CAT proof of Deity

The CAT Proof of Deity

By John Taylor; 2008 Jan 20, 2 Sultan, 164 BE

So far, I have heavily revised two early essays about the proofs of deity, one from the early 1980's, the other from 1991. The following, from the 20th of November, 2002, is so embedded in the time and place in which it was written that I hesitate to change a word. It was written just before I started the Badi' Blog, so to the majority of my present readers it will be new. As is evident from the text, Thomas was a very vigorous three-year-old at the time. I do have a couple of minor corrections that I will append after the original text.

2002 Nov 20; Mostly about CAT's and Teaching Children about God
First of a series about proofs of deity

I think a lot of parents out there will sympathize when I confess that now that my daughter Silvie has reached eight years old I am concerned that she gain at least a passing familiarity with St. Anshelm's ontological proof of deity.

These are strange times and there are a lot of wackos walking around. Parents around here have been warned, for example, of a fellow by the name of Billy (the kid) Hatcher who is going from town to town claiming that he has updated Anshelm's proof using the dog and pony show of modern symbolic logic. What hope does Silvie have, should Billy turn up, of defending herself against a whack like that? On what grounds are her refutation to be based? Questions like that keep me up at night for I know in my heart even I, an adult, would have a hard time avoiding non-sequitors in the presence of the "kid." What shame she would bring upon the family, no upon the whole town of Dunnville, if she should fail to fend off Billy's assault? Or really worse I suppose, if she were to slip up in upholding the only real basis for proofs of deity, the Negative Way?

 These considerations prompted me to come up with a story explaining the essentials of Anselm's proof along with the related Cartesian "demon" explanation of the theory of mind. It involves, as always, a fox named Bea and a wolf named Gabby. I will tell it to you sometime soon.

 About my younger son, Thomas, I have fewer worries. Thomas is three years old but he shows at times an understanding beyond his years. The other day he went into a tantrum as we were walking somewhere in a hurry. I had to do something fast or we would be late. The teacher of the adult classes at our Baha'i school last year, Pat Cameron, advised us to say Allah'u'Abha, or the Remover of Difficulties in such situations; a baby may be too little to understand about prayer but hearing the words helps nonetheless. Marie had tried it a few times and found that Thomas objected to the prayer so much that he forgot about the tantrum. Perhaps not the sort of spiritual effect that Pat had in mind, but still effective. This happened the other day when I tried the prayer. But his objection intrigued me, because it actually increased my understanding of what the prayer is saying.

 What happened was this. He was rolling about on the sidewalk, so I picked him up, embraced him and walked along saying gently the Remover of Difficulties in his ear. When I got to "He is God" Thomas shouted and tried to interrupt but I continued right through, as Pat advised us to do. At the end I asked what the problem was. "He is not God!" What did you say? "`He' is not God." Well, if He is not God, then who is? "Cat is God." What? You mean "that" is God? Are you saying that it should say, "That is God?" "No," he screamed, "Cat is God!" Do you mean your cat? Malley is God? Or are all cats God? "Yes! Yes, cat is God."

 Worried that he was reverting to ancient Egyptian belief systems, I quickly and smoothly moved the topic of conversation away from this controversial theological objection. Soon his tantrum blessedly passed. But later when I thought about what he had said the implications began impacting me like a rotten tooth. By any standard, "He is God!" in the prayer is a pretty strange thing to say. A Muslim would recognize it as the first part of the formula, "He is Allah, there is no God but Him, and Muhammad is His prophet." Just saying the first part rings strange, though; one as familiar with Islam as E. G. Browne evidently thought so, since he translated "Huwallah!" in the Remover of Difficulties with parentheses: "He (alone) is God!"

 But if you start adding parentheses it does not stop. A feminist would instinctively add, "He (or She) is God!" A philosopher, bearing in mind that Huwat is Arabic for the technical term "ipseity" or "thisness" might add: "He (analytically and by synthesis) is God!" But as you go down the human food chain, parentheses get more dangerous. A mystic says, "He is (my) God," but the sectarian ends up debasing that to, "He is (the Baptist) God", or "He is (this or that kind of) God!" which ultimately obviates the unity of deity. In effect the prayer becomes a self denial, He is not God.

