If the title “exists” can be applied to God, then is he similar to something we describe as “existing”?
To dear Rabbi Michael, peace be upon you!
If the title “existent” can be applied to God, then is he similar to something we describe as “existent”?
If not – why do you use the same word for something from the known reality that may be known and also for God?
If so – there are two options-
Either the thing it resembles is limited in its very essence, or it is not.
If the thing that resembles God is limited in its very essence, then the God that resembles Him is also limited.
If the thing that God resembles is not limited in its essence – then we cannot perceive the thing that God resembles. Therefore, we have come to a contradiction to the assumption from which we started – that God resembles something that we can perceive (proof by negation that this is not possible).
If it is impossible to apply the title “exist” to God – how can the word God be included as the subject of religious sentences? (“God created…”, “God commanded…”, etc.)
Let’s return to the possibility of a limited God – why would I listen to a limited God? Out of fear of punishment because he performed miracles? Maybe there is a God greater than him? After all, he does not give the total purpose to all that exists, since he himself is limited and we need to think about what the purpose of the divine object is as a limited object.
Personal note – I believe that it is appropriate to follow the path of the Torah because it makes sense, and to feel the divinity through the mitzvot (a kind of neo-Hasidism), and not because God exists that one should keep the mitzvot. On the contrary – because those who keep the mitzvot feel the Shekhinah. As part of this, I see the word “exists” with regard to God, as Maimonides says – in complete association, “and His reality is not like the reality of either of them.” There is no connection between the existence of God and the existence of something we know – just as the word “eye” applies to a body organ and a source of water or “brother” applies to a relative and an oven. This is a completely coincidental connection (although it may have been created deterministically and one can demand sermons on hints and Kabbalah and Hasidism about why two things in the world are called by the same name despite the abject lack of similarity.)
Most blessed!
Ofir
First, existence is not an adjective. It is a reference to the body of the object and not to its adjectives. Kant and those who challenge the ontological view insisted on this (see here on the website in the first notebook).
Second, the only similarity I posit between God and the other existing objects is that they all exist. No other similarity is relevant here. Indeed, He exists in exactly the same sense that they exist, just as a photon exists or a calf exists or a soul exists. All other characteristics (mass, occupying space, etc.) are irrelevant to the discussion because existence does not posit them and is not related to them.
Existence is necessary for God to exist.
And this is also a property and not a reference to the body of the object.
I think that here too it should be noted that a calf “exists” (as a noun with predicates) in that it “has continuity in time” (while its adjectives change - at first it is small and slowly it grows), while God, by way of negation, “does not decay” (we cannot achieve a duration of “eternal” by way of affirmation)
The necessity of existence may be an adjective (and I noted this in two sentences), but not the very essence of existence.
Ofir,
Not true. Continuity in time is not related to existence. It is a property.
Then only God exists. You cannot dictate the fact of the existence of the calf if the calf is a soup of phenomena without permanence. You arrive at the Spinozist position that there is only one thing and it is attained only through itself and is not like a thing.
Absolutely not. The calf is not a soup of phenomena. It is a collection of properties that characterize the object in question. Continuity in time is one of them. You are mixing up a collection of phenomena at a moment in time with a collection of moments in time of the object's existence.
So if there are many properties and there is no consistency in combining them together, why is it one object and not several?
I don't know what's unclear here. An object that exists for one second is an object and it exists completely. There are such objects.
Only the constancy of the predicates together over a period of time (a duration of a second in the case you pointed to) makes the predicates valid for one object – an object. Therefore, constancy is what we need to point to in order to define a particular object. But God is not constant, but eternal, we cannot grasp his constancy and therefore we say by way of negation “imperishable”. The definition of God's existence is by way of negation and accordingly his existence is in no way similar to the existence of a calf or a photon.
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