The traditional, Theistic interpretation of God has been a major foundation of Western religious philosophy for centuries; many philosophers, like Anselm, have spent volumes concocting robust and complicated theories – grounded in analytic logic and reason – that support the validity of this Theistic interpretation. Logical theories like the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the argument from design are now staples in high school and undergraduate philosophy courses. Thinkers in the continental tradition, however, challenge traditional or widely-held conceptions of God. Kierkegaard has illustrated that the complexities of the subject/object distinction make belief in concrete characteristics of God problematic. This further complicates how we “conceptualize” God; after considering Kierkegaard's theories, it seems evident that no conceptualization of God is complete or perfect. In this essay, I will examine the characteristics of the traditional Theistic God in the context of Kierkegaard's existential ontology, and note the implications of his theories upon one's belief in God. Whereas philosophers of religion like Anselm looked to deepen their belief in God by attempting to demonstrate God's existence though logical discourse, Kierkegaard instead argues that belief in God is strengthened in letting go of such demonstrations. Kierkegaard's bottom line is that we ultimately cannot rationally justify a belief in God, but rather must make a “leap into faith” and, in “absolute relation to the absolute”, come to understand God on our own, subjective terms.
In his text Philosophy of Religion, William L. Rowe outlines some of the fundamental characteristics of the traditional Theistic God. The first of these characteristics is that God is omnipotent, or “able to do all things that are possible”, absolutely (Rowe, p. 6). Rowe, channeling Aquinas, also notes that “things that are possible” in this sense are “things that are not a contradiction in terms”. That is, God's omnipotence is limited by what is possible; if something is a logical impossibility, then God does not have the power to do that thing. The second characteristic is that God is that God is omnibenevolent, or “perfectly good” (Rowe, p. 7). Rowe also formulates this in a different way, saying that “the being who is God cannot cease to be perfectly good”. Just like a dog is an animal by definition, so too Good is perfectly good by definition. The dog will always be an animal, because being an animal is essential to being a dog. Likewise, being perfectly good is essential to being God. Rowe comes to the third characteristic of God via Anselm, who posits three categories to which one can attribute existence; “either something's existence is explained by another, explained by nothing, or its existence is explained by itself” (Rowe, p. 11). Anselm argues that God can only be the last of the three, and so the third characteristic of God is that it is a self-existent being. Finally, Rowe outlines his argument that God is “separate from and independent of the world”, and an “eternal being” (Rowe, p. 13). The former means that God is not subject to the laws which govern the world, including the laws of space and time. The latter means that God's existence is without beginning or end, but also (since God is not subject to the laws of time) that God “does not have its life broken up into temporal parts” (Rowe, p. 15).
Before I engage these characteristics with Kierkegaard's philosophy, I want to examine some of the fundamental concepts and distinctions at the heart of the latter. For Kierkegaard, it all comes back to faith, or leaping into faith. In Fear and Trembling, he recounts the famous Biblical story of Abraham's command from God to sacrifice his son Issac. Kierkegaard notices a problem in the story; from the perspective of those who are not Abraham, he looks as if he is going to murder his son. In Kierkegaard's words, “if faith is taken away, all that remains is the brutal fact that Abraham meant to murder Issac, which is easy enough for anyone to imitate if he does not have faith – that is, the faith that makes it difficult for him” (Fear and Trembling, p. 30). The point is this: to everyone else, Abraham's sacrifice is an expression of murder, but to Abraham, it is an expression of faith. This difference in perspective marks some important distinctions in Kierkegaard's philosophy; the aesthetic, ethical and religious. Of the three, the aesthetic and the religious are both subjectively established, and the ethical is objectively established.
The ethical worldview is one of objectivity, of universality. In it, we find all of the structural concepts that make up an objective worldview. In the ethical, everything is calculable and has a teleological endpoint; that is, the ethical suggests an essentialist view of the world. Things have an essence, and that essence is knowable, calculable and always true. The ethical is the realm of ideals. Abraham's sacrifice, for example, looked like murder in the ethical realm, because the conceptual structure that the act of sacrificing Issac corresponds to in the ethical is murder. The concept of murder fits into a “box”, and any event that fits the characteristics of that “box” counts as murder. The aesthetic, conversely, exists in subjectivity, but also has interplay with the ethical. The aesthetic constitutes our experience with absurd ideas that can be exemplified in the objective, ethical worldview. I can use “beauty” as an example to illustrate the aesthetic. If I were to ask you to “show me beauty”, or ask “what is beauty?” you would have trouble answering. Granted, you would be able to show me things that you thought had beauty, but if I continued asking you to “show me beauty, not a beautiful thing, but beauty” then eventually you would have to give up. There is no objective object in the ethical that is “beauty”. This is the important characteristic of the aesthetic; that an absurd notion (like beauty) does not exist in the ethical, but can be exemplified in the ethical, through, say, a painting or a sunset. I can say “look at that sunset, it's beautiful”, but not “look at that Beauty over there”.