 But Thomas in his contrary mood can be understood to be bluntly and effectively denying even denial. To assert anything about the Origin of Being is to deny it, so he obviates everything that can be placed in parentheses. In effect Thomas adds, "He is (not not) God!" where the (not) cancels itself out and denies all possibility of anything else to go between those brackets. His denial leaves only the assertion, "He is God!" Naturally Thomas has to bring it down to my level. So, to make it comprehensible, he says, "Cannot Attract Theology," or CAT.

 CAT would be this: If there is any attempt at direct attribution of existence, existence could not attract being into Being. CAT thus effectively removes the paradox from reference and meaning, the banes of Twentieth Century philosophy. To say "He is God" is to deny any capability of reference except the self-reference that God Himself indulges in. This is positive, it is a meta reference. Baha'u'llah seems to uphold such thinking in the following,

 "It is therefore established that all names and attributes return unto these sublime and sanctified Luminaries. Indeed, all names are to be found in their names, and all attributes can be seen in their attributes." (Javahiru'l-Asrar, para 47, p. 35-6)

 You may deny Thomas's insightful glimpse down the Via Negative. You may say, "Hey this is just the proud father speaking." Tomorrow I will offer further evidence intended to refute such insinuations.

 Note from now: I broke my promise to explain whatever it was I had in mind the next day. Regrettably, I violated Baha'u'llah's order to "promise not that which thou canst not fulfill," but for a migrainer especially one must take refuge in God, and recall what the Bab told Mullah Husayn on the evening of the Declaration when he tried to beg off His offer of hospitality by saying that he had promised to meet his friends elsewhere: the Bab said, in effect, surely you prefaced your promise, as every Muslim is assumed to do, with the proviso: "if it be the will of God." Had Mullah Husayn not subordinated a verbal promise to God's will, the Declaration would not have happened at its destined moment.

 Anyway, I made a mistake when I attributed the ontological proof of deity to Anselm. As "Billy the Kid" Hatcher himself acknowledges, the original and best articulation of this proof comes from Avicenna -- though Hatcher himself, in the whirlwind tour of public talks that he was giving then, sadly as it turned out just before his death, did his best to improve upon Avicenna's proof. Whether he did so is up to more qualified persons than myself, though I plan to try -- if it be the will of God, mind you.

 A silly error of mis-attribution on my part to credit it to Anshelm. But I would be a lot more red-faced were I alone in making that blooper. Unfortunately, pretty much every Western philosopher since the so-called Enlightenment has ignored the Muslim contribution to Western thought. It is ironic that Anshelm, Bacon, Lock, and many other pre-Enlightenment Christian thinkers had no problem acknowledging the greatness of Avicenna; they read him closely, and did not seem even to bother trying to improve upon his ontological proof. Anshelm, for instance, referred to it in a prayer, he did not flesh it out into a full treatise.

 No, it was the largely agnostic and atheist so-called "Enlightenment" that decided that it would be a lot easier to ignore anything that came from a religious source. We have discussed lately on this blog how the hands-on educational reforms of the religious thinker Comenius were suddenly forgotten in the "Enlightenment." Now the credit for freedom in early childhood goes to Rousseau's Emile, a work of fiction by a man who had his own babies adopted out before he laid eyes on them. For example, in the Philosophy of Education course I took in college, Emile was required reading, and Comenius was not mentioned at all.

 The same bigoted injustice happened to Avicenna. Perhaps the new deist and atheist philosophes found his ontological proof too formidable, or maybe they just assumed that because he was a Muslim he must have been a religious thinker -- he was not. Although he prayed, he also drank wine and was in many respects what we would call today a secular thinker. Whatever he was, he was undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers in history. As a Baha'i, I was interested to learn that Avicenna spent his latter years in Isfahan, the city where a thousand years later the Bab spent the first stage of His exile.

 To check my facts about this, I just looked at the Encyclopedia Britannica, and still there is no mention of Avicenna in regard to the ontological proof, just Anselm of Canterbury and Descartes (both of whom read Avicenna closely). But if you read the article on Avicenna in the Wikipedia, more recent scholarship is in evidence. The article even hints that Descartes completely misunderstood Avicenna when he plagiarized his "floating man" experiment and made it into his "I think therefore I am." No wonder we in the West have such problems defending God against materialists, we have not got our philosophical heads on straight.