Philosophy 298: Honors Seminar
Fall 2005
Professor Emile Piscitelli
The Question of God:
Pro and Con ?
PBS Program: A Beginning: Status Questionis.
(Click Here To Go To PBS Site)
Unit I: Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis: The PBS Program.
Conversations with Thoughtful People: The Limits of Common Sense. Common Nonsense: Has Western Secular Culture become a Slum? If so, who are the Slum Lords?
Read: Freud and Lewis Texts (Click Here)
Unit II: God In Antiquity: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine. The Good, Mind Minding Itself, The One, and God.
Unit III: God In The Middle Ages: Anselm, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas: Apologetics, Mysticism and Argument.
Unit IV: God In The Renaissance and Modern Philosophy: Machiavelli, Descartes, and Vico: Politics, Science, History, and Poetry.
Unit V: God In The European Enlightenment (Theism, Deism, and Atheism): Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel: Scepticism, Critique, and Geisteswissenschaften and the Absolute Spirit.
Unit VI: God of Subjectivity and The Eclipse and Death of God In Nineteenth Century Romanticism: Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (Feeling of Absolute Dependence), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Death of God), Karl Marx (Opium of the People) and Friedrich Engels (Projection of Idealized Man): History, Feeling, Subjectivity, and the Will to Power.
Unit VII: The Resurgence of The Philosophies of God: Eric Voeglin and the Recovery of the Classic Experience of Reason; Paul Ricoeur and the Recovery of Religious Myth and Symbolism; and Bernard Lonergan and the Recovery of the Theoretical and the Affective Life as an Experience of the Divine.
Evaluation:
Students will chose research topics from the above units.
Readings:
1. Texts of Freud and Lewis from PBS. Required
PBS Program Discussion Guide Download in .pdf file Once you down load the file save it on your hard disc so you can access it later.
2. Plato's Symposium Required
3. Aristotle, Metaphysics Book XII.
4. Plotinus: The Enneads: The Enneads
4. Augustine, Confessions. Required
6. Anselm, Proslogion. Required
7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae,
Five Ways. Summa: Question 2 Required
On the Nature and Existence of God in Aquinas's Apologetic Work:
8. God and Physics: From Hawking to Avicenna Arab/Muslim Medieval Philosophy
9. Machiavelli, The Prince. Works
10. Rene Descartes, Third Meditation. 
11. Giambattista Vico, Scienzia Nuova ,
12. Rousseau & the Revolt Against Reason Mary Ann Glendon
13. Emmanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment.
14. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. Philosophy of Right
15. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiemacher, Five Speeches On Religion Addressed to Its Cultural Dispisers.
16. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. God Is Dead!
17. Marx and Engels: Collected Writings.
18. Charles Darwin: On The Origin of the Species. Ian Johnson On Darwin
19. Eric Voegelin: Reason the Classic Experience. Required
20. Paul Ricoeur: Religion Atheism, and Faith. Required Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy of Religious Symbol Required
21. Mataphysics As Horizon: Kant's Nominalist Pre-Judgment: The Precursor to Heidegger's Critique of Onto-Theology. "Overcoming Metaphysics" Or how a fundamental error in cognitional theory can undermine a whole tradition.
22. Kant and the Question of God, Hans Georg Gadamer. Required
23. My Account of B. Lonergan's Metaphysics: Background to the next reading.
24. Bernard Lonergan's Argument for the Existence of God In Insight. Required
25. The Gospel and Culture, Eric Voegelin. Required
26. Russell Copleston 1948 BBC Debate on the existence of God.
27. B.J.F Lonergan on the Philosophy of Religion and the History of Theology
Required = Must be Read!
I. THE QUESTION OF GOD
The facts of good and evil, of progress and decline, raise questions about the character of our universe. Such
questions have been put in very many ways, and the answers given have been even more numerous. But behind this
multiplicity there is a basic unity that comes to light in the exercise of transcendental method. We can inquire
into the possibility of fruitful inquiry. We can reflect on the nature of reflection. We can deliberate whether
our deliberating is worth while. In each case, there arises the question
of God.
The possibility of inquiry on the side of the subject lies in his intelligence, in his drive to know what, why,
how, and in his ability to reach intellectually satisfying answers. But why should the answers that satisfy the
intelligence of the subject yield anything more than a subjective satisfaction? Why should they be supposed to
possess any relevance to knowledge of the universe? Of course, we assume that they do. We can point to the fact
that our assumption is confirmed by its fruits. So implicitly we grant that the universe is intelligible and, once
that is granted, there arises the question whether the universe could be intelligible without having an intelligent
ground. But that is the question about God.
Again, to reflect on reflection is to ask just what happens when we marshal and weigh the evidence for pronouncing
that this probably is so and that probably is not so. To what do these metaphors of marshalling and weighing refer?
Elsewhere I have worked out an answer to this question and here I can do no more than summarily repeat my conclusion.
