human consciousnesses, there is an additional consciousness called God? Swinburne
(1979) and Plantinga (2000) call it “a person without a body,” a notion that fails to do
justice to biblical language concerning God (Sherry 1982). The notion of pure
consciousness has to face at least four logical objections.
First, God as a pure consciousness, preexisting all things, is said to have ideas and to
entertain thoughts. But what makes these ideas and thoughts what they are? The logical
difficulties inherent in the empiricist notion of “ideas” reemerge, difficulties encapsulated
in Wittgenstein's arguments against a logically private language. Nor will it do to say that
God's thoughts and ideas need be only potentially shareable, not actually shared, since
this will not secure the essential distinction between “following a rule” and “thinking one
is following a rule,”
end p.456
between “getting it right” and “thinking one has got it right” (Malcolm 1995). For the
idea that the rule is intelligible prior to its having a common use, would require the rule to
provide, without such mediation, its own application. To postulate a rule for the use of
the rule would leave us with the same problem, plus the prospect of an infinite regress.
To know whether an individual is following a rule correctly, there must be a context other
than the individual user in which a distinction between correct and incorrect has a
purchase.
Second, “consciousness” cannot yield the identity of its possessor. Consciousness cannot
tell me who I am. If it is supposed to pick me out, I'd need to experience a number of
consciousnesses, which is absurd (J. R. Jones 1967). If, on the other hand, consciousness
is taken to mean my awareness of the world, or “there being a world for me,” others are
in that world just as much as I am. It is a world in which I may see others in pain, or cry
out in pain myself, for example. The “I” has no privileged status here, as solipsism would
require. Hence, the claim that, faced by this ordinary use of awareness, solipsism
collapses into realism (Phillips 2000c). I am who I am in a human neighborhood, as this
person, not that one. But God has no neighbors. It may be thought that he could identity
himself for himself with a self-authenticating definition: “I am this.” But this reverts to
the initial difficulty. It falls foul of Wittgenstein's critique of a magical conception of
signs, the view that the meaning of a word or sound is a power inherent in them, rather
than something that is found in their application. The divine “This!” is meant to operate
as a supersign, a sign that guarantees its own idea, a transcendental signified, to use
Derrida's (1998) term.
Third, the divine consciousness is supposed to be the source of the reality of all things,
but we have seen that this metaphysical space is an intellectual aberration. Consider such
a space in the Pythagorean claim that numbers entail the existence of ultimate units,
which are supposed to account for our actual arithmetical configurations. Granting that
the units are mathematical, they cannot fulfill this metaphysical role, since arithmetic
does not spring from the units like shoots from a bulb (Rhees 1970). It is not the units
that give sense to the arithmetic, but the arithmetic that gives sense to the units. It is only
in that context that they are mathematical units at all. Similarly, it is not “consciousness,”
metaphysically conceived, that shows us what is meant by “the mind of God,” but the
religious practice in which that notion has its application. But do not be drawn into the