Notes on the Proofs for the Existence of God: Of Transmundane Repositories

“…The image illustrates, I think, the relationship of the soul to the body, and anyone who says the same thing about them would appear to me to be talking sense, that the soul lasts a long time while the body is weaker and more short-lived. He might say that each soul wears out many bodies, especially if it lives many years…” (Plato, Phaedo, translated by G.M.A. Grube)

At the outset, our preamble into this obviously ludicrous domain of Philosophy is beset by a complete lack of spiritedness, piety, intuition, imagination and wit. We are inclined to think this if we are to compare our procedure here with other similar investigations; that the ridiculousness of this question is beleaguered yet when we attempt to ask for proofs for the existence of other objects like Love, Justice, and Reality, etc. By asking such a question one ipso facto appears as someone who has barely immersed themselves in a subject, and so instead of doing the real reasoning labor of defining and proposing new ideas, one merely attempts by these proofs to have the slightest grasp of the mere exigency of the thing. Along with this apostatized way of approaching the object, we also may remark that in our age the impulse to secularize has left us with the most lazy charlatanry in this domain, so that unnameably boring Philosophers attempt to assuage us of the import of the object of God by asserting that God is merely love, conscience, organization, etc.

That the "God" of Philosophers is not really a typical religiously sanctioned God is also obvious, and Philosophers - it must be admitted - have a proclivity to desecrate the word "God" by using it as a vague point of orientation where they can affix their principles. In Hegel's Lectures on The Philosophy of Religion, Hegel at first asserts the existence of God by instead relying on the "infinite", and the infinite is then available most pronouncedly in two ways:

§1 that of the repose and withdrawing into oneself and the refusal to engage of foremost-action (which is infinite because in this modality the infinite is available to us because we take account of the manifold of possible choices; the infinite is itself this dynamistic manifold found in withdrawal)

§2 that of the finite giving rise to the infinite, for the reason we may use our faculty of prospection to infer that should a series of finite things play themselves out continually, then the finite itself becomes infinite (it should be noted that a repetition and series of the same is a bad infinite for Hegel and that a series of emergence makes up a good infinite)

We can interpret this charitably as meaning that we transform a thing into its Absolute version by imagining where it would end up at the end of a ever continuous series of changes. Later in the lectures of course Hegel also reduces god to a principle: the principle of the resolution of contradiction. Most explicitly this is what Hegel directly calls God. We will leave behind this notion of God as being the principle of the resolution of contradiction here, as we may find it a diversion from the task we have set out to accomplish, but in general we can suppose that the resolution of contradiction allows for either the close proximity to the object or more directly its absorption. This hermeneutic gives us then a quite dynamistic metaphysical perception of ordinary things, and we can find transcendence, but it is a similar state of mind to that of other Philosophies and only really impresses on us a world that is different from the one we see, if we are to be uncharitable. What we are trying to prove is the existence of a God with great power and knowledge which makes this God deserving of worship, and so a proleptic exercise in deliberating infinite things is still insufficient; what we are after is a more direct relation to our object.

So as not to any longer bore our reader with our contempt for this traditional domain of Philosophy, and so as not to engage in that mere History of Philosophy which lifelessly parades Philosophy's corpse, we will rather take the most literal definition of God we can find and then provide proofs for that definition. Our point of departure here will be to prove that there is such a thing as what the Oxford Dictionary of English calls "the being or spirit that is worshiped and is believed to have created the universe." Our task is then to show what manner of existence is responsible for creating the world, and to show why it is that it is deserving of worship. For our present purposes we will not yet investigate “whether God is a Principle, “The nature of Principles”, or other cognate quandaries, like: “what is a Spirit?” etc.

In order to set out to prove what we have just evinced, we learn it is also that Christianity already literalizes itself and asserts that God is a product of a faculty of the Human mind; an actual thing. in this way we receive from The Book of John the following: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God", "All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made", "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us". It then does not even require the slightest effort to prove that the Christian God exists, since the foregoing passages have already explained that the linguistic faculty of man, or more properly its product "the word" is God. The world is then primarily made by words, words and language itself allowed for communication, abstraction etc., and hence the creation then of institutions, culture, identity, etc. Such would be our inference if we were to be charitable in assigning the principal role of the creation of the world to the “word”. This is the most literal sense we can make of the Christian God whilst not departing from Christian doctrine and replacing it with a Philosophical concept. Furthermore, it is less relevant that when one assumes this as one's identity and when one conflates this word with one's identity, one becomes the Messiah, and is the word made flesh, and this is all it takes to attain divine nature in a Christian, albeit naive sense.

Why then should we assume that this "word" allows for omniscience and omnipotence? Or insofar as this question is relevant for us mere mortals: what access to power and knowledge have we if we are to make conference with this "word". So too, at this stage in our inquiry, we may also have the opportunity to actually improve upon this notion of God by showing how it brings about more effects, for, a things reality is complimented by whether it causes effects. Max Muller, the German translator of Eastern Philosophy, is another we will draw on here. Through his last essays, he discusses whether it is in fact literally true that the self is immortal. For the reader this should be ascertained as a similar exercise and justification as the one we are currently engaged in, but directed at the assertions of Brahminism based in the Upanisads. Max Muller then proposes that the self is primarily a unit of language, and that language is neither alive nor dead, and so it could never "die". These suppositions then will lead us to the brief indication of power and knowledge insofar as it is transmitted by language. The basic premise which accounts for how such effects come to be would then be as follows:

§1 Human subjects gather together merit, skill and other authoritative and proficient traits during their lives.

§2 The human being dies, but they construct a medium using language and craftsmanship whereby their merit and wisdom is retained for posterity.

§3 Eventually these templates which contain the relevant components of individuals accrue vast merit and wisdom and so become far more evocative than any of the merit and wisdom the average mortal being can achieve in their single lifecycle.

§4 The following human subject communes with this aggregate of excessive merit and wisdom, and learns from it through intoxication and skill; it attains to a likeness with this entity.

§5 The human subject experiences eternal bliss (a state which is deserving of its own inquiry) by encountering a divine thing (something with capabilities which exceed mundane merits and wisdom).

note: it seems highly contentious whether a catalyst which accrues vast merit and wisdom is by necessity language or writing.

note: that subject fluent in utilizing imagination and intelligence toward encountering such things as we have here elaborated skips this entire line of reasoning, and sets forth building their aggregate of merit, wisdom, etc. - they are then ever developing it without knowing how it arises, since how it arises is comparatively an entirely unnecessary additional step next to attaining resemblance to it.

note: for the purposes of clarity, we may call such units of inspissating merit and knowledge “Transmundane Repositories”.

note: if we were to choose between the inheriting vast sums of merit and knowledge from transmundane repositories while all the while remaining mortal, or, the life of an immortal who does not have the potentia to encounter transmundane repositories, we would choose the former.

See: Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Max Muller, Last Essays, The Book of John, KJV, Plato, Phaedo, translated by G.M.A. Grube