"Now we believe that [the Lord] is something than which nothing greater can be imagined." - Anselm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anselm%27s_argument#Anselm.27s_argument
I ponder Anselm's Ontological Argument, as I do sometimes. Can I imagine the Greatest Being?
I can. I can imagine an omnipotent being defying all rational contradictions and paradoxes; one that can create a burrito so spicy that even It cannot consume it.
But wait! There is an even Greater Being than the Greatest Being of my imagination! For there is the one that created it.
Me.
I am greater than the Greatest Being I can imagine. I created it, after all. But I am an illusion, aren't I? Born of the distinction of "I" and "not I"?
So "I" am the Greatest Being I can imagine. (Other than, of course, the I that created "I.")
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4 comments:
The one I can create is not the One.
Thanks, Mike! That's a new twist to me on an old argument. One worth thinking about.
Kay! Great to hear from you again! I've missed your posts on RF...
Yeah, Anselm's argument has always had me fascinated. It appears perfectly logical to me, but there's something that doesn't feel right about it.
Brendan has made a good point. Anselm was discussing God from a Christian viewpoint, but what the argument was applied to a non-Christian version of God, such pantheism? It turns the argument into something else, I think.
Rather than a being seperate from ourselves, God may be experienced as the totality of reality; the "One." A holism of Being rather than a seperation of being.
A Greater Being would be that holism, as it cannot be made greater. "Greater" is not even a part of the vocabulary at that point and seperates us from the One.
Experiencing it collapses any idea of arguing one point over another. The observer is creating that experience, in the same way that the experience is creating that observer.
"It is a yin/yang, coincidentia oppositorum, paradoxical merging, where everything becomes one."
It fascinates me how paradoxes tend to find their way into an existence that is supposed to be ordered and rational.
Our universe is deterministic, when we view it in a mechanized way. But it is also quixotic, when viewed in a romantic way.
Paradoxes exist because we attempt to slice up God and analyze the parts. We are really just analyzing ourselves, aren't we? Physics is as much a psychological exploration as psychology is.
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