[Avodah] Proving the Existence of G-d from the Existence of Self

[Micha Berger]

Experiencing the tzelem Elokim as proof there is an Elokim?

See https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/02/search-soul-john-cottingham-review
or http://bit.ly/3czL1aK

Snippets / teasers:

    New Statesman

    The paradox of an atheist soul
    Why the idea of a single self only makes sense in a theistic world.
    By John Gray

    There are many arguments for theism, most of them not worth
    rehearsing. ... A different and more interesting approach is
    to argue that theism is suggested by the fact that we experience
    ourselves as unified, conscious beings - in other words, as having
    a soul. Not necessarily an immaterial entity, the soul is the part
    of us that strives to realise what is best in our nature. We do
    not come to know the soul through any special revelation. We know
    it by considering the kind of creature we find ourselves to be -
    a thinking being inhabiting a life-world that seems to reflect a
    mind greater than our own. Once we realise we have a soul, theism
    becomes a credible way of thinking.

    Such is the approach adopted in this lucid and illuminating book by
    John Cottingham, professor of the philosophy of religion at University
    of Roehampton....

    Cottingham presents a version of the transcendental argument deployed
    by the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). A
    transcendental argument does not appeal to anything factual. Instead,
    it asks what must be true if certain features of human experience are
    accepted as given. Kant used it to support his belief in a universal
    moral law and, at points in his writings, the existence of God. As
    used by Cottingham, its purpose is to refute the Scottish sceptic
    David Hume (1711-1776), whom Kant described as "having interrupted
    my dogmatic slumber". In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume
    had written that the self is "nothing but a bundle or collection of
    different perceptions, which succeed one another with an inconceivable
    rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement". If the self
    is not an autonomous entity but an assemblage of sensations Kant's
    theistic faith crumbles into dust.

    Cottingham spells out the connection between theism and the idea of
    the self:

	It is a fundamental theistic belief, following the words of
	Genesis, that human beings are made "in the image" of God;
	and this is taken to be especially true in virtue of our
	conscious minds, in virtue of our attributes of intellect and
	will. Theism thus posits a source of ground of all being that is
	somehow mind-like: consciousness is taken to be at the heart of
	reality. The theistic picture tends to be discarded or ignored by
	the majority of contemporary philosophers, but it seems perverse
	to dismiss it from consideration should it turn out to fit rather
	well with certain aspects of reality that cannot in integrity
	be denied... [such as] the irreducible reality of consciousness.


Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
http://www.aishdas.org/asp   I awoke and found that life was duty.
Author: Widen Your Tent      I worked and, behold -- duty is joy.
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF                      - Rabindranath Tagore