A detailed, internally consistent worldview philosophy that is in essence a concise cosmological theology. Limitation Philosophy incorporates a cosmology of the universe in its all-encompassing doctrine of the Limitless Personality and Boundless Being of God.
Open to Examination with Critical Thinking
Atheism can be used as a thought stopping mechanism. Because the atheist has come to the conclusion that the anthropomorphic God of our Judeo-Christian culture cannot logically exist, no other alternatives need be considered. The concept of God arises and all discussion is ended with the thought stopping conclusion, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ End of discussion. This is not scientific openness.
In Limitation Philosophy all theological belief is agnostic in character. One is expected to believe rather than to know, and to be open to revision if a belief proves unjustifiable.
The Premise of Limitation Philosophy
What if a Deity does exist, but this Deity is very different than our cultural conception of God?
This would be true if anthropomorphism, the commonsense theory of mind method used to understand deity, is the path to error.
The light of rationality is limited, so let’s make our goal a rough and general understanding, a sort of believing agnosticism, rather than a detailed dogmatic theology.
If we assume that a limited mind cannot understand a limitless mind, then the content of the Deity’s personality is accepted to be inscrutable to us.
So then, if we are unable to discern content, what qualities would a limitless personality essentially have?
Then using limitless as a logical term and rationality as our method, we seek through a system of informal logic to understand the Deity’s properties?
This is the premise of Limitation Philosophy.
The Limitation Paradigm
The Personality and Being of God is Limitless. The personality and being of human beings is not limitless.
The Limitation Paradigm is the seed of Limitation Philosophy’s logic
The Meaning of Personality Limitation
In limitation philosophy the amount of limitation is unimportant, it is the quality of being limitless that defines the concept of limitless personality, and the quality of not being limitless that defines a limited personality. Differences of amount, while real, are not important to the concept.
Limitless is the benchmark. Compared to limitless personality the amount of limitation between limited personalities is minor and irrelevant to the theological concept. The amount of difference between limited personalities and the one limitless personality is vast, and in some respects total, so a limitless personality is a different thing than limitless personalities.
Limitless personality is not a limited personality with the limitation removed. A truly omniscient mind does not operate as if it is a limited mind somehow having every fact. Nothing but misunderstanding can result from using self-referential theory of mind methods like this to understand God. By its operations in only one limitless personality becomes an unmatched quality, a type of personality present only in God.
Personality limitation is the basis for Limitation Philosophy’s complete rejection of anthropomorphism. Except for the intellect, emotion, and will structure common to personalities of any kind, limitless personality does not operate in any way at all like limited personality. The Deity is not a human being, and does not think humanlike thoughts, feel humanlike emotions or suffer from the frustrations of a thwartable will. Because God is not a man or woman using the human likeness for theological purposes leads only to error, despite our strong instinctual inclinations to behave as if the opposite is true.
Some Concise Statements
- Limitation Philosophy is an alternative to the ordinary paternalistic theistic philosophy of deity.
- Limitation Philosophy differs from ordinary theism because it doesn’t limit the nature of God to being a spiritual deity without any physical aspect.
- Limitation Philosophy differs from ordinary deism because it doesn’t regard creation to be a past event originating in the intentions of an anthropomorphic deity.
- The Deity is embodied in the boundless physical universe and the ongoing processes of the living universe are the means of the ongoing passive creation we see operating throughout the universe.
- Creation is by process, not intention. Processes are the means by which every temporal thing, be it planet or person, comes to be. Creation like time has no beginning or end. Physical creation operates in the ever present processes of material reality.
- Evolution is a label for one group of processes. Many processes not falling under that label have creative roles in the ongoing reality of things coming to be in the universe.
- In a very general way, most of the physical descriptions employed by the various branches of science, such as biology, and physics, are provisionally accepted as explanations for aspects of the creative nature of physical reality.
- Our belief in the scientific method requires that we remain open to revision and outright correction in scientific matters. Scientist disagree amongst themselves, so no one theory is ever accepted as dogma, though some are favored over others.
- Physical reality is the basis for non-physical realities, such as personality, which is the best example of an emergent reality.
