means to exist.
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.
In other words, God could not be God. He would be at best some sort of super-alien, flitting about the creation flashing super powers, seemingly irrationally. That is what the Flying Spaghetti Monster is. Its “worshippers,” the “Pastafarians,” are the latest in a long line of skeptics, though with perhaps a finer sense of humor. And even if said Monster existed, it could not be God. There would be no reason to worship it; in fact, one would do well to avoid it and its “noodly appendages.”
Those who say they do not believe in God often give lack of evidence for their unbelief. This is a confusion of knowledge and faith. It is also an error of logic — absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There cannot be any empirical evidence of the existence of God, for God does not exist.[/quote]
Remainder here. Makes an important point about the nature of existence which is generally neglected.
Does anyone have more information about what caused the grilled cheese, so that I might predict the next one?
In that sense maybe it does not have existence in the manner that we understand conventionally, but it must exist in the sense that it must be able to interact in some way with matter/energy/spacetime else it could not of created such.
So I don't believe in a purely spiritual creator of the universe - it is not possible to wish/think/shout a universe into existence.
But the theological distinction is based on the observation that the word ‘exist’ actually has a specific meaning - ‘ex-‘, other than, outside of, or apart from (exile, external), and ‘ist’ to be or to stand. So to ‘exist’ means to ‘be apart’, to be ‘this thing' as distinct from 'that'.
Quoting Devans99
'Existence' is what 'the transcendent' is transcendent in relation to. Whereas we have naturalism bred into us, so, for us, what exists is generally identified with the phenomenal realm, the domain of appearance.
Quoting Devans99
'It'? What are we speaking of here? (But, do notice how thought is always naturally inclined to 'objectify' whatever it considers. That is an important point. Not much time to write now, will expand on these themes later.)
And (the) grounds for thinking the universe was "created"?
Quoting Pfhorrest
:smirk:
Quoting Daniel
God is not God.
(i.e. G ? ?)
great forum topic.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Following the via negativa alluded to in the Meister Eckart stanza - thereby pushing into paradoxical phraseology - I would underscore the contrast between:
1) God is an abyss.
and
2) God does not exist.
Some other writer, I forget who, described god as "that which recedes to a great distance."* God as qualityless recession.
My personal view: Whalon - like most mystics - is exaggerating, or contorting or molesting language, to make his point. His point is valid but carries the unwelcome, unwholesome odor of paradox. A good part of why logophile, logicophile philosophers are so hostile to god-talk. There is a catalog of spiritual experiences best described by way of the counterpoise of: X = not-X.
* Barbusse? Schreber?
See this OP:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6218/the-universe-cannot-have-existed-forever/p1
How is that different from atheism?
This is a rhetorical question.
Whalon appears to be affording god an existential status categorically different from the existence of people, objects, "things in the universe."
Again, we're moving in the direction of mystical, paradoxical phraseology. Philosophy - even language - is spectator to this sport.
Paradoxical phraseology is best suited to describe a certain kind of spiritual excitation. Better not to say a word. But these ecstatic moments can be so transformative and so exciting that it's difficult to hold one's peace. Mum is the wisest Word.
You could say that.
Reminds me a bit the the Olympians. Once someone took a good look at Mount Olympus and didn't find them, they had relocated to :sparkle: "otherworldly" realms.
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
And now resigned from existence, too, of all things.
Pierre Whalon is bishop of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe and point he's making is perfectly orthodox; the fact that everyone here is baffled by it is predictable. Think of something that exists, that is not composed of parts, and does not begin and end in time. So, being composed of parts, and beginning and ending in time, is the 'mark' of 'all things that exist'. True or false? So, if God is not composed of parts (being simple) and does not begin and end in time (being eternal), then God does not exist. This doesn't say that God is unreal - what it's showing is that a lot of the argumentation about God is misplaced. As he says, many of the atheist arguments against God, is against a God that really doesn't exist - hence, 'straw God arguments'.
Logophilic/logiphilic philosophers should perhaps consider how language itself and human rationality have properties traditionally associated with the divine.
Here are some quotes that bolster the notion that the Enlightenment project is a transformation of monotheism into humanism.
[quote=Feuerbach]
Reason, which conceives God as an infinite being, conceives, in point of fact, its own infinity in God.
The necessary being is one that it is necessary to think of, that must be affirmed absolutely and which it is simply impossible to deny or annul, but only to the extent to which it is a thinking being itself. Thus, it is its own necessity and reality which reason demonstrates in the necessary being.
“God is unconditional, general – 'God is not this or that particular thing' – immutable, eternal, or timeless being.” But absoluteness, immutability, eternality, and generality are, according to the judgment of metaphysical theology itself, also qualities of the truths or laws of reason, and hence the qualities of reason itself; for what else are these immutable, general, absolute, and universally valid truths of reason if not expressions of the essence of reason itself?
Philosophy presupposes nothing; this can only mean that it abstracts from all that is immediately or sensuously given, or from all objects distinguished from thought. In short, it abstracts from all wherefrom it is possible to abstract without ceasing to think, and it makes this act of abstraction from all objects its own beginning. However, what else is the absolute being if not the being for which nothing is to be presupposed and to which no object other than itself is either given or necessary?
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/future0.htm
An interesting position. But what of great music, great art, great poetry? While I like the idea of silent monasteries, I'd also like an entire culture of ecstatic moments. Humans insist on 'magic,' and the billboards are happy to give us magic commodities. When I remember great parties, I also recall great music and great conversation, everything aimed at the 'magic' of life and its ecstasies and opportunities.
This is a beautiful post. Thank you.
Only the eternal 'IS' is real and lasting, called 'ungenerated and deathless' by Parmenidies, to say that it is permanent, it due to no opposite or alternate such as not-anything or 'Nothing', which is to further say that the 'IS' is all there is and that the 'IS' has no option not to be and that it must be.
Some might want to have a secondary degree of realness to what appears to us as temporary, since it has to bee of thee real 'IS', the temporary which ever changes and must go away, it never being able to remain as anything particular even for an instant, so it seems; but, strictly speaking, what is temporary is not really real like the 'IS'.
Apparently, any transient state of the 'IS' is returnable to any other state of the 'IS', as like being 'topological', in a rough way of analogy, granting somehow that the 'IS' must ever remain as itself and kind of still to be said as unchanging at heart.
