search for the true, the good, the beautiful, and the holy.
They distinguish between the ultimate mystery of being and
mysteries that vanish as human understanding increases.
Aware that the last word on the mystery of being is beyond
their grasp, they pursue the best clues to the relation of the
ultimate reality to themselves and the quality of their exis-
tence. In the history of theism and of monism, it is almost
invariably claimed that immediate experiences of the divine
are the most authentic, inspiring sources of truth about the
ultimately real, and that these religious experiences take pri-
ority over claims based on rational, moral, and aesthetic ex-
perience.
However, since religious experients, including seasoned
mystics, make conflicting claims about what is revealed, most
philosophical theists (hereafter referred to simply as “the-
ists”) will take into account the claims based on religious in-
sight but will not grant them arbitrary priority over other in-
terpretations of experience. Broadly speaking, the drift in
theistic thinking is toward improving insight into the nature
of God and the attributes that are essential for conveying his
transcendence and immanence. This essay, in the main,
stresses the drift of these reflections without expounding par-
adigm arguments as such, even as they have been articulated
by great theists.
ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT. When Anselm, archbishop of
Canterbury (1093–1109), formulated the ontological argu-
ment for God, he was expressing an invincible conviction:
the human intellect is, in fact, gripped by at least one idea
that, clearly understood, proves the knower’s kinship with
the ultimate reality as inherently one and good. Anselm’s fas-
cinating proposal is that every mind has the idea of a perfect
being, namely, of “that than which nothing greater can be
conceived” (Proslogium, chap. 2). The uniqueness of this idea
is missed by any opponent who counters that to argue thus
is like deducing the existence of an island from the idea of
a perfect island; after all, any island, to be an island, must
be perfect. But the idea of a perfect island is not “that than
which nothing greater can be conceived,” namely, a self-
existent being.
Proponents deduce that this one self-existent being is in-
trinsically immutable, omnipotent, omniscient, and good.
These attributes dominate their interpretations of the perfec-
tion of this transcendent God’s immanence in the world or-
ders. The conclusion of the ontological argument is not
grounded in interpretations of human experiences of sense
and of value. Indeed, the mind’s awareness of perfection is
the guiding norm for evaluating claims based on these di-
mensions of human experience. Nevertheless, theists, wheth-
er or not they are sufficiently impressed by the ontological
proof, usually explore the family of ideas associated with per-
fect being in order to help resolve conflicts that do originate
in experiences of sense and of value.
COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT. The cosmological argument
for God centers attention on the explanation of the depend-
able regularity of changes among the countless beings that
make up the spatiotemporal world and constitute it an order-
ly whole (a cosmos). The cosmological theist emphasizes that
the cause-and-effect connections (and other relations) in this
world are contingent and not self-existent, that they cannot
of themselves ground the cosmic order assumed in so much
theory and practice. The Theist therefore proposes that this,
or any, cosmic order is the product of a self-existent cause.
For without such a cause, the successions of beings and
events, having no reliable frameworks of their own, are in
fact happenstance. Moreover, the cosmos is a collective
whole whose unity is actually contingent, unless the succes-
sion of beings and events is grounded in the activity of a self-
existent cause. Such a cause is not one supreme being along-
side other beings, and it cannot be conceived adequately on
the model of any dependent being.
The argument thus far presented allows all contingent
beings to be modes of the One, which is consistent with
forms of monism. But, for reasons to be noted, the theist
holds that the cause, although immanent in all orders, must
not be conceived as absorbing them, as in panentheism, nor
identified with them, as in pantheism.
While some theists regard such cosmological conclu-
sions as logically demonstrative, most theists regard them as
more reasonably probable than alternative explanations of
the cosmos. “More reasonably probable” does not mean sta-
tistically probable, however. Because there can be no obser-
vation of a series of world orders (as there can be of, say, re-
peated throwings of dice), there can be no calculation of
mathematically probable trends. After all, cosmological the-
ists seek the explanatory ground for trusting connections (in-
cluding statistical calculations) that underlie the uniformity
of nature.
Some critics of cosmological theists charge that they
commit the fallacy of composition in affirming that a whole
of contingent parts must itself be contingent. For example,
they contend that a whole of overlapping, contingent beings
and events may logically be an everlasting cosmos. To this
a cosmological theist replies that to explain cosmos by self-
existent cause is, in fact, not to commit the fallacy of compo-
sition. Surely, there is no fallacy in concluding that a group
composed of blind members is never more than a totality of
blind individuals. Similarly, a whole composed of intrinsical-
ly contingent beings and relations cannot be other than con-
tingent. Moreover, the theist points out that a continuous,
everlasting contingency is still contingency and certainly no
substitute for a whole, unified by a self-existent cause.
Theists and monists agree that the self-existent cause
(the One) is indivisible and immutable. Were it composite
or changing in any way, we would be back seeking an ade-
quate ground for dependable change. Other philosophical
considerations influence the theist’s and monist’s differing
conceptions about the immanence of the transcendent One.
But they agree, in principle, that analogical inferences from
the dependent orders can serve as pointers to the nature of
the One. They both discourage the mythological mode ofTHEISM 9103