Hans Kung on Does God Exist? Part 1

A Synopsis by Glenn M. Plastina

Hans Kung. Does God Exist?: An Answer for Today. Trans. Edward Quinn. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1980.

This book is not a history of philosophy, but a critical analysis on the question of God’s existence and nature (Who is God?) against the advance propositions and arguments of major thinkers and philosophies that failed to embrace humanity in all its complexities; thus, failing to answer the prime question: Does God exist?

REASON OR FAITH?

I. I think; do I therefore exist? Rene Descartes
Cartesuis was an ideal model of mathematical-philosophical certainty on which Rene Descartes is identified with. But it was the later who found his key ideas of new philosophy in understanding the certainty of reality based on mathematics and geometry. The necessity of exact method pushed the ideas of certainty on a higher plane of truth, epistemology not based on empiricism, development of methodical thinking, and the overarching control of mathematics in the order of nature. In contrast to the speculative scholasticism of his time, Descartes’ epistemological objectivity gave the self assured individual a significant stance in knowing how things were known. Here, the fundamental certainty of reason is gained through “methodological (accomplished at a regular pace of thought) and radical (going to the roots) and therefore universal (all-embracing) doubt” (11).

Since sense perception is unreliable and deceptive, one can doubt everything and emerg from it. Knowing therefore the existence of God is entirely and wholly on the reason of the doubting self, the thinking person (I think, I am). The turning point of Medieval way of knowing the certainty of God to self became certainty of the self to certainty of God; reason as basis of faith is a major question hereafter. Though Descartes had no intention to reform religious thinking, his influence reshaped majority of it. But his approach is different to where he was acquainted with; he is neither freethinking traditionalist nor Augustinian and his Thomistic heritage is only simplified where clarity as the ideal of theology is gained though the need of faith to have a solid and rational foundation.

Nonetheless, major questions remained in mathematics as the ideal of truth. The consistency of mathematics did not cover all the complexities and paradoxes of life and reality. The allegedly conclusive proof on God revolves around the vicious cycle of causal and ontological arguments. Kung comments, “it is easier to reach certainty of the self from a certainty of God presupposed by faith than conversely to gain certainty of God from a philosophically proved certainty of self”(34).

II. I believe; do I therefore exist? Blaise Pascal
Without a doubt, Blaise Pascal is a genius in mathematics, physics, literature and engineering. He is a man of letter and of profound thinking, a modern man of the world. While Descartes is a man of method, Pascal is a prodigy in the logic of the “heart” (coeur), the center of man’s persona, reason, and spirituality. Here, “the relativity of purely rational, mathematical certainty”(50) is clearly perceived by Pascal. He is extremely cautious in drawing conclusions from established principles verifiable by human experience.

The fundamental certainty of faith is, therefore, essential in taking “the risk of believing in God”(56) in whom the greatness and wretchedness of man can be expounded. The answer to the discordant existence of humanity is found in the Christian message, not in philosophy, according to Pascal. The God of the Bible is for him the ultimate ground of certitude. Man can only apprehend God by heart (intuition). “Pascal attaches great importance to the observation that certainty is lacking not only in questions of religion but also in most important questions of ordinary life”(61). Thus, the main point is: “One must choose” and not choosing is, in fact, a choice. “What is more important for him is not the path from conceptual certainty of the self to the conceptual certainty of God, but the path from existential certainty of God to existential certainty of the self”(63) by faith, the basis of reason. To this, he is more close to Augustine in terms of conversion, faith, and existential emphasis and rationale in the unity of faith and reason. Theology and philosophy are not to be separated.

III. Against rationalism for rationality
The empirical and the “mystical.” Ludwig Wittgenstein’s two major propositions are: “What can be said at all can be said clearly” and “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” His advocacy for clarity of ideas and concepts made repercussions in theology and philosophy. The “mystical” though beyond language, still exist. Other inexpressible are existence, meaning, and value of the world, life, survival, ethical, and God. Thus, “speechlessness” is the only remain of the “problem of life”.