Judgment proceeds rationally from a grasp of a virtually unconditioned. By an unconditioned is meant any "x"
that has no conditions. By a virtually unconditioned is meant any "x" that has no unfulfilled conditions.
In other words, a virtually unconditioned is a conditioned whose conditions are all fulfilled. To marshal the evidence
is to ascertain whether all the conditions are fulfilled. To weigh the evidence is to ascertain whether the fulfillment
of the conditions certainly or probably involves the existence or occurrence of the conditioned.
Now this account of judgment implicitly contains a further element. If we are to speak of a virtually unconditioned,
we must first speak of an unconditioned. The virtually unconditioned has no unfulfilled conditions. The strictly
unconditioned has no conditions whatever. In traditional terms, the former is a contingent being, and the latter
is a necessary being. In more contemporary terms the former pertains to this world, to the world of possible experience,
while the latter transcends this world in the sense that its reality is of a totally different order. But in either
case we come to the question of God. Does a necessary being exist? Does there exist a reality that transcends the
reality of this world?
To deliberate about "x" is to ask whether "x" is worth while. To deliberate about deliberating
is to ask whether any deliberating is worth while. Has "worth while" any ultimate meaning? Is moral enterprise
consonant with this world? We praise the developing subject ever more capable of attention, insight, reasonableness,
responsibility. We praise progress and denounce every manifestation of decline. But is the universe on our side,
or are we just gamblers and, if we are gamblers, are we not perhaps fools, individually struggling for authenticity
and collectively endeavoring to snatch progress from the ever mounting welter of decline? The questions arise and,
clearly, our attitudes and our resoluteness may be profoundly affected by the answers. Does there or does there
not necessarily exist a transcendent, intelligent ground of the universe? Is that ground or are we the primary
instance of moral consciousness? Are cosmogenesis, biological evolution, historical process basically cognate to
us as moral beings or are they indifferent and so alien to us?
Such is the question of God. It is not a matter of image or feeling, of concept or judgment. They pertain to answers. It is a question. It rises out of our conscious intentionality, out of the a priori structured drive that promotes us from experiencing to the effort to understand, from understanding to the effort to judge truly, from judging to the effort to choose rightly. In the measure that we advert to our own questioning and proceed to question it, there arises the question of God.
It is a question that will be manifested differently in the different stages
of man's historical development and in the many varieties of his culture. But such differences of manifestation
and expression are secondary. They may introduce alien elements that overlay, obscure, distort the pure question,
the question that questions questioning itself. None the less, the obscurity and the distortion presuppose what
they obscure and distort. It follows that, however much religious or irreligious answers differ, however much there
differ the questions they explicitly raise, still at their root there is the same transcendental tendency of the
human spirit that questions, that questions without restriction, that questions the significance of its own questioning,
and so comes to the question of God.
The question of God,
then, lies within man's horizon. Man's transcendental subjectivity is mutilated or abolished, unless he is stretching
forth towards the intelligible, the unconditioned, the good of value. The reach, not of his attainment, but of
his intending is unrestricted. There lies within his horizon a region for the divine, a shrine for ultimate holiness.
It cannot be ignored. The atheist may pronounce it empty. The agnostic may urge that he fmds his investigation
has been inconclusive. The contemporary humanist will refuse to allow the question to arise. But their negations
presuppose the spark in our clod, our native orientation to the divine.
(Bernard Lonergan, Method In Theology, pp. 101-103)
"The trouble with chapter nineteen in Insight was that it did not depart from the traditional line.
It treated God's existence and attributes in a purely objective fashion. It made no effort to deal with the subject's
religious horizon. It failed to acknowledge that the traditional viewpoint made sense only if one accepted first
principles on the ground that they were intrinsically necessary and if one added the assumption that there is one
right culture so that differences in subjectivity are irrelevant.
There emerges from this outline the distinction between different and opposed meanings of the phrase, "philosophy of God." There is an older meaning that considers philosophy in general and philosophy of God in particular to be so objective that it is independent of the mind that thinks it. There is a newer meaning that conceives objectivity to be the fruit of authentic subjectivity. On the former view philosophy of God need not be concerned with the philosophic subject. On the latter view philosophy of God must not attempt to prescind from the subject. This means that intellectual, moral, and religious conversion have to be taken into account."
(Bernard Lonergan, The Philosophy of God and Theology, p. 13)
Professor's Comment:
Lonergan recognized that any "proof for the existence of God" has to take into account the "horizon" of the subject which means "where the person is coming from." In Insight without realizing it, he presupposed that "questioning" or what he called "the notion of being" was itself a basic form of "religious experience" even though it was obviously an intellectual experience, the experience of understanding. In the light of this discovery the question becomes, "Whether recognized as such or not, is questioning a covert religious experience?" Ironically most secular thinkers as well as most religious fundamentalists would either not recognize it as such or deny that it is! Hence the need to consider Eric Voegelin's work because he understands existential questioning as a "Questing in the In-Between" which defines human consciousness. See The Gospel and Culture, by Eric Voegelin above
Student Projects: