God cannot explain the origin of life

[Anthony_V]

What you are saying here appears to be seriously in error and contrary to Roman Catholic teaching:
Who is God?
God is the Supreme Being, infinitely perfect, who made all things and keeps them in existence.
ewtn.com/faith/teachings/GODA21a.htm

And the use of the term “Supreme Being” is here meant analogically, not univocally as in the manner which I was using it earlier. The reason I was using it univocally is because that was the manner it was used when I quoted it from rossum:

A being is something that exists. Are you saying that God does not exist? This is not a good argument from your point of view. As Tomdstone pointed out, if God is not a being then He cannot be the Supreme Being.

That, to my eyes, is a univocal conception of “Supreme Being.” It puts it on par with every other thing that exists, which is an essence that has existence (rather than an essence that is its existence). In other words, if we predicate univocally of God that He is the “Supreme Being,” we have the exact same problem in saying that He is the origin of being. How can He be the origin of being if He Himself exists as a Supreme Being? He’s just another creature requiring an origin, and that’s what I’m denying in adamantly stating that He’s not the “Supreme Being” (… which I should have qualified with: in the sense of the term univocally construed.) If we use the term analogically, as I find the link you quoted does, I have no problem.

To back-up my claim that the term is used analogically by the link provided, it affirms that “God is the first and completely independent source of all being.” But it also says He is the “Supreme Being.” Thus, if we are to make sense of what the source is saying, we must assume it is not using the “Being” in “Supreme Being” in a sense univocal to “source of all being”, or otherwise the Supreme Being would not be the source of ***all ***being, but rather of every being except Himself. Thus, the quote must mean “Being” in a way different than (not univocal to) “source of all being”, but not in an utterly different way (such that “Being” is not an equivocation of “being”). For a term to not be univocal and also not be equivocal is for the term to be analogical. I’ll try and demonstrate in a below post (probably in my reply to rossum) that such a middle way of analogical predication is possible. But this analogical usage, which is the only usage by the quote can be made sense of, is what I can agree “Supreme Being” can be used in. I put my foot down when rossum was using it because he was using it univocally (since He is again and again denying that analogical predication can be used).

Of course, I will concede that I acted hastily in not noting that “Supreme Being” or “Self-Subsisting Being” or other equivalents are often used analogically in Thomist circles, and therefore most Catholic circles – such as in the case with the quote you kindly provided us. Any other uses in Catholic thought requires some severe qualification and tinkering of terms. If you’d like to jump down that rabbit hole, then be my guest; I provided the link to Scotus’ qualifications here. But, back to the point, it does make things confusing when someone comes along and says that God is not a Supreme Being (in the manner the term is used in the discussion), but does not clarify that the term can, in fact, be used properly in some other sense. I apologize for being unclear.

But It should at least be clear that this is not a problem isolated to God as the origin of “life,” but God as the origin of anything which we predicate univocally of Him. For this reason, I keep denying that we can predicate anything of Him univocally, since I would maintain that He is in fact the origin of all that we can predicate of Him, including “being”. This is why I keep saying He is anterior to every predication we assign Him (including essence and existence at the most fundamental level), even if these predications really do apply in a certain sense – an analogical sense. But the point here is that He cannot be the origin of what we predicate univocally of Him. If one maintains the position that God is the origin of all things, the one who maintains this cannot predicate anything univocally of God and those things which do originate from God; otherwise, there is a question-begging regression: “Yeah, well, if God is X too, what is the origin of X?”

 

[rossum]

Your attempt to describe divine life (which is uncaused) in terms of created life (which does have a cause and a temporal beginning) fails because you’re “crossing the streams” (to put it in 80’s Ghostbusters-speak): you’re attempting to use a category which applies to the latter in the context of the former.

My initial thread title used “life” to encompass all varieties of life. This is the same as the usage in the Bible, God is a “living” God.

If we split life into two types: divine-life, created-life, then it is immediately obvious that divine-life has no cause, and hence God cannot be the explanation for its origin, exactly as my thread title.

Given that some life (the divine-life part) cannot be explained by God, then my contention is correct: God cannot explain the origin of life.

If we look further, then it is clear that divine-life existed before created-life. In a discussion of origins, it is the first occurrence of something that is important. Again, my contention is correct. The origin of the first life cannot be explained by God.

And, as such, you come up with a simple, trivial fact: uncreated divine life cannot be explained in the ways that created life can. And yes, we can agree on that: divine life is uncaused.

It is not as simple or trivial as you seem to think. A lot of people have made a lot of posts arguing about it. Saying that God did not create all life is correct, but people do not always recognise that fact immediately.

It is a similar, and common, error to say, “God created everything” or “God is the creator of all”. Those also fail for exactly the same self-referential reasons: God did not create Himself.

It’s kind of like saying “God cannot explain why He does not have ten fingers”.

• Jesus had ten fingers.
• Jesus is God.
• Therefore God has ten fingers.

QED.

rossum

 

[Anthony_V]

If remains true that God cannot explain the origin of analogue-life because analogue-life is eternal, and anything that is eternal has no origin or cause, by definition.

I am preparing my own reply to the rest of your reply. However, I thought it fitting to ask this, since your answer will determine, in part, the rest of my reply:

What if I told you that “life” resolves analogically into an origin which is itself the principle of explanation and intelligibility? How would you define explanation anyway? From my point of view, the necessity of explanation in the order of reality is what holds when there is a being whose essence does not entail existence: a contingent being, if we can use the term. God’s essence is His existence: He is not a contingent being. Therefore, He does not require an explanation, because there is no sufficient reason to require one.

Now, in the order of discovery, we of course do need an explanation for a being which is not contingent – since it is possible for there to be a disparity between the intellect’s conception of reality and reality itself. The point is simply that, when it is in fact proven that there is a being which is not contingent, then there is not a sufficient reason to require any more explanation.

As a principle, there must be a sufficient reason to require an explanation of something; to propose otherwise is to devolve into mere assertion and unfounded skepticism.