How does one answer Schopenhauer’s critique of the cosmological argument ?

[Gary Childress]

And so it begs the question again: How would you detect any such thing, and if you can't how would you ever come to identify it, or talk about it?

If you go back to my response to the OP, that's more or less what I said. How can we even talk about noumena? How do we know that there are aspects to the world that we don't or cannot know? One of the big questions out there in philosophy.

[surreptitious57]

This is a classic example of philosophys ability to ask questions without being able to comprehensively answer them
But the less than satisfactory answer is that we cannot know of any thing beyond our own experience or knowledge

[Immanuel Can]

How might one respond ? As a platonist, or theist ?

Well, I can give you one Theist's response, I suppose. I don't know that I have a right to offer it on behalf of everyone.

You might be right about man's epistemological perplexities -- indeed, they might be worse than they are, and it would still be inconsequential. What I mean is that your unspoken supposition there is that human beings are left to their own devices exclusively, in the business of coming to know God. And if that were true, perhaps the objections you raise would be significant.

But the claim of many Theists would be that revelation is possible from the other direction. In other words, if it is impossible for man to find God, why would we think it was impossible for God to find man? What would be a hard thing in the first case would surely be a very simple thing in the second, no? A God capable of creating the whole universe, and man in it, would surely be capable of speaking, of self-revelation. And He who desired to speak, and Who had Himself made the mind in the first place, He would surely be able to impart to the mind the necessary illumination, no?

Both Torah ("let there be light," Gen. 1) and the New Testament ("In the beginning was the Word," John 1, and "God spoke," Heb. 1) speak of God as the Light, as the the Revealer of Himself. So man is not drifting solo through the universe, trying to figure out the story without help. Perhaps all we have to do is listen.

[Belinda]

Classical theists make the argument for God from the contingent to the absolute, or from the conditioned to the unconditioned, like Aquinas’s 3rd way.



A devotee of Schopenhauer, I imagine, would make 3 points.


1) You cannot apply our notions of causality beyond physical reality.

2) We only know our experience inside time and space, so how could we know this “God” beyond everything we know ?


3) We cannot know the noumena behind phenomena.



How might one respond ? As a platonist, or theist ?







Neither. We should respond as if there is no centre of being ,no God, because the reality of our time is that our God is what we make our God to be.

There is a new religion about to be born. Let's hope so anyway.

[HexHammer]

How might one respond ? As a platonist, or theist ?

It's just a bunch of fancy rethorics making arbitrary circular conclusions. Don't engage with such nonsense.