Subject: Re: BHA: Bhaskar, Marx and self-consciousness
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 17:29:30 -0400


Sort of pursuant to Ruth's post, I'll repeat Mervyn's paragraph:

> I myself am agnostic, but fail to see why, for those who've had a
> religious experience, there can't be a realist (as distinct from
> irrealist) concept of God. The Bhaskarian God of FEW as far as I can see
> adds little to what was already in the DCR system. There were (very
> likely) ultimate causal powers or dispositions before, though unknowable
> to science, and there was order and boundedness in the cosmos, ultimate
> categorial structures (now termed the binding force of unconditional
> love...).

Now, I'm not sure what Mervyn has in mind here by "realist" either, but one
of the things that bothers me about claiming God as a CR category is that I
don't see any real specificity to the structure or generative mechanism that
would be God.  The supreme powers that would be God, it seems to me, have to
be emergent, in which case God is also susceptible to certain things and
hence cannot be omnipotent.  On the other hand, if (as FEW claims) God is
pure dispositionality and the ultimate condition for the possibility of
everything, then everything that is actual (not just possible) has power
over God, who therefore can't do much of anything.  Basically, it looks to
me that within a CR framework of a stratified universe consisting of
entities with various powers and susceptibilities, God is a contradiction in
terms.  That doesn't sound very realist to me.  Or am I missing something?

Fallibly,  T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-mail.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce




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