GOD AS TRUEST PERSON AND INFINITELY PERFECT BEING

Metaphysics as Science of the Supreme Being in Himself

By: Josef Seifert

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Feuerbach said: And Man Created God in his own Image. Might he be right?
From many reasons it follows that God could not be a creature of our mind:
a. From the impossibility of adding or subtracting arbitrarily any Divine attribute without destroying also all the others.
b. From the absolute impossibility of the derivation of the divine nature from the world through increase or mere negation of properties of the world.
c. The concept and essence of God contains infinitely more „objective reality” than all the beings in the world. A phenomenological analysis shows what this “more objective reality” is.
d. Many personal acts such as adoration can only have God as addressee (otherwise they are absurd or blasphemous because wholly inappropriate to any creature).
e. The ontological truth of the finite essence of the world depends on the ontological truth of the divine essence. Without some understanding of the uniquely divine attribute of necessary existence we cannot understand contingency, without some grasp of infinity not the finitude of the world.
f. A more direct way is the grasp of the divine as the most intelligible essence and in a sense as the only intelligible essence because no other essence can explain the real existence of the entity that has it.
g. Likewise, delving into the uninventable glory and holiness of the divine essence as condition of the possibility of religious acts and religion itself reveals the irreducible divine essence through the irreducible essence and value of true religion that requires God as ultimate and only reference point.
Chapter 2 Comprises a succinct form of Seifert’s realist phenomenological defense of the ontological proof of the existence of God from the necessary divine essence and answers 4 groups of objections against the Ontological Argument:

1. That it would seek to prove God’s Existence from a mere Analysis of the Concept of God: Since the ontological argument proceeds from an objcetive divine essence we discover, Kant’s, Brentano’s, and other objections refute an entirely misunderstood ontological proof of God’s existence that would ascribe Existence to God only because we first packed it in our subjective Idea.

Kant’s and other objections that indeed nothing about reality can be concluded from a merely subjective concept, which is perfectly true, misses the abysmal difference between essence and concept.
Anselm’s call to a return to “the divine nature itself“ entails a strong parallel to Husserl’s foundation of the necessity of thought in the necessity of essences: as we cannot think that two contradictory propositions are true because we understand that this is so, the impossibility of our thinking God as non-existing follows from the impossibility that He could not be.

1. The second major objection to the Ontological Argument is directed against the claim of the sufficiency of our knowledge to defend the ontological argument.

Indeed, if the divine essence were wholly unknown to us, the ontological argument would totally collapse. But while we certainly do not possess a complete and perfect knowledge of the divine essence, we do have a true, though limited, knowledge of the divine nature sufficient to know the truth of this highest proof.

1. While Kant is right that existence never belongs to the essence of a thing in the world, this is entirely inapplicable to God, in whom precisely real existence just as much belongs to his essence as other attributes.

If we did not know this, also the world would lose is ultimate ground.

1. Finally, against the objection that existence is no perfection, because the real existence of Auschwitz certainly bears disvalue: while real existence of Auschwitz is no perfection, the real existence of the infinitely perfect being possesses infinite value. Therefore, the perfection of God objectively includes His real necessary existence.