The transitions, or transmutations, of the 'IS' have to happen, for some unknown reason, these apparently guided by what we can only so far call the laws of nature.
Such, then, does the Great Wheel of the 'IS' have to turn and return, it being helpless/powerless over not doing so.
Also, from First Principles of philosophy, on would think that the eternal 'IS', having no input, needs be not anything in particular, which is in agreement here, and thus, I would seem, a kind of everything, at its level, whatever that means for it.
Given that g/G is undefined - undecidable - a (the) "mystery", g/G is not an (the) answer to any question whatsoever, and begs them all.
Quoting Wayfarer
A second-order argument against theism (i.e. demonstrating the falsity and incoherence of theistic claims about - predicates attributed to - g/G) and not against g/G as such, however, is neither "idle" nor a "strawman"; and, consistent with the tradition of via negativa, recommends that some of us ought to shut our 'pious' holes since nothing true or intelligible or definite can be said (vide Witty), let alone sermonized, for or against g/G as such.
[quote=Wayfarer]Pierre Whalon is bishop of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe and point he's making is perfectly orthodox; the fact that everyone here is baffled by it is predictable.[/quote]
What has me "baffled" is why "the orthodox", like the good Bishop, perennially lose their nerve and keep on grasping for smoke & barking glossolalia at shadows. Apparently this pia fraus pantomime still consoles enough believers for it to go on being worth all of the intellectually disingenuous & self-abnegating trouble (pace Philo of Alexandria, Eckhart, Tillich, Cupitt et al).
I heard that Wittgenstein was quite a religious guy, actually. The thrust of ‘that of which we cannot speak’ was not that speech was idle, but that it falls short. So he points to the ineffable beyond speech, but, unlike what the positivists said, this was not because metaphysics was ‘nonsense’ but that it too fell short.
[quote=Wittgenstein]There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.[/quote]
Traitor to the cause, perhaps?
While I understand where you are coming from, I also think the evolving idea of g/G has been and remains important. Why this monotheism? Why this God apart from nature? If Feuerbach was right, then God served a purpose as a stage of free and rational humanity becoming conscious of itself as such, a perhaps necessary error.
[quote=Feuerbach]
Not to invent, but to discover, “to unveil existence,” has been my sole object; to see correctly, my sole endeavour. It is not I, but religion that worships man, although religion, or rather theology, denies this; it is not I, an insignificant individual, but religion itself that says: God is man, man is God; it is not I, but religion that denies the God who is not man, but only an ens rationis, – since it makes God become man, and then constitutes this God, not distinguished from man, having a human form, human feelings, and human thoughts, the object of its worship and veneration. I have only found the key to the cipher of the Christian religion, only extricated its true meaning from the web of contradictions and delusions called theology; – but in doing so I have certainly committed a sacrilege. If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism – at least in the sense of this work – is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.
[/quote]
God has the qualities of 'infinite' human reason-feeling-imagination distributed in fact over many mortal bodies--but concentrated and projected symbolically away from this plurality of local mortality. As human culture accumulates within language, a kind of super-mind is created that individuals can plug into by reading, thinking, living. God's omniscience functions as a point at infinity. The philosopher wants to know like God, from first principles. In short, God is an important 'fantasy' worth talking about.
It is unarguable that all manifest entities are temporal and compound. It ought to be an easy thing to refute it it isn’t the case.
God --- All good --- All knowing --- All powerful
1*.------------Yes------------Yes-----------------Yes
2.--------------Yes------------Yes-----------------No
3.--------------Yes------------No------------------Yes
4.--------------Yes------------No------------------No
5.--------------No-------------Yes-----------------Yes
6.--------------No-------------Yes-----------------No
7.--------------No-------------No------------------Yes
8.--------------No-------------No------------------No
1* is the god we all know and debate about. In accordance with the OP's question let's play around with the three omni-attributes of god and hopefully get to God's essence and discover what god is not.
Which of the three qualities of god is indispensable or, put otherwise, which quality is of prime importance in the definition of God?
When it all began, there were a multitude of gods and the general belief was that they, like us, had emotions, weaknesses, moral shortcomings, etc. but what made them divine was power. The power of Thor, Zeus and Indra made them gods and no or little significance was given to their moral character. It's worth mentioning that godly power in the early history of humanity had a lot to do with the natural phenomena - weather, earthquakes, disease, pestilence, all factors that affect our wellbeing. This was a time of polytheism where many gods had to be worshipped and doing so kept in a happy state to either prevent calamities or ensure positive outcomes. God was all powerful
Then came the realization that godly power was in a large parts nothing more than ignorance. The weapon of Thor, Indra and Zeus was simply an electrical discharge from clouds. Ergo, the power of the gods, that which made them divine, was our own ignorance, thus necessitating a revision of the definition of god. God had to be all knowing.
As time passed humans soon realized that an all powerful, all knowing doesn't quite do the job of allaying our fears and sustain our hopes for there was no requirement that an all powerful, all knowing god care about, let alone help, us. To remedy this situation we had to add the last, but not the least, attribute to god. God had to be all loving.
It's quite clear from the above that omnipotence was by itself inadequate and we were forced to add omniscience to the definition of god. This too failed as an acceptable definition of god - we had to make god omnibenevolent too.
Though simplified the above account touches upon the crucial stages in the evolution of the notion of god and the most important takeaway is that a definition of god that was acceptable to us was only possible with the attribute of omnibenevolence. Neither omnipotence nor omniscience and not even these two together gave us a satisfactory definition of god. In other words it's necessary that god be good. God can never be be evil or, to answer your question, God is not evil.
Good answer. And that's because the divine predicates are familiar human virtues. Who made who? We created God in our own image, unconsciously, automatically. But what are concepts? They too are 'non-material' ghosts, like the concepts of the non-material and the material for that matter (which by the way threatens our conception of concepts.)
At the same time, God also works as a symbol for world entire in its mysterious presence. this whole vast circus is God, or entertainment for the gods. Lots of uses of 'God' and 'gods.' But the God of Christians only makes sense with human virtues, as a non-evil loving God. And yet, of course, what's with the hellfire? And that's how speculative philosophy is born, as an attempt to make theology rational.
