I suppose we could expand the thread into a wider talk about logical proofs for God’s existence. Esq, do I correctly surmise that you believe no amount of thinking can call something into existence? That seems obvious enough for most categories of being. If so, I generally agree*.
That said, a self-evident premise of the OP is that reason serves as a means for gaining knowledge of reality. Clearly, no one can have knowledge of that which does not exist. But it is also clear that something can exist of which no one has knowledge. The question before us is whether knowledge of God, could in theory, be gained by using reason. Now people cannot know anything about specific gods, like Thor or Jesus Christ, unless the gods make themselves known is a highly specific way like divine revelation. “Proofs of God” deal only with how people can gain general knowledge of the divine by reasoning from the experiences within their reach.
All experiences have two distinct features: a sensible object and a knowing subject. As such, by reasoning from experience someone can gain knowledge about a sensible object by observation and about himself as a knowing subject by introspection. For example, someone can know that water refracts light and he can know that he likes to swim. The general revelations found in nature come from the most basic types of experience, like knowing that things maintain their existence despite change (the Aristotle’s unmoved mover) or that each of the plurality of things owes its particular being to a universal ground of being (Aquinas’s 2nd Way). This rest on self-evidences like the reliablity of our senses, the validity of logic, and personal identity.
This speaks to the so-called lack of evidence touted by most atheists. The Christian God, in the person of the Father, is not just another being like any other being, but rather something that pervades all of reality. As such most Christian apologists don’t point to a unique or specific bit of reality as evidence of God. Instead the whole of nature is the evidence, evidence that is only recognized as evidence by applying reason to experience, as shown above.
*While sensible objects counts as one category or being, there are others, like sets, relations & identity, that exist in a limited way, if only in thought.
That said, a self-evident premise of the OP is that reason serves as a means for gaining knowledge of reality. Clearly, no one can have knowledge of that which does not exist. But it is also clear that something can exist of which no one has knowledge. The question before us is whether knowledge of God, could in theory, be gained by using reason. Now people cannot know anything about specific gods, like Thor or Jesus Christ, unless the gods make themselves known is a highly specific way like divine revelation. “Proofs of God” deal only with how people can gain general knowledge of the divine by reasoning from the experiences within their reach.
All experiences have two distinct features: a sensible object and a knowing subject. As such, by reasoning from experience someone can gain knowledge about a sensible object by observation and about himself as a knowing subject by introspection. For example, someone can know that water refracts light and he can know that he likes to swim. The general revelations found in nature come from the most basic types of experience, like knowing that things maintain their existence despite change (the Aristotle’s unmoved mover) or that each of the plurality of things owes its particular being to a universal ground of being (Aquinas’s 2nd Way). This rest on self-evidences like the reliablity of our senses, the validity of logic, and personal identity.
This speaks to the so-called lack of evidence touted by most atheists. The Christian God, in the person of the Father, is not just another being like any other being, but rather something that pervades all of reality. As such most Christian apologists don’t point to a unique or specific bit of reality as evidence of God. Instead the whole of nature is the evidence, evidence that is only recognized as evidence by applying reason to experience, as shown above.
*While sensible objects counts as one category or being, there are others, like sets, relations & identity, that exist in a limited way, if only in thought.
