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11 Chapter 1 Inadequate Approaches to the Question of God 1.1 Initial Clarifications As is well known, the question of God has been presented and addressed in a great many ways, these ways being based in specific modes of discourse . This book concerns only philosophical modes (more precisely: modes that consider themselves to be or designate themselves as philosophical ). With respect to the task of attaining clarity concerning these forms, a classification of them is highly desirable. But it is not clear that a classification is possible. On first consideration, it appears to be scarcely possible. The situation changes, however, if specific criteria for a classification are explicitly identified. Such criteria determine the classification in that they appear as some among various possible ones. The criterion used here is the one most appropriate given the central thesis of this book, formulated in the “Introduction,” according to which to ask adequately about God, to treat the questions that then arise effectively and to answer them in ways that are rational in every respect requires that the questioning proceed within the framework of a comprehensive philosophical conception concerning reality or Being as such and as a whole. Different approaches to the question concerning God can be classified in accordance with how they relate to this central thesis. It turns out that they relate to it in an enormous variety of ways, so even the classification that attends strictly to this criterion remains incomplete. It is, however, sufficient for the purposes of this book. The approaches presented and criticized in this first chapter are inadequate in at least one (and in some cases in both) of the following two respects. The first is their total or partial failure to clarify or to explain the immense spectrum of presuppositions on which direct talk about God is based. The second respect is wholly different, because contentual: these approaches (or at least most of them) start from some individual, isolated aspect of or phenomenon in the world (somehow understood), for example, from a specific concept or phenomenon (such as motion or causality). 12 C H A P T E R 1 Approaches exhibiting the first inadequacy are philosophically secondary or dependent, and because what they are secondary to or dependent on remains unclear and unexplained, their philosophical status remains undetermined. Those suffering from the second inadequacy can yield only one-sided concepts of God, ones that are wholly inadequate to the idea of the divine because they allow God to appear only as a function of some single aspect of the world, not as the dimension that encompasses the world as a whole. No such “God” can ultimately be thought of legitimately or even coherently. This chapter treats only a few inadequate approaches; they serve only as examples of such approaches. Because the terms/concepts unsystematic, anti-systematic, semisystematic , direct, and indirect are used in what follows to distinguish among inadequate approaches to the question of God, these terms/concepts require explanation at this point. The explanations are of them only as they are used in this book. Unsystematic approaches are ones that do not explicitly articulate the essential philosophical contexts within which their sentences, their theories, their subject matters, indeed every one of their theoretical elements and thus all of their talk of God, is unavoidably situated. Anti-systematic approaches are strictly distinct from unsystematic ones. Anti-systematic approaches are ones that explicitly deny the reasonability and indeed the possibility—and so, of course, the unavoidability —of making explicit the essential contexts, presuppositions, and implications of philosophical articulation. Semi-systematic approaches are those that articulate their contexts, presuppositions, and implications only in part and insufficiently. Direct approaches to the question of God are ones that introduce no preliminary or intermediate stages that must be passed through before the term/concept God is introduced as intelligible. God is accepted from the outset as having a sense that, in one way or another, can simply be presupposed, in some cases on the basis of the putative familiarity of that sense. To put the point loosely: direct approaches to the question of God presuppose that those who take them know from the outset what they are talking about. There are many varieties of direct approaches, of highly divergent types. Most of them rely on some pre-understanding of the Christian God. Of particular importance is that none of them relies or recognizes—at least not explicitly—the distinction, central to this book, between absolutely necessary Being...

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