I think I understand this, and I think that's why various philosophers have more or less identified God with all of reality. To ensure that God remains good, reality has to be understood as either already good or on the way to becoming good, justified as a result. 'No finite thing has genuine being.' There is only God. Human consciousness is God knowing himself, etc.
Out of context, this looks suspicious. If God is not all of reality or a kind of shareable subjectivity, then in what way is s/he at all? To me it seems like the burden of a rational-philosophical theist to articulate how God is supposed to be or not be...basically what is intended. To be sure, a mystic need not reply to skeptics or offer explanations.
Whalon is paraphrasing an idea which has been central to philosophical theology but which modern culture has generally lost sight of.
Quoting softwhere
Well, think about what 'empirical' means. Basically it means that you can bring the subject of the debate into the ambit of what our culture agrees can be validated in the third person; what is measurable or detectable by scientific instruments, and mathematical analysis of the implications of same. But the objects (using the term loosely) of religion and spirituality are not at all of that nature, because they're not a 'that' to us. And if the subject is not something that can be understood as an object of experience, then we don't understand the kind of reality we're talking about. But suffice to say, in religious parlance, what is being indicated is a relationship, an 'I-thou' relationship, rather than a subject-object relationship.
Here's another couple of snippets:
In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent (‘accidental’), but matters of value are necessarily so, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions:
A statement from Ray Monk, who wrote a well-regarded biography of Wittgenstein:
I think he's misread by a lot of people.
Quoting Wayfarer
In the sense that Spinoza was "religious": amor dei intellectualis - yeah: definitely more mystical than "religious", maybe even more ecstatic than mystical: the difference being the latter seeks union - theois - with the divine (i.e. Mysteries), whereas the former seeks the impersonal depth, or aspect, of oneself (à la Iris Murdoch's (neo/platonic) unselfing or [url= https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin_(mental_state)]
mushin no shin[/url]). Transcendence and immanence, respectively.
[quote=Wayfarer]The thrust of ‘that of which we cannot speak’ was not that speech was idle, but that it falls short. So he points to the ineffable beyond speech, but, unlike what the positivists said, this was not because metaphysics was ‘nonsense’ but that it too fell short.[/quote]
Agreed. I invoke Witty on this point about theism 'falling short' for which silence - about the g/G to which it purports to refer (but cannot) - is demanded by intellectual(?) moral(?) aesthetic(?) ... religious integrity.
[quote=Wayfarer]There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
— Wittgenstein
Traitor to the cause, perhaps?[/quote]
Not at all. Witty's "cause" up close looks very different from any creedal or totemic "cause" insofar as "the religious" make graven images & idolatrize, that is, put g/G into words e.g. scriptures, theisms, theologies, theodicies, etc. and "the mystical", let alone (most) ecstatics, exorcise them.
In the beginning was the Ladder ...
:flower:
:death:
"Die Rose ist ohne warum; sie blühet, weil sie blühet ..."
That's actually quite compatible with the thrust of Whalon's essay.
[quote=Ludwig Wittgenstein] My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.[/quote]
[quote=The Buddha] [Comparing his teaching to a raft hastily constructed from leaves and branches]. And what should the man do in order to be doing what should be done with the raft? There is the case where the man, having crossed over [the river of sa?s?ra), would think, 'How useful this raft has been to me! For it was in dependence on this raft that, making an effort with my hands & feet, I have crossed over to safety on the further shore. Why don't I, having dragged it on dry land or sinking it in the water, go wherever I like?' In doing this, he would be doing what should be done with the raft. [/quote]
Quoting 180 Proof
People idolize all kinds of things.
Yeah but the idolatry-prohibiting [Abrahamic] religious believers are hypocrites lacking integrity when they do it.
The solution apparent is that what 'IS' is every particular, every path, and every event all at once and ever, that presentation then necessarily having to range through all the particulars, according to basic laws.
Since what 'IS' is All, not anything is apart from it, and so we are in/of its particulars flashing by, as those are what it is composed of.
Yeah you explained that already, a difference between "existence" and "being" or "reality". But I'm saying that the same argument given against "existence" works equally well against "being" or "reality": we have this big body of real existing beings that we're familiar with, and if you point at it and say "all of that is composite and temporal, God isn't, so God doesn't exist" you'd have to equally say he's not real and not a being. Showing that God doesn't exist but is a real being is supposed to be the demonstration that existence is different from reality or being, but this argument to show that God doesn't exist also shows that he's not real or a being, so that difference has not been demonstrated. Everything we're ordinarily familiar with exists, is real, is a being, and so on, so if something that's supposed to be unlike all of that stuff is thereby shown to not fit in one of those categories, it's also shown to not fit in the others.
:fire: :halo: :fire:
I will have another brief shot at it. In ancient philosophy until about the 17th century there was the understanding of the 'degrees of reality'.
Put another way, ontological simplicity was a determinant of its degree of reality. Atoms were supposed to be ontologically simple, as being indivisible and eternal (according to the materialists) but 'the ideas' were so understood in the Platonic tradition.
'The source of all being' is which we now would conventionally identify as God, because Christian theologians incorporated those ideas from Greek philosophy into their dogma; but not all of their originators would have agreed with that at all, had they been given the choice. (Recall the Platonic Academy was closed by Christians.) But in the philosophy of late antiquity, the neoplatonic ‘One’ alone was truly real; everything then cascaded ‘down’ through levels or planes or hypostases with the sensory domain being most remote from the source. (Scholars have commented on the similarity with the contemporaneous Indian philosophy of Brahman.)
That is sense in which 'the One', however conceived, is 'beyond existence'; it doesn't come into, or go out of, existence, however any particular existent is ontologically dependent on the reality. (I think that notion of ontological dependence is barely represented in post-17th c philosophy, although I might be mistaken.)
This is why, in the metaphysics of the Republic, there were lower and higher forms of knowledge, beginning with pistis and doxa (belief and opinion) and ascending through dianoia (knowledge of mathematical and geometric truths) to noesis (knowledge of the Forms - see this table). And the Platonic notion of what constitutes knowledge is very different to our own, in that veridical knowledge of the visible world - the domain we instinctively assume is the sole reality - is impossible, because the visible domain is not truly intelligible (which I think is validated by many of the vast confusions in modern physics and cosmology). In the famous analogy immediately preceding the divided line, we do not see the reality, but are trapped in the cave of ignorance, mistaking shadows on the cave wall for reality.