Logic and theory of knowledge against metaphysics? Rudolf Carnap proposes the logical structure of the world deduced in rational form of genealogy constructed by logical - mathematical formulas, e.g. autopsychological, physical, heteropsychological and cultural objects. This proposed all-embracing science affected religion and philosophy especially metaphysics’ theses which are rationally unjustifiable in this term. Non-rational intuition, thus, cannot be called knowledge using their “metatheory.”

The universal claim of scientific thought? Karl Popper started the movement committed to destroy logical positivism, empirical hypotheses, and metaphysics. They are “pseudo statements.” Accordingly, “there are no such ultimate ‘manifest’ certainties either of reason or of the senses”(103) from which one could start for epistemology because they are mere assumptions, theories, conjectures, patterns, etc. Thus his theme of learning by trial and error is central in his critical methodology of “fallibilism.” There is no such thing as logical knowledge, only critical guessing in an infinite possibilities and openness.

Scientific revolutions. Thomas Kuhn introduced new philosophy of science (explanatory model/paradigm change). Kuhn insists that it is never the falsification or verification that solves crisis in science but paradigm change. In the rational-irrational process of scientific progress, no single method, paradigm, theory, or language is indispensable. The effect of this is abandonment of ideological scientism.

Theology and the changes in the world picture. Natural science and theology have remarkable parallels. Knowledge is dynamically attained; difficulties often come from the outside and younger generations; there is resistance in the beginning from those who held the established principles until the obscure idea become the powerful element in changing the mind set that leads to a paradigm shift in search for the truth. There is continuity in discontinuity. But the question of truth in religion is much deeper than in natural science for it could mean reformulation of old tradition.

Interim results I: Theses on modern rationality can be humanly meaningful through “critical-dialogic cooperation between theology and natural science”(115). In modern science, man does not live by reason alone but with feelings, intuition, passions, imaginations, etc. “As long as it does not become an ideology, theory of knowledge can be a help also in philosophy and theology so far as these are meant to be sciences. Criticism, therefore, must be accepted, but not destruction.” (120)

Concerning the relationship of theology to natural science, Kung points out: “In theology, too, the scientific interplay of project, criticism, countercriticism and improvement should be possible.”(122) In this case “science” is not confined to mathematical rigidity (Descartes) but can be flexible an academic discipline. It is advisable that science remains to be on its field of experience, not beyond, to be consistent to its methods. In the midst of the complexity and unity of reality, theology “must stand for critical rationality” and should be aware of the contributions of others, even those antagonist to it. Since genuine rationality is not homo-dimensional, the unity of truth and reality must be discussed openly.

THE NEW UNDERSTANDING OF GOD

God in the world: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Now, focusing the section to a Tubingen theology student, G.W.F. Hegel, the course of Deism has inclined towards panentheism, a radical line of thought (God is in the world and the world is in God) headed by B. Spinoza. In the background of Hegel lies the great influence of Spinoza among the intellectual circles of Germany. God was no more considered as above or outside man, but God in man. Pantheism may be getting great following that time but Hegel’s revolutionary line of thought was considered not pantheism per se, but panen-theism (vital unity of all being in God: a differentiated unity of life, of love, of all-embracing Spirit).

Hegel scrutinized and understood modern atheism closely as postatheistic. But his main concern is his philosophy of the absolute, the real unity of the finite and the infinite. This is more inclined towards Christian theology. “This means a unity in God himself, in the Absolute. This unity in the divine Absolute cannot be attained by rationalistic-deistic juxtaposition of the finite and the infinite but by the preserving ‘pan-en-theistic’ sublation [Aufhebung/transfiguring] of the finite in the infinite.”(140)

Thus, in the death of Christ, “God externalizes himself into the world.”(140-1) Though Hegel never espoused atheism, Death of God theologians appealed to him and his methodology of dialectical universal system where “everything individual was to be understood as moment of the uniform dialectical evolution of the whole, of the divine ‘Absolute Spirit’ itself: the Absolute Spirit which represents a unity of subject and object, being and thought, real and ideal.” (142-3) But Hegel was aware of the extreme dangers of this stance, like alienation of God as expressed by irreligious atheism and fatalistic pantheism. The Absolute must be affirmed as the “common ground of harmony between freedom and intelligent agent”(143)

