Postmodern Ontologies, Epistemologies, and Faith, Part 4

So, we all have presumptions.  Without belaboring the point further, you could say that my blogging is evidence of my provisional presumption that other extant minds exist.  Alternatively, though, I could be fully agnostic about the existence of other minds and the action of blogging might be part of a self-consciously created code of conduct to which I imbue and from which I take existential meaning.

Organizing one’s life around a code of behavior (the transcendence of which is suspect at best or outrightly denied) is nothing new.  Ernest Hemingway did it.  The author of Ecclesiastes did it.  Sports fans and patriots do it all the time.  Same for philosophers, writers, and religious people.   Codes, traditions, laws, parameters, organizing principles, founding myths–hell, even preferences– can all be noble lies we accept just for some semblance of order, progress, telos, point. My point here is that action doesn’t always belie belief (or mean that there is belief) and that we lie to ourselves (I presume) all the time.

In summation of this idea, I presume that I exist because I think.  I have no way of knowing whether I exist in the physical world as I perceive it (or that this world is, indeed, physical), or as a brain in a vat or in some other simulation.  For a chance at happiness, the best I can do is function as if the world I perceive is the world that exists, because there’s nothing I can do about it if it’s not, anyway.  

A few nights ago I was meditating on this premise as I fell asleep.  I repeated the phrase “I think therefore I am” a dozen times and then began to focus only on the phrase “I am” and it occurred to me that if God exists, the being we call God would be the only being that knows with certainty that minds beyond his own exist.  Does the fact that I can imagine a being who knows the absolute terms of his existence mean that such a being exists?  Descartes would say yes, right?  But it’s not clear to me that his argument for God’s existence (which runs counter to his provisional Method) isn’t just him dicking around.  And, of course, it might not be the case that that which we call God would know anything with certainty.  We assume that something worthy of the capital G is omniscient, omnipotent, eternal, and good.   Consider, though, that we have no reason to assume these things, and consider the apologetic room it allows you if you do believe: the problem of evil is a easier to live with when you’re not bound by at least one of these assumptions.  

The more I thought about the relationship between the statements “I think therefore I am” and “I am”, the more I let myself wonder if Yahweh’s self-descriptor (“I Am” or “I Am that I Am” etc) is actually the awkward realization of the only truly self-aware being, and this being trying to communicate that awareness to we the contingent.  Imagine the poetry of this: (let’s call this being) God realizes “he is” and tries to articulate that to creatures who have no way whatsoever of knowing what grounds reality.  If you’re willing to imagine this with me, nothing is too far-fetched (since we’re just imaging).  Could it be that history (or, if you like, the universe) starts with God’s Gogito ergo sum? 

Karl Barth said God is self-communication.  I, for one, love the idea that God’s naming convention is actually the temporally disturbing effort of the Self-Aware God to say something about himself:  ”I am!” 

This, of course, doesn’t get us any closer to knowing anything about the hows of God’s existence, but if you’re already inclined to believe in God, and, more specifically, you believe that the Jewish and Christian traditions (or codes) have something to say about that God that is somehow true, I don’t think this is a bad way to make sense of the importance of “I am” within the context of our own inability to really know if others are.  God’s knowledge of his existence only grounds the reality of our existence if we also believe that he has some other way of accessing pure ontological truth, or if, you know, he created us. 

Part 5 eventually, maybe.