Friendly Atheism

[Belacqua]

I can imagine all sorts of crazy things, but in the end I'm just imagining.  

I understand it seems that way, when we talk about traditional arguments about God.

The trouble with describing these very unfamiliar ideas is that we tend to start in the middle. All of the elaborate grounding and logical progression to reach that position is there, but takes a lot of work. And absent that work, especially if we just assume that all religious people are self-deluding fantasists, it's easy to dismiss. 

They would do well study Objectivism.

I'm never against studying something serious, for the reasons given above. I do want to avoid giving one view more credence based on begging the question about another view.

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How can a being that is one with everything be said to possess consciousness? 

It doesn't. Not in the way that people possess consciousness. 

There are a lot of terms that are used only analogously when talking about God. For example, the statement "God loves you," is entirely different in meaning from "your mom loves you." 

And how can something that is one with everything have no parts, when everything clearly has parts?

It looks that way to us. 

The best explanation of this I've found comes through Lutheran mystic Jacob Boehme, who was so influential on Hegel. (The idea long predates Boehme, though.) 

For limited human minds, understanding comes through division. One part of the universe (e.g. your mind) has to stand in regard of another part of the universe (e.g. the laws of nature) in order to understand them. In fact, though, your mind is not separate from the laws of nature. 

(The cool thing is that the Japanese kanji 分 means both "divide" and "understand." 分ける = divide and 分かる = understand. I think those old guys knew some metaphysics. It's also true that in many cases, it is through dividing that we discern. For example, as you learn art history, you learn to divide Gothic style from Renaissance style, Quattrocento Botticelli from Cinquecento Raphael, early Raphael from late Raphael, etc. Increased connoisseurship comes through increased ability to discern one thing from another. For humans, understanding comes about through separating things. )

For mystics from Plotinus to Blake, visionary experience is when the apparent divisions go away. I'm pretty sure this is similar to satori in Zen, but being less familiar with that don't want to state it too strongly.

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I suppose for the pantheist, it would be okay to say God is one with all things. However, classical theism denies that. Yet how do they reconcile this with what you've laid out I wonder? 

Again, I'm not exactly clear about this. We have to DIVIDE Catholic divine simplicity from pantheism. 

Roughly, I think it has to do with where we draw the boundaries. Non-Christian pantheists hold that God is contiguous and co-terminous with the universe. 

For Catholics, God is infinite, and therefore not co-terminous with anything. God is the whole universe, plus infinity.

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assuming as they say he's wholly immaterial and necessary, separate from material, contingent things? 

Here I'm afraid that "separate from" is a spatial analogy, not a metaphysical truth. 

God seems separate to us, based on our limited perceptions. 

As far as I can tell, this was less clear in earlier theology -- I don't know of how Aquinas, for example, addressed this. 

In the 15th century the great polymath Bishop Nicholas of Cusa did original work in mathematics on the concept of infinity. (Since overthrown by Cantor's work, but there you are.) Cusanus argued that infinity could have no boundaries, because a limited infinity would not be infinite. (This is what Hegel called "bad infinity" -- what looks to us like infinity, but is said not to be present somewhere, isn't really infinite. Infinity must spread to everywhere.) 

Based on other arguments, Cusanus decided that because God is infinite, he can't be absent or separate from anything. This is the origin of Blake's famous poem: infinity in the palm of your hand, a world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour, etc. 

(Cusanus also used this concept of infinity to show -- several decades before Galileo, that an infinite universe would have no center, and therefore it is wrong to say that the earth is the center of the universe. He even proposed that the stars we see are like the sun, and may have people looking at us. He was of course burned at the stake for this -- oops, wrong, he was lavishly praised by several popes.)

Thus God is not separate from contingent or material things. 

OK, OK, I know this is getting pretty wild. I only brought it up to point to one strong and old tradition in which God's existence and consciousness are not separate -- they are in fact identical. As God's existence isn't separable from God, because God is the existence of everything whatsoever.