Dear Atheists: what would convince you God/Christ is Real?

[Belacqua]

That's an interesting question. I hadn't thought of all this in terms of my personal satisfaction. 

I know from reading lots of things that these are basic themes in theology and philosophy, so it makes sense that anyone interested in those fields would look into them. 


Yes, I think it would be a mistake to get bogged down on issues of modern English usage. Whether the word "thing" can refer to Platonic Forms or not isn't really the problem. 

If there are such things as Platonic Forms, they are generally not knowable through the senses. But I would have no trouble with a sentence like "You can't know about those things in the way that you know about rocks and lizards." 

I guess my point is just that whatever kind of thing a Platonic Form is -- or what God is -- we have to be careful not to treat it as something that would necessarily be definable, quantifiable, or locatable in space. For millennia, those are not characteristics attributed to them. 

At the moment I'm reading Plato and Dialectic, by Rush Rhees. This guy worked closely with Wittgenstein, so he's not someone who's stuck in the past. So far in the book he hasn't said anything about what a God would be like, but he does accept that there are aspects of the world that cannot be spoken of adequately in human language. He finds Plato's approach to be relevant and useful here.

Right, well it's in that overarching, comparative sense you've described that a 'thing' is meaningful to my own questions of why, and how, something not nothing. So I'm asking 'how can any 'thing', regardless of type or even kind, material, immaterial, knowable or unknowable etc, come into existence from nothing or exist eternally?'. Call this question 1.

Whereas the question from theology would seem to be different, more like 'how can one type/kind of thing - material things - come into existence from nothing or exist eternally?' and with the answer given 'by being created by another type/kind of thing - unknowable, spiritual, Platonic etc - that does come into existence from nothing or exist eternally'. Call this question 2.

From my perspective then, question 2, and its answer, is not satisfactory in the slightest because it does not address question 1 in the slightest. So I was basically asking if question 2, and its answer, is wholly satisfactory to you, and if so, why you and theology in general seem to have no interest whatsoever in question 1 (correct me if I'm wrong)? To me, question 2 is at best kicking the can on some questions, but not the key questions, and at worst, a red herring.

Well, gee -- you're only asking the biggest and most difficult metaphysical questions ever asked. There may be people who can give concise and persuasive answers to these, but I don't think I'm one of them. 

One way we might want to approach it is through act and potency. Or actualization and potentiality, in more modern terms. 

God is perfect actualization with no potential. Prime matter, in which no actualization has taken place, is entirely potential. So here we're not talking about spirit vs. matter, or mind vs. physical stuff. There aren't two types, there is only a continuum. One end is potential with no actualization, the other end is pure actualization with no potential. 

The way they explain it is that for completely unactualized potential to begin to actualize, it must be actualized by something which is already more actualized. Prime matter, which has no form or function, needs to be acted upon in order to become more than prime matter. But prime matter is just unactualized potential, not something globby and shapeless like clay. It's not really possible for us to picture prime matter in our minds, because we will always imagine something stuff-like. 

Anything which is at any level of part-potential and part-actuality (like you and me and rocks and lizards) is acted upon by something else in order to increase its actualization. At the end of this causal chain is the thing which is all act and no potency -- God. The thing which is all act and no potency (God) must always have existed because there is nothing of greater actualization which could cause it to exist. For anything at all to rise up from the level of pure potency (prime matter) this God must exist. So in this system, God never came into being. This is a fundamental point in classical theology.

There cannot have been another being before this God, because only one thing can be actus purus. If there were a more actualized being acting on God, then the God that's acted upon isn't actus purus, and therefore isn't really God. 

There was never a time when the actus purus -- full actualization -- didn't exist. This is because, as Augustine pointed out, it doesn't make sense to speak of time if there are no things to be in motion. Just as there was no time before the Big Bang, it doesn't make sense to ask what God was doing before he began the actualization of potency. 

As actus purus, with no potentiality, God doesn't act in the world, or create it, by reaching down and changing things. He takes no actions and undergoes no changes. Nonetheless he causes all things to happen because all potentiality in the world actualizes due to the existence of the already-actualized thing. 

So I guess if we call act and potency things, then things have always existed. If, on the other hand, we think of the beginning of the world as the point at which prime matter began to take on form, then we could say that the world had a starting point. 

As with all thumbnail explanations like this one, I'm not expecting it to persuade anybody. Each sentence that I've typed would need to be explicated more fully to be in any way persuasive. 

Nor am I arguing that this must be true, or that I believe it has to be true, or that anyone here should believe it. I am reporting what classical theology says.