Metaphysics Unnecessary if God Exists?
A professor of mine raised an interesting point a couple of weeks ago (and yes, I’m just now getting around to posting about it!). He mentioned off-hand that many philosophers after Spinoza simply declared that if God exists necessarily, or is the uncaused cause, that metaphysics is unnecessary.
To what extent is that true? Is it really the case that the study of being and knowing is irrelevant if God is the uncaused cause?
I don’t think so; to the contrary, doesn’t this make metaphysics most exciting? My professor was phrasing the point in such a way that it sounded like the philosophers making their claim were disappointed that God should exist because it would take away their fun; but let’s assume they didn’t have these kinds of motives. But I think that’s one of the very joys of studying metaphysics, and indeed what fascinates me so about it: when I began studying philosophy, it was primarily in the interest of these kinds of things, of being and knowing, because by inquiring into these matters it would be as if one were inquiring into the nature of the living God, by whom all things are (Be) and who is the all-knowing and who designed us to “know” things as well.
2 Responses to “Metaphysics Unnecessary if God Exists?”
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Thom Says:
March 4th, 2005 at 09:20:01Apparently your professor has forgotten how to play. Play is the opposite of utility. It is the pleasure in the thing itself. Very little of anything we ever do is absolutely new: a striding out into the absolute unknown. What is new is our doing it. I play guitar, read Heidegger, and chip away at this way of being called “theologian” because it is pleasurable. Every “game” (linguistic or otherwise) has rules. Indeed, a game without rules is chaos.
It is because God exists that metaphysics is a worthwhile pursuit. The existence of the triune God makes a game of chaos, and means that we are allowed the pleasure of discovery against a field of possibility rather than thrust naked into a void of relativity and the power of argument (or of force, or chance). Whereas the former has meaning and narrative, opening ever-wider into greater areas of ability and pleasurability, the latter is an afterbirth and an accident, with no meaning or narrative at all.
Discovery, rather than utility, is the mother of science. In the days when scientists were theists (and by all reports, many of them – even the most advanced of them – still are), scientific inquiry did fairly well for itself. Indeed, science is at its best when its method is given dimension in the human context of wonder, of investigation, and of the deep assurance that the logos is there. There is something there which is not only worth learning but can be learned.
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Michael Says:
March 14th, 2005 at 03:27:42This sounds very much, in the last paragraph, how Schaeffer handles science. Even Bacon in Novum Organum tries to relate it back to God. [I had something else to say here and I lost it.]
March 4th, 2005 at 09:20:01
Apparently your professor has forgotten how to play. Play is the opposite of utility. It is the pleasure in the thing itself. Very little of anything we ever do is absolutely new: a striding out into the absolute unknown. What is new is our doing it. I play guitar, read Heidegger, and chip away at this way of being called “theologian” because it is pleasurable. Every “game” (linguistic or otherwise) has rules. Indeed, a game without rules is chaos.
It is because God exists that metaphysics is a worthwhile pursuit. The existence of the triune God makes a game of chaos, and means that we are allowed the pleasure of discovery against a field of possibility rather than thrust naked into a void of relativity and the power of argument (or of force, or chance). Whereas the former has meaning and narrative, opening ever-wider into greater areas of ability and pleasurability, the latter is an afterbirth and an accident, with no meaning or narrative at all.
Discovery, rather than utility, is the mother of science. In the days when scientists were theists (and by all reports, many of them – even the most advanced of them – still are), scientific inquiry did fairly well for itself. Indeed, science is at its best when its method is given dimension in the human context of wonder, of investigation, and of the deep assurance that the logos is there. There is something there which is not only worth learning but can be learned.
March 14th, 2005 at 03:27:42
This sounds very much, in the last paragraph, how Schaeffer handles science. Even Bacon in Novum Organum tries to relate it back to God. [I had something else to say here and I lost it.]