As I said, a lot of Platonic philosophy was incorporated into or amalgamated with Christian theology by the Greek-speaking theologians such as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, among many others. That was the beginning of the grand synthesis that actually forms the core of Western philosophy. Of course, much water under the bridge, moderns have discovered many things which we completely unforeseen to the ancients. But be that as it may, there are some fundamental insights in that tradition which haven’t been superseded, so much as simply forgotten. We literally have forgotten an entire way of understanding, not just this or that detail.
Now to answer my own rhetorical question regarding what, if anything, is not made, compounded, or temporal, there is actually an answer to that question, which is: the natural numbers. Numbers are the same for all who can think, and they don't come into, or go out of, existence. And knowledge of arithmetical proofs and the like, is direct and apodictic. This is the sense in which the Platonic tradition understood dianoia as being of a higher order than sensory knowledge. That was preserved in Galileo ('the book of nature is written in mathematics' but for complex historical reasons, other crucial elements of the philosophy became lost.)
So that is like a pointer to the understanding of 'intelligible reality' - ideas that can only be grasped by the eye of reason alone. But those 'higher ideas' are real in the way that logical proofs are real, i.e. by necessity; it is the domain of the self-existent and apodictic. And beyond that, another realm again. (I think the most thorough contemporary book is Jacques Maritain's Degrees of Knowledge.)
Quoting PoeticUniverse
The whole Aristotelian notion of essence and substance is an attempt to define what a being or particular truly IS. Essence is derived from esse, is, so essence = isness. And particulars, whether objects or beings (horses, tables, Socrates) are a mixture of essence and accident, which enables them to be at once both intelligible whilst allowing for their mutability and imperfection.
The whole visible universe is an admixture of essence and accident. It is not real in its own right, but it's not simply an illusion either. Understanding that grand scheme was seen as the aim of philosophy (before it became regarded as a separate discipline to science.)
I'm having trouble thinking of some X "that is not composed of parts." I assume you consider yourself capable of such a thought. Describe this thought to us.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
You asked me to think of "something that exists." Then you say that it doesn't exist.
As a mystic myself, I'm comfortable - and at times delighted - with paradoxical language. But a contradiction is a contradiction.
Wiser to call god an abyss or a nothingness or an idealized omni-recession than to say bluntly "god does not exist." Again: A contradiction is a contradiction.
Wiser still not to talk about god at all. It only evokes hostility, bafflement and hecklings by folks who have never conjured or suffered the voidlike touch of -------------- YWH.
Thanks. I bumped into Eckhart by way of Derrida. I forget the name of the book.
I figured you'd know Feuerbach. 'All must pass through the fiery brook.'
When god is apprehended or grokked in a paradoxical light - language fails us. One wants to deploy a paradoxical phraseology. With so many logicians skulking in cybershadows it's a mistake to resort to paradox. You won't be welcome and you won't be understood.
The great poets - I think of Rimbaud's "Genie" - come closest to describing god. But they fail. Great music can convey the moment of ecstatic union. But it's a dayfly shadow set beside the psych-ekstatic prowess of a devout and weathered mystic.
7
Not a description, but an example.
Have a read of this passage concerning Augustine and Intelligible Objects. (Start at (1)).
I suppose that's arguable. It wouldn't be so difficult to argue that seven is composed of exactly seven parts.
I tend to agree, I guess. I think theology should be rational or just confess itself as poetry.
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
I enjoy this input. I know the ecstasy of music and rationalized theology, but I can't claim access to a mysticism that escaped a return to everyday life. I'm not familiar w/ the 'genie,' but I'll look into it.
But there's a real point at issue. We have developed these fantastic instruments that can measure the entire universe and see into the sub-atomic domain. For us, that is all there is. Whenever we speak of 'what exists', then we think of what is 'out there somewhere'. It is the 'phenomenal realm', the domain of appearances. Modern naturalism insists that this is all that is real - 'the cosmos is all that exists', per Carl Sagan. Our orientation towards that subject-object perspective is instinctive and culturally ingrained. So this kind of argument is directed - as it says! - against those who say that the absence or non-discoverability of 'the divine' anywhere within this picture, is an argument against it.
So, I am giving examples of intelligible objects, as entities that are real, but not phenomenally existent. Whenever we count or reason, we're actually negotiating a meaning-realm; but because we do that instinctively, we take it for granted. But that meaning-realm, likewise, is real but not existent, in that you can only point it out to another being with similar reasoning capacities. You can't point it out to a horse or a cow; it's not something you can see through scientific instruments. It's the implicit domain in which all of judgement is embedded.
There's another well-known contemporary theologian who was (in)famous for asserting that 'God does not exist', that being Paul Tillich. There's a fragment floating around cyberspace to wit:
I think, in other domains of discourse, this distinction between 'what exists' and 'what is real', is not problematic, as it's very much a product of modernity.
Quoting Pfhorrest
They're admixtures of real and unreal. They're real insofar as they're forms. 'Formless matter' is inchoate disorder. Forms (morphe) are what enable matter (hyle) to be intelligible at all. So they're real in a sense, but not in the same sense as intelligible realities. And, I'm saying, what we've lost is that ability to perceive different senses of what it means to say that something is. But, hey, we're actually starting to find some common ground, and that's great.
And "7" - suppose I accept that it has no parts - doesn't exist?
Quoting Wayfarer
You're fudging your words. The first is qualified by "phenomenally." The second isn't.
I'm a huge fan. :blush:
But, as I say, our thought is so thoroughly shot through with these realities that we fail to notice them, or take them for granted. We assume that it's something that can be understood as an adaptation.
I think you need to be consistent with your qualifications. Is Whalon saying "god does not [phenomenally] exist"? If he is, he needs to qualify his assertion. That's why I say he's "contorting or molesting language."
It's worth posting:
Genie (Arthur Rimbaud)
He is affection and the present moment because he has thrown open the house to the snow foam of winter and to the noises of summer—he who purified drinking water and food—who is the enchantment fleeing places and the superhuman delight of resting places.—He is affection and future, the strength and love which we, erect in rage and boredom, see pass by in the sky of storms and the flags of ecstasy.
