The Rational God is dedicated to investigating the ultimate questions of existence. Such questions can be approached through science but even a scientific investigation requires contextualizing. Whatever science discovers is seldom final, a deeper explanation is usually needed. This is where philosophical analysis can help.
The title is two words. Rational and God. I have no interest in irrational claims or notions of knowledge which require a suspension of my rational or empirical faculties. There is then, a very clear emphasis on the term rational.
The God alluded to in the title is the pantheist God of Spinoza. Simply stated pantheism is the philosophical claim that God and the universe is the same thing. For many this definition makes no sense. They ask,
“Why point to the universe as a whole and claim that this is God? Why not just call it the universe?”
High Priest of atheism Richard Dawkins asserts that:
“Pantheism is sexed up atheism.”
For me a pantheist claim rests on one basic principle. That principle is based on the nature of the existence of mind or spirit, or whatever you may want to call it. If it can be demonstrated that the mind is a fundamental component of the universe then the universe is necessarily a thinking thing. If mind is a mere chance occurrence in the universe, something that just happened to evolve and existence could have been otherwise, then pantheism fails.
When we look at the structure of reality it is clear that some things must exist in order for a universe to exist. I don’t mean that in a trivial sense. The claim is that for a universe to exist then there are some things which necessarily exist as components of that universe; ie. all possible universes have some features in common. For example, it seems likely that two candidates for necessary components of any universe would be space and time. Can you imagine a universe existing that did not contain space? Can you picture a universe existing which did not have a temporal component?
One of the questions I look at in my book and which I shall be returning to in this blog asks:
Is the human mind a necessary component of the universe? If the answer to this question is yes then pantheism becomes far more important than the mere assertion of Dawkins that “pantheism is sexed up atheism.”
The blog then is going to discuss ideas from science. Philosophical issues will be a constant feature and I think questions concerning God, theism and atheism may prove popular.