The God of We and of I Am

aaacrThe God of We and of I AmA curious, brief episode occurs after the story of Cain and Abel.  Eve gives birth to Seth, who fathers Enos.  At the time of Enos (or, as some translators would have it, first from the lips of Enos) people began to use the name usually rendered as "the Lord" for God.  This name for God, of course, is the famous "I am" that got Jesus in such trouble, having effectively claimed it for himself (John 8:58).

So--perhaps even while Adam yet lived--we have two fundamentally different views of God.  God is the anthropomorphic figure, inexplicably using the "we" pronoun, walking through the Garden in the cool of the day, and also God is the quintessence of all existence.  God is either understandable within a framework of existence, or God superintends even that framework.

This blog will have to struggle with that tension, on at least two planes.  The first plane is the question of belief--of how we address ourselves to the knowable and/or the unknowable.  The second plane is the question of how we are to properly orient ourselves against what we know, what we think we know, and what we must try to know.

Before I begin I have to dispense with--in my amateurish way--that statement of Descartes usually rendered in English as "I think, therefore I am."  Despite his attempt at a first philosophical statement, Descartes has already fallen into unwarranted presumption.  Would it not be as correct for him to say "We think, therefore we are"?  Has he any warrant to assume that the phenomenon of thought with which he begins is not the combined product of multiple processes, perhaps including the communal output of multiple minds?  Does he not actually visualize an individual entity thinking, yet pretend that the thought itself is that with which he begins?

And then there is that "exist" business.  Is existence separable from some context in which the "existing" entity is registered?  Does Descartes not also postulate the existence of a universe surrounding the speaker of the phrase, "I think, therefore I am"?  Is not the true beginning of Descartes' philosophical journey simply "I think", a statement that--without presupposed context--leads nowhere?

For my part, I think we should begin philosophy with the God of "We" and the God of "I am"; the God of the origin-myth Garden and the God of man's first grasping at the ultimate.