He is love, perfect and reinvented measure, miraculous, unforeseen reason, and eternity: machine loved for its qualities of fate. We have all known the terror of his concession and ours: delight in our health, power of our faculties, selfish affection and passion for him,—he who loves us because his life is infinity…
And we recall him and he sets forth…And if Adoration moves, rings, his Promise, rings: "Down with these superstitions, these other bodies, these couples and ages. This is the time which has gone under!"
He will not go away, he will not come down again from some heaven, he will not redeem the anger of women, the laughter of men, or all that sin: for it is done now, since he is and since he is loved.
His breathing, his heads, his racings; the terrifying swiftness of form and action when they are perfect.
Fertility of the mind and vastness of the world!
His body! the dreamed-of liberation, the collapse of grace joined with new violence!
All that he sees! all the ancient kneelings and the penalties canceled as he passes by.
His day! the abolition of all noisy and restless suffering within more intense music.
His step! migrations more tremendous than early invasions.
O He and I! pride more benevolent than lost charity.
O world!—and the limpid song of new woe!
He knew us all and loved us, may we, this winter night, from cape to cape, from the noisy pole to the castle, from the crowd to the beach, from vision to vision, our strength and our feelings tired, hail him and see him and send him away, and under tides and on the summit of snow deserts follow his eyes,—his breathing—his body,—his day.
I'm not sure there's anything like a permanent escape from (let's say) "everydayness." After all, as they say, samsara is nirvana.
Meditative practice has a permanent effect on brain wave patterns. That might be the best we can do.
The sages who have compassed sea and land,
The secret to search out, and understand—
My mind misgives me if they ever solve
The scheme on which this universe is planned.
— Omarian thought
Clues:
Parts:
What 'IS', as the Fundamental, cannot have parts, for then the parts would be more fundamental; thus, mind, as well as any system or composite compound is out.
Something like a wave is simple and has no parts. Science has thrown out the higher prospective fundamentals on down to a near final and much lower prospect, that of quantum fields.
Timelessness and the Block:
Something Eternal and permanent is implied due to no available source such as 'Nothing', and thus it simply ever 'IS', known as timeless 'being', instead of 'becoming' in time.
Science suggests this as a block universe.
Completeness:
The 'IS' block doesn't change; it is already ever complete, so it must contain all events/particulars.
Philosophy/logic suggests that what has no beginning can't have any input, leaving it to be all possible events/particulars there all at once.
Observation of daily life shows that change is ubiquitous, for not anything remains the same even for an instant; there is a constant sequence/transition/transmutation of particulars coming and then going away in a flash, in a way that appears to be sensible to natural laws.
Either the block gets traversed or it is presented to us.
Realness:
There is something to be said for a non-real implementation virtual kind of presentation scheme to be taken as real when the difference makes no difference. For example, the message of hearing music is so, whether from real live band implementation/messenger or from a recorded device implementation/messenger.
What is the message of the Universe? How does everything happening have any information content beyond what a lack of anything would have?
Sure. It's a cultural catastrophe.
No argument against the existence of god can tarnish the mystic's insight and moment of ecstasy. Philosophy is impotent here.
I like the poem. It reminds me of Whitman, and I love Whitman.
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
That's how I tend to view it. There is no enduring escape, but moments of insight and ecstasy leave traces on everyday living. And I love my favorite philosophers for unveiling what is profound in the apparently mundane. There's a 'spiritual' ambition or intention in the great philosophers that is bigger and brighter than technology-as-truth ('If it's gear, it's hear.', 'If it's useless, it's unreal.') As you may know, Derrida's first paper was on the 'ideality of the literary object,' which is arguably the 'spiritual realm,' our intersubjective participation in the 'holy spirit' of language. This embarrasses the tough-minded pragmatist who sides ultimately with worldly power against fleeting 'private' insights.
I also like God as the abyss of our unknown selves. I think that's what Feuerbach means by the species essence. As mortal beings in time, we can live out only a tiny part of our potential, of the species as still-unknown possibility (including paths that others take and we don't). And then I love the God in Job, a dark transrational or subrational God justified only by the beauty and terror of the real. In short, the idea of God or gods seems central to human existence.
I bumped into Eckhart in Caputo's book on Heidegger. Also Angelus Silesius.
[quote=Wiki]
The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition identifies these epigrams as Reimsprüche—or rhymed distichs—and describes them as:
...embodying a strange mystical pantheism drawn mainly from the writings of Jakob Böhme and his followers. Silesius delighted specially in the subtle paradoxes of mysticism. The essence of God, for instance, he held to be love; God, he said, can love nothing inferior to himself; but he cannot be an object of love to himself without going out, so to speak, of himself, without manifesting his infinity in a finite form; in other words, by becoming man. God and man are therefore essentially one.[9]
[/quote]
I think this is what Hegel wanted to rationalize.
Also this:
[quote=Angelus]
The rose is without 'why'; it blooms simply because it blooms. It pays no attention to itself, nor does it ask whether anyone sees it.
[/quote]
This reminds me of Wittgenstein: It's not how but that the world is that is the mystical. Such an insight is repeated in Nausea, albeit in its unsettling aspect.
This is the thrust of a book I hope to put together before I'm cozy in my coffin. Instead of "magic," I like to say "mystique." Mystique and Nothingness.
I have a load of research ahead of me. But say you have the world-mystique of the Middle Ages and the loss of world-mystique concurrent with the loss of Christ or death of god. The billboards exploit the loss of world-mystique. Political figures exploit the loss of world-mystique. Etc.
Absolutely.
That's pretty.
In Nausea I see the intimate link between mystic union and schizophrenia. Joseph Campbell writes: "The schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight."
This makes it extra clear that you're talking about the same thing I am talking about as "concrete vs abstract". Concrete things are phenomenal, abstract things are noumenal. Your early comment about the tree being "partially real" fits into there as well, as I say that the most concrete things are the local, present, actual occasions of experience that oneself is having, and ordinary things like trees are abstractions out of patterns in patterns in patterns in those occasions of experience, and things like electrons are abstractions out of patterns in those ordinary objects, and eventually things like numbers become completely abstracted away from any concrete instances of them, but can still be further abstracted into things like sets.