God in history.
Phenomenology of spirit. This philosophy is gaining grounds in every aspect of life in Germany. Hegel’s genius has, somehow, seen the loophole of the Enlightenment period and spread his brilliant work in his “Phenomenology of the Spirit”. “Hegel describes patiently, stage by stage, how natural consciousness reaches absolute consciousness or—better—how it becomes aware of absolute knowledge, which it is already itself in secret.”(145) This is called “the path of the soul” that must be understood historically and philosophically and where the reciprocity of the Absolute and human consciousness in the path of experience is involved; both are aware of each other.

Therefore, reality is not to be deduced “from above” but derived from historical, philosophical, religious, judicial, theoretical, practical, and ethical consciousness. Here, Hegel’s use of the term “Aufheben” (elevating, canceling, preserving) is significant in his philosophical line of thought. He rarely use “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” but what is meant here is the affirmation of truth turned into a denial and then again turned into a transcending of both affirmation and denial into a higher unity. Here, human consciousness shared in the dynamism of the Absolute itself.

Dialectic in God himself. Hegel’s discovery of this phenomenal “all-embracing process of reconciliation”(147) extends so far in the new dialectical understanding of God. Hegel arrived to this position with great philosophical repercussions. Kung comments that, “By way of development: the world is not simply God, but it is God in his development. This God externalizes himself to the world in development, in history, and leads the world as nature and finally as spirit through all stages up to himself and to his infinity and divinity. All this in a mighty, all-encompassing circular movement,...as Hegel expresses it: outgoing of God and return of God himself.”(147-8)

This is what dialectic of God himself is. But Hegel prefers speaking of God as spirit for it expresses the reality that God is a God who is a dialectical, a self-developing, self-externalizing God, “coming to himself out of alienation”(148). Hegel insists that the Absolute God or Spirit himself should be acknowledged for what he is (nature) and should not simply be finitized, rigidified, materialized like the supra and extramundane God.

God who is beyond finite determinations, in Hegel’s understanding, is not “supreme being,” beyond, above, , alongside, opposite or outside this world but as “the all-pervading infinite in the finite, as the ultimate reality in the world, in the heart of things, in man himself, in world history. God as the inexhaustible ground of all being. God as the here-hereafter, as transcendence in immanence.”(150)

In 1808, he wrote his Science of Logic. This new system in history starts out from the dialectic of being, nothing, and becoming. Three large section of this work deals “with the logic of being, of essence, and of the notion: an order of pure essences or God in his eternal being before the creation of the world.”(150) Developing the new synthesis, he touched reformulations in philosophy of history where the world is governed by “divine providence” for God’s glory. His main philosophy of world history is “God himself is in history.

Throughout all wretchedness, all negations, the divine Spirit unfolds all his riches in time. Since God in his passage through history takes all wretchedness on himself, evil, the negative in world history, is from the outset encompassed by good.”(155) He calls history as the “Golgotha of Absolute Spirit” that transfigures reality (including theodicy) and reconciles it with rational. Hegel’s philosophy of history became the very foundation of the following “historical presentations of art, religion and philosophy.”(156)

Repercussions in theology were also felt in Hegel’s new philosophy of religion. Some of the striking features were:
(1) Hegel’s God is not some outer spirit in the universe but the mind permeating all minds in the innermost depth of human subjectivity.
(2) His concept on the Trinity is not unrealistic arithmetic but trinitarian “economy” in relation to the world and salvation history.
(3) World creation is not an abstract and arbitrary volition but rooted in the nature of God. This is not something like perfect to imperfect emanation but more of a progressive imperfect to perfect evolution.
(4) Providence is not attributed to a dictatorial God or proved in unhistorical sense but observed speculatively in the actual course of history.
(5) The non-Christian religions are assessed not as purely negative or neutral-irrelevant phenomena but as pro-visional, pre-Christian religions approaching the one true God.
(6) The Christ event is not confined as the object of private devotion but is shown as a world event of the Spirit for mankind as a whole.
(7) The negative aspects of reality, i.e. sin, suffering, death, are not trivialized by abstract theodicy but “depicted by a theology of the death of God in a concrete justification of God and man as overcome painfully and victoriously by God himself in history.”(160)

Hegel’s death came suddenly and Germany lost one of their greatest philosopher overnight of 13 November 1831 due to cholera. A few night before his death, he was working on his desk for a publication entitled “Proofs of God’s Existence” which was left unfinished. While Europe was in political and national turmoil, he rest gently in peace without seeing his reputation and popularity fading away.


