Is God an unconditioned reality?

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andyklein

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meaning He’s the simplest reality, because He can only be understood in terms of Himself?
 
Meaning that He is logically sufficient and all else hinges on Him? Thus everything else could only be defined if God is understood as its source? Not sure what you mean.
 
I mean to ask: when we talk of God are we talking about nothing more than God?
(Is God not reducible to a unique set of properties?)

Such as, we might say that God is the one and only unique entity which is all-knowing. We would have to reduce the property of “knowing” into terms and entities outside of God. But if God simply is God, then who He is speaks for itself. When we say “God” we mean nothing more than “God.”

This is what I mean by an unconditioned reality. I found the ideaib a book written by a Jesuit named something Spitzer and its intrigued me.
 
Trying to understand. Does God therefore evade definition because our attempts to discuss Him use terms which limit Him?
 
Yep. If we can “conceive” of God in terms of properties and beings outside of Himself, then God is not the unconditioned reality. Im saying that when we talk of “God” we are talking of that which exists in virtue of Himself. This makes use of the phrase “God exists” entirely meaningless. Talk of God implies the existence of that which is referred to as “God,” so God is a necessary being. I think this view makes many atheistic arguments roll over. Does that make sense?
 
We can discuss God. I’m only trying to show that any argument which tries to disprove the existence of God is a non sequitur and any ontological argument trying to prove the existence of God begs the question. If God is the unconditioned reality, then He is not subject to any arbitrary semantics. We can try to understand the properties of God, but we will always come up short because the properties we refer to are understood in terms of the beings they refer, which aren’t not God.

So we might say that God has the property of being perfectly just. We determine what is just by looking at the world around us (we perceive beings’ properties with our senses and come to understand certain universal properties it only if we have sensed the essences of beings). But we can’t refer to that which is perfectly just via this sensible world, because we do not sense perfect justness in the beings in this world. This property is understand only in terms of God. But God is perfectly just. So the perfectly just being is tautologous with God. It’s not a property of God. God is this property made manifest.
 
Ah. Very interesting. I wonder how that argument stands up in debate.
 
It’s funny. I saw the title for this thread and immediately thought “This guy is probably reading Robert Spitzer.” I’ll try my best to explain. On page 226 of his book New Proofs for the Existence of God, Spitzer outlines three ways we can talk about God:
  1. Through apophatic knowledge (via the negative)
  2. Through hyperphatic knowledge (looking down the tree of being, and
  3. Through use of the doctrine of analogy.
    Examples of the first one include saying God is immaterial, not spacial, not temporal, and has no bounds on his knowledge or power.
    The second would we looking down the tree of being to where everything becomes unified by one unique entity that is completely simple in being (not composed of any discrete parts or limited by any conditions).
    The third way comes from the Scholastics like Aquinas. They held that we cannot exactly know what God is like due to our limited cognitive power and understanding. So when we describe God’s love, for example, it is analogous to human love but not quite the same.
Referring to God being all knowing, I would put emphasis on the first and third example. The first one shows that He is all knowing in the sense that his knowledge has no bounds. We can also describe His knowledge as being analogous to that of human knowledge. So while we cannot perfectly comprehend or describe God and His knowledge, we can get a ballpark idea of what it would be like.
 
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