So if you're saying that God something completely abstract like numbers, then you're saying he is not (as I would phrase it) concretely real, which I take to be the ordinary sense of reality we're usually talking about: abstract reality is a weird, well... abstraction, of ordinary concrete reality, projected behind the concrete phenomenal reality we're directly in touch with. But the thing is, all kinds of fictional objects like unicorns are also abstractly real in that sense: that's why we can say things like "unicorns have three horns and scales" are false, in the same way that "triangles are concave" is false: fictional objects are defined into (abstract) being like mathematical ones are, and a three-horned scaly unicorn contradicts the definition of a unicorn. There can be a (concrete) universe with no (concrete) triangles, and a universe with no unicorns, and a universe with no God, even though we can say things that are necessarily true of all those things; just like if humans went extinct, there would be no (concrete) bachelors, but it would still be necessarily true that all bachelors are unmarried.
Basically, by putting God into that category, you're saying he's just an idea (in the colloquial sense) that might not actually exist (in the colloquial sense). Which... doesn't sound like anything contrary to what any atheists think, and so makes that a pretty vacuous form of theism.
I'm also wondering if you're aware of Kant's equation of empirical realism with transcendental idealism, and likewise transcendental realism with empirical idealism. In saying that the abstract, noumenal, or transcendental is more real, you're saying that the concrete, phenomenal, or empirical is all just ideal, i.e. just ideas, images, fallible impressions of true reality. Kant conversely endorsed transcendental idealism (abstract noumenal are just ideas that we have) and equivalently endorsed empirical realism (reality is made of concrete phenomena), as do I: where what we directly experience is the most real, and abstractions from that are ideas that we project behind it in a fallible attempt to understand and explain it.
Nicely put. These are also themes I'm interested in. Mystique and Nothingness would be the kind of philosophy I like. Great project.
I think the transformation of world-mystique is what Heidegger had in mind in terms of the understanding of being. 'If it's gear, it's here', 'If it spends, we're friends.' 'If it get clicks, it sticks.' What does a culture take as real, true, valuable, authoritative? Have you seen Debord's film? If you get in the mood, here's a link: https://vimeo.com/139772287
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
I read The Masks of God recently and was quite impressed. Anyway, that quote makes sense. The shaman is perhaps the survivor of a schizophrenic crisis.
Sweet, I'll check it out.
I'll download a subtitled version... :)
I wonder if you'd be willing to offer a reference or exposition.
Classical theology would say that God is ‘super-real’ - the real in reality, the being of being. Whereas what you and I take to be concretely real, is actually ephemeral and only existing because of the being that has been lent to it. Don't agree with it, by all means, but at least understand what it is you don't agree with.
Quoting Pfhorrest
This conveys a misinterpretation of Kant. When you say that the noumenal are 'just ideas that we have', it's because you, as a modern, understand 'ideas' as being 'subjective' or something in your mind or my mind. So in other words, they're a product of mind, which in turn is a product of (material) evolution, which in turn is a product of chance. (Everything is skewed in modern thought by the notion of biological evolution. Darwin was not a philosopher, and evolutionary theory is not a philosophical framework. And this shows up in many different ways.) So, to you, ideas have a kind of derivative reality, and are only real at all insofar as someone has them. Whereas, Kant would say that the categories of the understanding, and the various rational powers of the mind, are what makes coherent experience possible in the first place. They are in that sense ontologically prior to any naturalistic theory of the nature of mind (for instance) because it is only by virtue of those faculties that we can have theories of any kind.
quote="Pfhorrest;363791"]Basically, by putting God into that category, you're saying he's just an idea (in the colloquial sense) that might not actually exist (in the colloquial sense). Which... doesn't sound like anything contrary to what any atheists think, and so makes that a pretty vacuous form of theism.[/quote]
I'm saying nothing like that but again it's inevitable that you will see it that way. But it is interesting, that all the ID types think that the philosophical theology of a David Bentley Hart is also 'like atheism' - which just goes to prove my original point, that nearly all atheists are criticizing a straw god.
There's a kind of nietzschean transgressive thrill in such notions, but I'd rather swim than sink, myself.
:fire: :scream: :fire:
Quoting Wayfarer
I absolutely agree with this. God is a strange word. In some important sense, all god-notions are straw gods.
Like Feynman said about quantum mechanics - if you think you understand god, you don't understand god.
I highly recommend A Thing of This World by Lee Braver. It weaves Heidegger into narrative that stretches from Kant to Derrida. I read it for free as a pdf and then bought the paperback.This is review by another book by Braver, relevant to the history of being.
[quote=review]
In the chapter ‘History, Nazism, the History of Being and its Forgetting’ Braver argues that Heidegger, in his later writings, emphasizes the history of being rather than pursuing explication of existential phenomenology. He provides a short history of being, divided into four separate parts: pre-Socratics, Platonic, medieval, and modernity, with each area having its own unique understanding of being. Accordingly, human beings’ way of being alters throughout history, due to an ontological understanding of being that shapes a culture’s entire way of acting and thinking. Braver, in Groundless Grounds (2012, p.117), wrote that “Only Greeks can be tragic heroes, only Medievals pure-hearted saints, and only moderns comfort-seeking gadget-users”. He pursues this idea in the book while claiming “And our way of being changes with them so that a Greek citizen, a medieval monk, an early modern gentleman-scientist, and a modern iPhone user are different kinds of subjects”
[/quote]
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2014/05/18/book-review-heidegger-thinking-of-being-by-lee-braver/
In my own words, the 'I' is only possible on the foundation or background of 'we.' One uses a word this way. A road is for driving on. A sidewalk is for walking on. Time is money. For instance, 'I' think about 'myself' in a language I did not create and starting from 'values' (still too abstract and theoretical) that I did not choose. We are 'thrown' into our cultures way of living and thinking, and of course into having particular parents. If we rebel and want to bring down the house, we use pieces of that house. We use an inherited language to for instance try to transcend that language or see around it. I think lots of Heidegger and Hegel are contained in Joyce's/Stephen's 'history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' For Hegel, we dream toward an awakening. For Heidegger it's less clear, though in one interpretation there's no structure, no telos, just various unfoldings, clearings. Which aren't in our control. For if we could choose, we'd choose in terms of our thrown-ness. For the later Heidegger, there is an irreducible passivity in human existence, which the technological interpretation of being covers up. So Nietzsche is the last metaphysician. Platonism rots into pragmatism and will-to-power as a late manifestation of being (what counts as real & significant).
