I really appreciate your responses as you are probably the most engaging of the respondents so far
Thanks for the compliment.
Everything you've said thus far is very plausible. Our minds enjoy categorizing things but the more we learn about the universe, the more we see that these categories, while useful, are ultimately illusory.
To assume the categories illusory, is a methodologic assumption though. The set-up to reduce things to broader and broader rules or categories via hypothesis, will ultimately suggest a monistic One. This is why Neoplatonism or the Eleatics did so, too. It doesn't mean they are ultimately so reducible, and our hypothesis is a deduction from a method that implies thus. We believe the 'lower' categories less real then the 'higher' ones. On what grounds? Is atomic forces and gravity more real than the falling rock? Is force not itself an illusory concept, merely the name we apply to an attribute describing observed change of position or state? This is confusing the abstractions drawn from the empiric data as more fundamental, so how is this not a sort of Scientific Idealism?
You lost me here. The previous paragraph described things correctly as we know from science. There is no intervention necessary. What's wrong with monism (especially if science points us in that direction anyway)?
Monism hasn't been established, and if true, is both counter-intuitive and negates our ability to conclude that everything is monistic. For we are doing so by observing change, in position or state, and then describing this in terms of force or time. Zeno's Paradoxes enter here, for in like manner we are assuming by observing change, in the tortoise or arrow, that such change is false. This is inductive reasoning masquerading as deductive. Not that there is inherently something wrong with monism as concept, I don't think the argument for it stronger than not. It does negate the possibility of veridicality of our Reason though, so essentially robs itself of its own laurels.
You've also used a verb which implies that this "Ground of Being" can act. Is this an accidental anthropomorphism or is it intentional?
Freudian slip, I assume.
But science, as you stated, suggests the opposite. When we see a "dog" as a separate existing entity, science tells us that that this is just a useful categorization done by our brains while in reality this dog is actually just composed of a few fundamental forces and fields (and perhaps, one day, science may discover that this can be encapsulated by a single force or field).
There is no "dog" or "house" or "car". Everything is forces and fields. Our minds make up these categories to differentiate things. Why do you say "God" creates them?
Our minds create these categories by differentiation. If some category, the Self say, has to exist, then a mind makes them. So if something were to exist prior to our knowledge of it, to human ability to differentiate it from the rest, is not a mind required? Nay, a Mind? Are we recognising an actual distinction or creating it ourselves? So if I as a being exist in an intersubjective sense, an external order had to have been at play. It is either an solipsism and illusion, or Intersubjectivity and external creation of category. As I can only be aware of my own subjective qualia, any attempt at intersubjectivity or objectivity requires metaphysical input, and we only have evidence of things existing when placed in relation to an Ordering mind. To assume something can exist outside of such a relation, unperceived, is an utter a priori position counter to all data we have, of necessity. So in a theist view, God's perception creates them - almost a Berkeleyan Idealism perhaps, one could say.
You are confusing me now. Is the universe, in reality differentiated or is the universe in reality undifferentiated?
Also, I would argue that, prior to something existing, there was no differentiation. So there is no "pre-existent differentiation".
Depends what you see as reality. I meant pre-existent as before we humans differentiated it as such. So do we have fundamental differentiation and thus things that exist, or do we have no such fundamental differentiation but our facile schemes placed thereon, and thus no thing really exists per se? The latter unfortunately includes ourselves as well, so as explained above, I would opt for the former as more coherent, though the latter remains possible but unsupportable without cutting off the branch we sit upon.
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Maybe they don't really exist as fundamentally separate things until a mind can categorize them as such, but they still exist. For example, consider something much larger than an atom, like Neptune. Before any human mind saw and named Neptune, it is philosophically plausible to view Neptune as an "un-differentiated" collection of forces and fields and it was only upon conscious observing that it "became" something more than that. But, in a fundamental sense, it still existed, just not as a categorized entity with clear boundaries from the rest of the universe. Humans make up all these definitions to make boundaries between things even if, in reality, those boundaries are fundamentally blurry.
Similar to the classic Tao saying, "If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?"
I think a scientifically sound answer to this koan would be that the falling tree produces disturbances in the air at certain frequencies in a fundamental sense, but this is not "sound" until it is consciously processed by a brain. In this sense, both a car horn and a tree falling are fundamentally "disturbances of the air", but our brain categorizes them as "different" even if they are, fundamentally, the same thing.
I agree they fundamentally exist, but I disagree that this is plausible outside a categorisation by a mind. We have no evidence something can exist not in relation to a mind, as everything we know to exist has of necessity undergone this. This is a complete shot in the dark, in the face of all evidence, of which this intelligibility is a fundamental attribute. You are extrapolating phenomena that has been perceived to the hypothetical unperceived, but we know that perception or observation impacts the nature of what is observed. Schrodinger's Cat is alive and dead till we take a look; light a wave and a particle; etc. Why are we assuming the fundamental rule that the observer impacts the observation, would not be radically other? How can we determine it would be similar without our application of our perception to it, beyond an unsupportable conjecture?The koan only exists because it was conceived; and any categorisation or abstraction assumed on grounds thereof, as well.
I think I understand more where you're coming from in approaching the problem from philosophical deism. Perhaps you can clarify some of the above questions and comments I had. I enjoy talking about philosophical deism as I think it is philosophically tenable and an interesting line of thinking to consider.
But I'll remind you that philosophical deism is a long way from Christian theism. This thread was primarily focused on addressing Christian theism so, in some sense, our conversation -- though interesting -- is a bit off-topic
More Scholasticism and pseudo-Berkeleyan Idealism than Deism. You asked about the nature of the concept of 'exist', not specific proselytism. God exists because inherently things need to be differentiated to do so, implying a Mind, which implies a Person. From there it is just a hop, skip and a jump to the Christian God as purposeful entity, in my opinion.
