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Originally Posted by duffe
For starters, I think we can infer that 'being' or 'to be' is the proximate cause of all things. Every thing can be said to have being; there is no thing that does not have being; and if a thing were deprived of being, it would not be. From this, I think we can conclude that being is the first and necessary cause of all things, which isn't exactly earth-shattering because things are existents and existents exist, are or have being.
It is a side issue, but I don't see this inference at all. Since as far as I am concerned, "being" (as a synonym for "existing") is just a way of saying that something is instantiated, I don't see how it can cause anything. It isn't anything apart from what we are applying it to. More generally, to me this is like saying that the proximate cause of the apple being red is "redness." If I'm looking for the proximate cause to the apple being red, I'll look to biology for the answers, not metaphysics.
Also, lots of "things" don't have being, e.g. Santa Claus, unicorns, square circles, fuzziness, etc, etc. I'm trying to make sense of what you say in a way that doesn't lead to you just saying, everything that exists exists. That is true, but I don't see how you would then draw the conclusion that "Existing is the cause of everything that exists" unless we thought that "existing" was somehow separate from things that exist (i.e. as if redness existed apart from entities that are red).
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Now, I agree that the real question is why we, or Aquinas, should identify God as being. Briefly, when we take into account what the prophets, mystics and those acknowledged as having had some sort of glimpse of God are saying, what they're saying about God sounds an awful lot like what we could say about being. Being transcends all existents; being is all-powerful in the sense that there is literally nothing to delimit it; being can't by definition be other-caused and hence is it's own cause; being is all there ever was and all that could possibly be; etc… Probably the most significant for Aquinas, though, is God's revelation to Moses as, "I Am that I Am," which is taken as the self-reference, self-definition of being. And because being reveals itself to man is why it's not treated as a null predicate or some sort of impersonal natural force. In short, being is personal and, as Aquinas gets into as did Aristotle, the grasp of being is the first act of the intellect when we know first that a thing is and that we are (I am). That we have that 'intuition of being' is why being is personal (literally, we are it) and because being is personable is why Aquinas calls it God.
I suppose that it is possible that when people have mystical experiences that they are experiencing "Being." However, this doesn't really justify our identifying "God" with "Being." After all, it is a well-known fact of these experiences that they are often not of a God at all (for most versions of Buddhism, if you have a mystical experience of God, then you are doing it wrong). So the same reasoning would lead us to identify "Being" with Brahmin, or Nothingness, or Mother Nature, or various other religions.
As a result, it doesn't seem justified to claim that Being "reveals itself to humans" in a personal way. Some people have interpreted their mystical experiences this way (although, it should be noted that even in Christianity the pinnacle of the mystical experience is a sense of union with the ineffable--an experience that mystics almost universally agree cannot be accurately captured in theological terms), and others have not. What is notable is how almost all mystics interpret their experiences in the terms of the religion they are in. Very few mystics after having a mystical experience realize that their basic theology is false--and since their basic theologies differ dramatically this is not an encouraging sign of the usefulness of these types of experiences in guiding our decision to accept a particular theology.
As for Moses, I don't see why we should think that the so-called mystical experiences of a legendary figure in the misty legends of the founding of Israel have any value as evidence of the nature of God.
However, I feel like we are talking at cross-purposes here. I end up disagreeing with almost everything you say here both about mystical experiences and especially your claims about "Being" in such a way that I feel like I must be misunderstanding what you say.
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I had no real idea what people were talking about when they referenced God other than just some vague, insubstantial term or some anthropomorphous entity. The Bible made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever, in terms of conceptualizing God and just trying to believe in God as posited in the Bible didn't bring about any sort of understanding or revelation for me, either. Neither were apologists like Craig and Plantinga of much help. I mean I can follow their arguments, but as to what they actually mean when they say God, frankly I had no idea and to some extent, still don't. Like the Bible, IMO, they posit God and then define him into existence, which is fine if one already has a conception of God or believes in him, but does very little for me in terms of getting to God. So, I plodded my way through the Summa, and I came to what I think to be a logical and conceptual understanding of God from doing so. Whether my conception of God is what others think of by God I don't know and sometimes I have my doubts that it is. Nonetheless, I know what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about God and so I do think of God in a Thomistic sense.
Interesting. I guess I think that the anthropomorphic conception of God is central to traditional Christian theology--I think this accounts in part for the centrality of the doctrine of the Incarnation.