The fantasy of not-being-thrown is connected in my mind to a god independent of nature and especially time and philosophy's lust to be without presuppositions, its own father, to have given itself its own name. Man is time trying to crawl out of itself. (?)
The quotes below described being within what I'm calling (got it from Braver?) an 'understanding of being.' The quotes on 'the nothing' remind me of Feuerbach. These connect to our larger conversation about God.
[quote=link]
The history of Being is now conceived as a series of appropriating events in which the different dimensions of human sense-making—the religious, political, philosophical (and so on) dimensions that define the culturally conditioned epochs of human history—are transformed. Each such transformation is a revolution in human patterns of intelligibility, so what is appropriated in the event is Dasein and thus the human capacity for taking-as (see e.g., Contributions 271: 343). Once appropriated in this way, Dasein operates according to a specific set of established sense-making practices and structures.
...
Where one dwells is where one is at home, where one has a place. This sense of place is what grounds Heidegger's existential notion of spatiality, as developed in the later philosophy (see Malpas 2006). In dwelling, then, Dasein is located within a set of sense-making practices and structures with which it is familiar. This way of unravelling the phenomenon of dwelling enables us to see more clearly—and more concretely—what is meant by the idea of Being as event/appropriation. Being is an event in that it takes (appropriates) place (where one is at home, one's sense-making practices and structures) (cf. Polt 1999 148).
...
Even though the world always opens up as meaningful in a particular way to any individual human being as a result of the specific heritage into which he or she has been enculturated, there are of course a vast number of alternative fields of intelligibility ‘out there’ that would be available to each of us, if only we could gain access to them by becoming simultaneously embedded in different heritages. But Heidegger's account of human existence means that any such parallel embedding is ruled out, so the plenitude of alternative fields of intelligibility must remain a mystery to us.
...
Because the mystery is unintelligible, it is the nothing (no-thing). It is nonetheless a positive ontological phenomenon—a necessary feature of the essential unfolding of Being.
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/#HisHis
I think of this 'nothing' as what makes poets the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world.' It's a pregnant darkness. People like Descartes see the world in a new way. Later we take what was visionary for granted. Another Heideggerian theme is restoring force to the most elemental words, which I understand as rediscovering the radicality of metaphors that have cooled and hardened into common sense.
I offer all of this humbly. I just love this stuff and enjoy trying to make sense of it with others.
If not, I'll have to get myself some Braver. Looks like my cup of tea.
I understand that model, I'm just trying to get clear if that's what you endorse yourself, because the things you've said and quotes you've agreed with haven't made that at all clear. It seems clear to me now that you are talking about the abstract-concrete / transcendental-empirical / noumenal-phenomenal spectrum, and taking the position that things on the abstract/transcendental/noumenal side of it are more real than things on the other side. It's still not clear why you make a distinction between being real and existing, but it looks like you conversely say that things on the concrete/empirical/phenomenal side exist more than things on the other side.
Because you have this weird divide in the way you use the words "real" and "existing", and your apparent misunderstanding of Kant (addressed further below), it's less clear to me whether you think "reality" or "existence" as you use them is more "objective", but I have the impression so far that you take it to be "reality", i.e. the abstract/transcendental/noumenal, and that you take "existence", the concrete/empirical/phenomenal world, to be a "subjective" ephemeral shadow or interpretation of that "reality".
Quoting Wayfarer
That is exactly what Kant means. The etymology of "noumenon" even comes from the Greek word for "mind". The view you seem to espouse is what Kant would call "transcendental realism", or equivalently "empirical idealism": that the transcendent/noumenal world is objectively real, and the pheomenal/empirical world is just our subjective impression of it. Kant explicitly rejected that in the so-called "Copernican shift" of which he is perhaps most famous, instead saying that it is the phenomenal/empirical that is real, and the transcendent/noumenal world is just the ideas we have about it: "empirical realism", or "transcendental idealism". He explicitly says that noumena are forever beyond our direct knowledge, that basically all we can do is speculate about them, and try to find the boundaries of what they might possibly be through reason.
Quoting Wayfarer
You keep bringing things back to Darwin as though I (or everyone you think I'm like) start with evolution as a premise and then build the rest of things from there. Evolution is entirely a contingent theory as far as my philosophy is concerned; it could in principle turn out to be false and nothing about my philosophy would change, just some contingent questions would turn out to have different answers. Much the same as with the existence of God, really, as I think we discussed at length in my "How important is (a)theism to your philosophy?" thread. For the entirety of my philosophy book I don't weigh in one way or another about whether or not God exists, until the very last chapter when I raise the question merely as an aside to answering another question and, using the rest of my philosophy which had thus far been agnostic to the existence of God, determine that there's almost certainly nothing anyone would want to call God in existence. The relationship of evolution to my philosophy is the same, except I never even have reason to pose the question of whether or not it's true, because it has no bearing on anything else I ever discuss.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, but that's different from saying noumena, or abstract, transcendent things, are ontologically prior. The whole "Copernican shift" that Kant is famous for is saying that rather than something abstract and transcendent, external to us, being primary or central to reality, but shielded from our view by a veil of concrete, empirical particulars, as we circle around it trying to peer in... instead we are in the center, the world circling around our minds so to speak, the empirical and concrete world of phenomena forming the true reality in which we are embedded, and transcendent, abstract, noumenal things being what we imagine to be "out there" beyond that. (That is not only the root of the logical-empirical tradition of the Analytic branch of contemporary philosophy but also, perhaps even more so, the phenomenological tradition of the Continental branch.) In that model of the world, the categories of understanding are a part of us there in the center, conditioning how the empirical, concrete phenomena appear to us, but they're not identical with our ideas of transcendental, abstract noumena, which are even further out in the periphery, metaphorically speaking, beyond the pheonomena.
I agree with that Kantian model, and before you ask how a physicalist philosophy of mind can fit into that, I'll just explain preemptively: each of us is at the center of such a model, and finds other people to be objects out there in our own sphere of empirical phenomena. So you're a physical object from my perspective, and it stands to reason that I'm also a physical object from your perspective, even though I'm the subject at the center of all phenomenal experience of all physical things from my perspective, just like you are from yours. So if I can devise a physical explanation for your behavior, it stands to reason that you can do the same to me, and the difference between being a physical object and a mental subject is a matter of perspective: my mental subjectivity is just what it's like to be this thing that is a physical object to you. (This is, incidentally, also where my panpsychism comes in: the only difference between physical and mental is a perspective shift, so all things that are objects in the third person perspective are subjects from their own first person perspective, not that that really means a whole lot for something that's not as interestingly complex in reflexive function as a human brain).