Finally, let us examine the religious. The religious constitutes our experience with the absurd, experience that cannot be exemplified in the objective, ethical worldview. The religious is unknowable. The religious, then, makes the claims of teleological universality of the ethical worldview problematic, because the conceptual structures of the ethical will always leave things out. The ethical can never comprehend the religious, just as those who were not Abraham could not comprehend his sacrifice for what it was. Love is another example. Love, true love, can only be reached by making a leap from the ethical into “faith by virtue of the absurd” (Fear and Trembling, p. 35), because love in the ethical realm can only be conceptual love. This is a personal example for Kierkegaard, who wrote Fear and Trembling after calling off his engagement to his fiancée, Regina. Kierkegaard realized before his wedding that his love for Regina was conceptual and incomplete; he loved her in certain situations, certain circumstances (in their house, for example, or in her family's house, or walking down a main street), but he had to admit that there were situations in which he did not love her. For him, this sort of conceptual love was horrific and limiting – conceptual love in the ethical worldview is a love of love more than it is love itself. Kierkegaard loved the idea of Regina at home, walking, smiling, loved the idea of living with Regina, of being married to Regina and having a family, but did he love Regina?
Let us now take some time to examine the characteristics of the traditional Theistic God in the context of the distinctions that Kierkegaard has made between the aesthetic, ethical and religious. One can immediately see that all of the characteristics that I have listed above fall into the ethical worldview. They are there because they are attempts to objectively define God. The concepts of omnipotence, omnibenevolence, self-existence, eternality, and exteriority are attempts to put God in a “box” the same as conceptual love is a “box”. The characteristics of the traditional Theistic God present a conceptualization of God, which is problematic because, as we have seen, conceptualizations are always incomplete. Like conceptual love, this Theistic conceptualization of God inevitably leaves things out. We can see this in the numerous paradoxes contained within the concepts of omnipotence and omnibenevolence. “Can God create a stone that no one can lift?” Is this a paradoxical problem for God, or for the logic being used to conceptualize God?
For Kierkegaard, then, using reason and logic to conceptualize God like Anselm will never justify a belief in God. This is because reason and the ethical worldview, which claim to be absolute and universal, are in reality particular and contingent. So, the ethical worldview, and a belief in God have nothing to do with one another. Belief in God is a movement of faith by virtue of the absurd, and any attempt to demonstrate God's existence conceptually actually speaks against such a belief. M. Jamie Ferreira agrees in Faith and the Kierkegaardian leap; “we first learn about the leap in the context of the all-too-common attempt to 'demonstrate the existence of God', and there it is tied to the concept of letting go. [Kierkegaard] highlights the limits of demonstration when he remarks that what passes for demonstration is usually only a case of developing 'the definition of a concept'” (Ferreira, p. 208). Attempting to demonstrate God's existence to justify a belief in God is merely developing a “definition of a concept” of God. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard comes to a conclusion surrounding all of this; “how does the existence of God emerge from the demonstration? I have to let go of it!” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 42).
Let me unpack this a little. What Kierkegaard is saying when he claims that he has to “let go” of such demonstrations is that using logic and reason to justify a belief in God is inadequate. One must “let go” of these tools and make the leap into faith by virtue of the absurd, otherwise a belief in God is impossible. The main point here is that you cannot use objective means to justify your belief in God. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard says that the “absolute relation to the absolute” that one finds by leaping into faith by virtue of the absurd is “a relation wholly within subjectivity” (Fear and Trembling, p. 47). That is, you can only justify a belief in God on your own terms, outside of the conceptions and structures that govern the objective world. Kierkegaard puts this another way; “he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself; he who loves God in faith reflects upon God” (Fear and Trembling, p. 37). When we use logic and reason to justify a belief in God, what we are really doing is revealing the inconsistencies of our systems of logic (think back to the problem of God and the stone which no one can lift). But if we come to a belief in God by leaping to faith by virtue of the absurd, then, by absolute relation to the absolute, then we can reflect upon God, and our belief can be justified. The point, however, is that this leap into the absurd is something that must be done alone.
In conclusion, I have outlined the basic characteristics of the traditional Theistic God, and have illustrated their inadequacy by virtue of their provisional conceptuality. These characteristics are found in the ethical worldview, which is the realm of ideals and incomplete conceptual structures. Using the theories of Kierkegaard, I have shown that a belief in God can only be justified by a leap into absolute subjectivity, into “faith by virtue of the absurd”, and that any attempt to rationally apprehend or justify a belief in God will always fall short of that which it aspires to. We are never rationally justified in believing in God, but we must instead come to justify such a belief through confronting our own subjectivity, jumping off of a cliff and into the unknown, into the unknowable.
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