Q&A: Thinking About Something of Which We Have No Impression in Reality, and the Existence of God
Thinking About Something of Which We Have No Impression in Reality, and the Existence of God
Question
Hello and blessings,
I’m starting from the assumption that we have no ability to imagine / think about / grasp something unless we have received information about it through the senses. The proof of this is to ask a person to imagine something he has never heard, seen, or experienced—this is impossible. Any imagination will always have some source in reality. (Following Maimonides’ definition of imagination as an unreal combination of two real objects.)
Everything that exists in our consciousness is ultimately material. We call “spirit” things that are more abstract—air, energy, love, affection, feelings, or phenomena whose material side is hard for us to define—but as science advances, we have more and more understanding and explanations for the material source of “spiritual” phenomena, yet in the end they too are composed of matter.
If so, when we think about “God” (or the First Existent), must we necessarily say that He is composed of matter?
But that is the opposite of the religious idea of God as “above nature,” isn’t it?
I’d be glad to hear ideas and directions for thought.
Thank you very much,
Shmuel
Answer
Four inaccurate assumptions/claims.
- We can imagine something we have not encountered, at least if it is an extension of what we have encountered. Something of a completely different kind is very hard to imagine, though I am not sure it is impossible. We do have imaginings very far removed from what we have encountered, although it always seems possible to view them as some kind of extension of what we have encountered. The question is whether a spiritual object is essentially different from what we have encountered, or whether it too can be treated as an abstraction or extension of other objects. Mainly, we just remove the mass. Photons or electromagnetic waves are entities of this kind (without mass).
- You assume that imagining means experiencing some visual image. But that is not correct. To imagine a photon or a field is not to see a picture of them (because they do not have a visual image). Still, we can think about them, and certainly assume that they exist.
- You assume that what we cannot imagine does not exist. Not true. Not only is there no necessity that it does not exist, but there are definitely things that exist and that we cannot imagine. A photon, for example (certainly by your definition of imagination; see the previous section). If I have reached the philosophical conclusion that there exists an entity that created the world, there is no obstacle at all to thinking that it exists even if I cannot imagine it.
- Even if you do not accept everything I said above, spirit is of course not material, but at most something that is created by (emerges from) matter, and even that is only if you are a materialist. Therefore there is no reason at all to assume that spirit itself is material. It can be a property of matter, and it can also be an object of another kind, one that perhaps we cannot imagine. I think I once brought here an interesting conversation I had with the late Prof. Yosef Neumann, one of the leading atheist-materialists in Israel. He told me that his materialist friends insist on identifying spirit with electrical currents and so on. He tries unsuccessfully to explain to them the nonsense of this. There is no dispute that mental phenomena are not material. The dispute between materialism and dualism is whether these are properties of matter or an additional substance (spirit). All this is in addition to the previous claims: even if you cannot imagine something, that does not mean it does not exist, and so on.
By my life, this is one of the most well-reasoned answers on the subject that I’ve read (if I may mention my own merits today—I’ve read a lot in this area).