Secular and historical God
The irremovable differences. Hegel’s famous advice to the Spinozism, as quoted by Jung, goes this way: “True refutation must engage the force of the opponent and must place within the compass of his strength; the task is not advanced if he is attacked outside himself and the case is carried in his absence.”(162) Nonetheless, in his absence to his critics today, both theological and philosophical, Christians and Marxist, there is certain “negative agreement against Hegel’s speculative identity of the finite and the infinite.”(163)

The main criticism is concerning the heart of the system—the Absolute Spirit which is called in turn Absolute Notion, Absolute Idea, Absolute Self-consciousness, the Self or God. But according to Iljin, “Hegel’s philosophy sways unceasingly between dualism in a disguised form and the attempt to ‘expunge’ the empirical-concrete by his own power.”(166) Among others who were related to the concept of God in coming to be are:

Auguste Compte (1798-1857). This French philosopher gave up his Catholic faith at age thirteen. He is one of the main proponent of “positivism” in science and “sociology.” But his concept of progress is without God. Metaphysics for him is fictitious. There was, according to him, no Absolute Spirit developing in the world history to progressively higher forms. Progress is not in God coming to be but in “humanity” which is the great universal being, developing in three stages to positivity. 1) the theological-fictive poetry of myth on the part of a predominantly militarized society. 2) the abstract metaphysics of the juridically oriented society. 3) the positive science of facts would be established in an industrial society. Here man stands in the place of God and his Providence. Man is the one who sees to foresee; foresees to plan; plans in advance to possess the world. Humanity is the main object. Love is the norm to one’s fellow man and the basis is social order. The ultimate goal is human progress.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). This French Jesuit priest formulated his fundamental vision of the God of evolution. He is a great geologist and paleontologist who dealt with the evolution of nature and cosmos exhaustively and tried to reconcile in unity of thought his scientific knowledge and theological concepts. His “theogenesis” and “Christogenesis” are directly linked to “cosmogenesis” and “noogenesis” in dialectical progress. However, his distinct differences to Hegelian theological synthesis are: 1) his Darwinian evolutionary biology in the light of life and matter “from below” rather than the idealistic philosophy of history “from above”. 2) his openness to the future and a consummation still to come rather than the Hegelian consummation which is already in the present. Thus, Teilhard’s evolutionary line of thought is cosmogenic-oriented. Man is not yet finished but becoming human, which is “anthropogenesis” towards the “Pleroma” in the “Omega point. His concept of God is: God is in evolution, a God from within and ahead (Prime Mover).

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). His philosophy is God in process; he is the antecedent ground of the whole process of the world. His nature is “dipolar” and is the “dialectical unity of permanence in flux and flux in permanence”(179).

Interim results II: Theses on the secularity and historicity of God. This is seen in a consistent, methodological thinking, meaningful critical-dialogic collaboration between theology and both modern philosophy and modern thought as a whole. Hegel sought reconciliation of faith and knowledge and of philosophical and biblical God into Absolute Spirit, of which two themes prevailed: 1) the Secularity of God. With Platonism, Aristotelian, Plotinus’ philosophy in light, God is seen not as a supramundane being above or extramundane being beyond but God is in this world and this world is in God. The absolute God relativizes everything. 2) the historicity of God. He is not the Unmoved Mover, the unchangeable being, static being itself but the living God who dynamic in actuality in relation to history. Kung comments in closing: “In the light of the historicity of God, the biblical message of a God who by no means persists unmoving and unchanging in an unhistorical or suprahistorical sphere, but is alive and active in history, can be understood better than in the light of classical Greek or medieval metaphysics.”(188)