Q&A: If the attribute "exists" can be applied to God, then is He similar to something we describe as "existing"?
If the attribute "exists" can be applied to God, then is He similar to something we describe as "existing"?
Question
Dear Rabbi Michael,
If the attribute "exists" can be applied to God, then is He similar to something we describe as "existing"?
If not—why do you use the same word both for something from familiar reality, which may be known to us, and also for God?
If so—there are two possibilities:
either the thing He resembles is limited in its very essence, or it is not.
If the thing God resembles is limited in its very essence, then God, who resembles it, is limited as well.
If the thing God resembles is not limited in its very essence, then we cannot grasp the thing that God resembles. And so we arrive at a contradiction to the premise we started with—that God resembles something we actually can grasp (a proof by negation that this is impossible).
If one cannot apply the attribute "exists" to God—how can one place the word God as the subject of religious sentences? ("God created…", "God commanded…", etc.)
Let us return to the possibility that God is limited—why should I listen to a limited God? Out of fear of punishment because He performed miracles? Maybe there is a God greater than He is? After all, He does not provide the total purpose for all being, since He Himself is limited and one would need to ask what the purpose of the divine object is as a limited object.
A personal note—I believe that it is proper to follow the way of the Torah because it is rational, and to feel divinity through the commandments (something like neo-Hasidism), and not that because God exists one should keep the commandments. On the contrary—because one keeps the commandments, one feels the Divine Presence. As part of this, I see the word "exists" with regard to God, in Maimonides' words, as complete equivocation, "and His existence is not like the existence of any one of them." There is no connection at all between God's existence and the existence of anything we know—just as the word "eye" applies both to an organ in the body and to a spring of water, or as "brother" applies both to a sibling and to a stove. It is a completely accidental connection (though perhaps it was formed deterministically, and one can derive homiletic interpretations, hints, Kabbalah, and Hasidic ideas from why two things in the world are called by the same name despite the glaring lack of resemblance.)
Many blessings!
Ofir
Answer
First, existence is not an attribute. It refers to the thing itself and not to its attributes. Kant and the critics of the ontological proof already made this point out (see here on the site in the first notebook).
Second, the only similarity I assume between God and other existing objects is that they all exist. No other similarity is relevant here. And indeed, He exists in exactly the same sense that they exist, just as a photon exists or a calf exists or the soul exists. All the other characteristics (mass, occupying space, and so on) are not relevant to the discussion, because existence does not presuppose them and is not connected to them.
Discussion on Answer
I think that here too one should note that a calf "exists" (as a thing with predicates) in that "it has continuity through time" (while its attributes change—it is small at first and gradually grows), whereas God, by way of negation, "does not perish" (we cannot grasp a duration of time called "eternity" in a positive way).
Necessity in existence may perhaps be an attribute (and I noted this in Two Wagons), but not existence itself.
Ofir,
That is not correct. Continuity through time is not connected to existence. It is a property.
If so, only God exists. You cannot point to the fact of the calf's existence if the calf is a soup of phenomena with no persistence. You arrive at a Spinozist position according to which there is only one substance, and it is grasped only through itself and resembles nothing.
Not at all. The calf is not a soup of phenomena. It is a collection of properties that characterize the object in question. Continuity through time is one of them. You are conflating a collection of phenomena at a moment in time with a collection of moments in time of the thing's existence.
So if there are many properties and there is no persistence in their combination together, why is this one object and not several?
I do not know what is unclear here. An object that exists for one second is an object, and it exists fully. There are such objects.
Only the persistence of the predicates together over time (a duration of one second in the case you pointed to) is what makes the predicates apply to one object—a substance. Therefore persistence is the thing we need to point to in order to define a particular object. But God is not persistent; rather, He is eternal. We cannot grasp His persistence, and therefore we say by way of negation, "does not perish." 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.
It is established for us that God exists necessarily.
And that too is a property, not a reference to the thing itself.