Quoting Wayfarer
This still just leaves me wondering what the heck you actually believe that is actually different from what an atheist believes, not just nominally. It reminds me of when I used to call myself a pantheist, holding that the universe itself is God, but that didn't hold any kind of import about different expectations for how the world did or should work or anything like that, it was just a kind of reverence of the universe. In time I realized that plenty of atheists revered the universe and nature and held basically the exact same views and feelings and everything that I did, they just thought it was silly to apply the word "God" to the universe, and made it sound like I believed something different from them when I really didn't. I've been trying to figure out for a while now what exactly you think differently about the world than me, in more than just nominal terms, although now that you're saying "God doesn't exist" (or agreeing with a quote to that effect at least) it's not even clear that there's a nominal disagreement.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Perhaps there's a clue, found in a previous post.
[quote =Wayfarer's post in Tillich]
However an interesting dialogue may be had between Christian humanists who posit that God is bound within language and does not exist beyond it (e.g. Don Cupitt) and Tillich who posits that our understanding of God is bound within language yet presumes (but cannot verify) that God exists beyond it.[/quote]
To me the 'realm of meaning' which includes noetic objects like 7 is related to the 'ideality of the literary object.' I think this realm as it wanders from simple math depends on material for signifiers, but nevermind that. It seems that people can have an I-thou relationship with an 'ideal' or 'noetic' God who isn't physically there. I sometimes feel a bond to writers of texts I love, long dead. Don't we live in a world of such ghosts? Imagine how we should have continued conversations? Interact with people from our childhood, long lost, in dreams?
As something like a 'Christian humanist,' I'm happy with the ghost as a ghost (the 'Holy Spirit'). This spirit passes to and fro a community of saints (sinners who forgive one another). Others are concerned perhaps with justifying the possibility of a God that exists beyond language and such community, by which I understand beyond the ideality of the literary object or field of shared meaning and feeling. Within this realm of meaning, within language and culture, we can gesture beyond to a more metaphysical God. Perhaps being itself is God. Or all being is the 'incarnation' or representation of God.
If God is a noetic object, that more or less seems to make sense to everyone. If God is (or refers to) the ground of being (being itself perhaps), that also makes a certain sense. But God as ground of being seems to open the problem of evil and/or shift us into Job's meeting with the whirlwind. Perhaps this is the 'God of God.' Personally the metaphysical issue seems less important than the divine predicates, which only make sense to me as human virtues. One can cast an amoral Father as a demiurge in the whirlwind and a tender (mother and) son who restores the loss.
The etymology of noumenon is actually from nous, which is nowadays translated as 'mind'. But 'nous' and 'noetic' have many connotations which are not captured by the modern sense of 'mind' and certainly not by most modern philosophies of mind.
To refer to the source text:
So 'transcendental realism' holds that time and space are real independent of our sensibility. And I don't hold that, so I'm not advocating transcendental realism. I am drawn to transcendental idealism on the grounds that, as Kant says, it doesn't conflict with empirical realism - and I am indeed an empirical realist. The principle is that empirical knowledge is inherently limited or conditioned by our cognitive and intellectual faculties, so therefore empiricism as such is limited in principle. So this understanding doesn't overlook or 'bracket out' the role of the observing intellect in the act of knowing. Whereas the typical naturalist view is to believe that the world seen by the senses and instruments is real 'in itself' or possesses intrinsic reality. That is what 'transcendental realism' holds. And you can see quite clearly how in most scientific realism, and certainly in naive realism, this attitude holds sway.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Objection, your honor! You're only so in a certain sense. If a person was deceased, then their physical remains would amount to a physical object. But the fact that they're subjects of experience distinguishes them from mere objects, and in fact this is the very distinction which I suspect much modern philosophy insufficiently recognises. All living beings are subjects of experience, but their nature as subjects is not something we can objectively know (a point which is central to Thomas Nagel's life work.)
Quoting Pfhorrest
In the spiritual traditions of (for example) Catholic and Orthodox monasticism, and also Hindu Advaita, 'knowledge of God' is itself liberative. In other words, such expressions as the 'beatific vision' and their equivalents in various spiritual lexicons, denote a state of insight or knowledge of the reality beyond the phenomenal, of which the phenomenal is an expression. The idea of 'higher knowledge' in such contexts is direct cognitive awareness of the ground of being (for example, as mentioned earlier in the sayings of Angelus Silesius and Meister Eckhart.)
So realising such states of being is radically different to anything naturalistic epistemology can provide as this naturally assumes the perspective of object and subject; the intelligent subject situated in the domain of objects. Which is, no irony intended, natural, but, I think, precludes any real notion of a summum bonum, beyond physical well being.
Part of this is also a radical shift in the way 'the world' itself is seen. This too is something that is allegorised in many spiritual texts - the vision of a new heaven and new earth is arguably a parable for the perspective that arises from these states.
But, not everyone who has experienced such an awakening is necessarily centred around theism - Buddhism is the stand-out example. But where all such philosophies differ from atheism, is that they do pursue a soteriological end, 'soteriology' being the pursuit of awakening, mok?a, spiritual liberation. Whereas most modern atheism sees humans as a more-or-less accidental outcome of a fortuitous process which is essentially physical in nature.
And these kinds of insights find current expression in spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle and Adyashanti, to name a couple.
Quoting Pfhorrest
The universe is the aggregate of experience and knowledge. It is objectively real, yes, but what is objective requires a subject. Again modern naturalism assumes that 'the Universe' exists independently of any human observer, neglecting the fact that human observers provide the all-important factor of perspective, without which no notion of 'existence' is meaningful. See The Blind Spot of Science is the Neglect of Lived Experience.
Quoting softwhere
One of the things I learned from my very cursory study of Hinduism, is the significance of the figure of Siva 'the destroyer'. He's not Santa Claus, but a deity of terrible, awesome power. But still not, on that account, evil, because possessed of no malicious intent, but of an awesome power which both spawns and devours universes. And I think there is an element of that sensibility in the Book of Job.