Friendly Atheism

[Belacqua]

The part in italics is the part that is implicitly in any statement about reality.  

Understood!

I should have said Metaphysically passive, but epistemologically active.  

That makes sense. 

No, because of the relationship that God's consciousness is said to have to its objects.  It is said that existence is dependent on it, is maintained by it and can be altered by it, i.e., the doctrine of creation, miracles, its plan, etc. 

Here's where everybody's going to get mad at me. 

Lately I have been talking about the doctrine of divine simplicity. Apparently this isn't something people think much about, yet it is crucial in the theology of all the big name theologians -- Augustine, Aquinas, etc. Also in most of the theistic philosophers. 

According to divine simplicity, God has no parts, and excludes nothing. Everything is God. So it's only an analogy to talk about God's "consciousness" as if it's similar to peoples' consciousness. 

When people are conscious of things, it means there are at least two things: the person, and the thing he's conscious of. It requires separation. 

It's different for God's consciousness (they say) because when God is "conscious" of something, in fact it's not two things. God includes the thing. Or better, God is the thing -- God is the existence of the thing. Plotinus and others talk of God as the One -- meaning it excludes nothing. The same idea is important in Buddhism, where it's called   不二 -- "not two." 

Now, since God is not two, and God is the existence of everything, it is wrong to say that God is conscious of objects and can change or maintain them by his thought. In fact God is existence itself (they say), so God's thought is exactly equal to existence, which is exactly equal to everything. 

So in this sense existence is not prior to consciousness (for God), because for him they are identical. 

This becomes important in mystical thinkers like Plotinus and William Blake. They are adamant that the world, which is God, is one. It seems separate to us because our perceptions are limited. But, as Blake said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” (For them, the Fall of man is not about disobedience but about a separation of perceptions.) 

For these theistic thinkers, then, existence is not prior to consciousness because, again, they are one. They seem to think that if we regain our full perception, then the apparent distinction between existence and consciousness would be revealed as a misunderstanding. 

I do think it would be reasonable to say that, according to these guys, existence is prior to consciousness in our current fallen state. Things exist, and we are conscious of them through a kind of active epistemology, but this is only due to our present limitations. 

So OK, in most naive or run-of-the-mill views of religion, it would make sense to say that existence is prior. But in the traditional theology of the great philosophers (which is strangely little-known among modern people), I don't think it's right.