- Human personality is based in the embodiment of each human being. Personality emerges coincident with the ongoing physical processes of human life. In essence, a human body thrives and personality emerges coincident with the processes of embodiment. Human embodiment as an overall process is unitary, not dichotomous. We are embodied persons. Cartesian mind body separation is an abstract fiction created by human language.
- All Personality emerges from the processes of an animated beings physical aspect and the personality of the Deity is eternally emerging from the ongoing processes of the universe.
- Spiritual reality is emergent from movement within the structure of physical reality. Emergent, non-physical, reality ascends from the elemental atomic level up to the Personality of the Deity which emerges from the entire ongoing universal process.
- Personality is a mind, heart, and will phenomena. Each distinct personality is based in the physical processes it emerges from. Various forms of personality emerge from the physical aspect of the different sorts of living organisms. Plant organism personality and animal organism personality is not human personality and conflating it by anthropomorphism is discouraged.
- The logical terms boundless and limitless are very counterintuitive to human beings. We struggle to comprehend concepts like these because we are bounded beings, that is discrete, local and temporal beings, with limited minds, limited hearts, and limited wills.
- We struggle to understand one another, despite our very common human nature. Amongst us, misunderstanding is as common as understanding, so it shouldn’t surprise us to have, as a culture, misunderstood God, a boundless being of limitless personality, different in almost every way from us.
- The limited mind is not equipped to grasp the thoughts of a limitless mind, so the Deity is inscrutable to us. Because we are limited, the limitless intellect, limitless emotional nature and limitless volition of the Deity is unknowable to us by our natural method of understanding one another by self-reference.
- Inscrutability is not rooted in some mysterious nature of the Deity but in our nature as bounded beings of limited personality.
- In Limitation Philosophy a distinct form of Deism that rejects anthropomorphisms of every kind replaces Theism which is based in understanding God by self-reference and analogy to human personality.
- God’s omniscience is not a human mind with mortal limitations somehow absented by magic. Essential omniscience is based in the Deity’s embodiment. Every particle of the physical universe as both parts and as a functional whole are known by God through the processes of embodiment. God’s omniscience is a practical reality based in bodily acquaintance and limitless personal understanding with all physical reality and the spiritual reality that emerges from it.
- The other divine attributes commonly ascribed to God by theology are, like omniscience, functional aspect of the personality and being of God, by the practical operations of the universal process.
- The Deity’s embodiment is the basis for omnipotence, nothing happens outside of God.
- Limitation Philosophy creates a moral framework where personality limitation is the operable dynamic rather than sin. The moral lapses of ourselves and others are seen as rooted in our incompleteness and humanity rather than in a human nature animated by original sin. Even intention driven malice is seen as shortsighted rather than evil.
- Bounded beings animated by limited personalities are only capable of limited behaviors. Nothing we do is free of limitation and no amount of shaming from others or feeling guilty ourselves can change that. Humility needs to replace superiority, and understanding needs to replace judgment.
- Limitation Philosophy is not deterministic. Human beings and all other bounded things develop by a free process. Human freewill is a profound example of limited beings having a free hand in their own development.
- There is no reason for a non-anthropomorphic deity to have some humanlike interest in how this or that thing turns out over time. A determiner, theological or otherwise, would be functionally humanlike. Omnipotence is rooted in the operations of God’s being and personality, not in humanlike conceptions like mastery and control.
- The proving in dialog that the Deity cannot function as a character in human dramas found in Ockham’s Epiphany is the ultimate expression of non-anthropomorphism.
Limitation Philosophy Is Not
An inconsistent postmodern stew of ideas characterized by belief in everything and belief nothing. Limitation Philosophy rejects the postmodern attitude where everything is included in a shallow optimism that allows any part to be discarded at will using claims of jaded skepticism. The postmodern practice of claiming science when the occasion suits it and religious beliefs when they are convenient, then discarding anything when it becomes costly to explain is rejected by Limitation Philosophy.
Dogmatism Creates Opposites
Religion and science may seem to be irreconcilable but they are not. The staunch adherents of each are dogmatic about certain matters. The role of dogma is to mask uncertainty, so the fans of science and religion are dogmatic about the things they don’t understand and cannot explain.
The small amount Limitation Philosophy claims to know about the personality of God is reasoned by logic. A logic which also tells us that limited persons cannot the discern the limitless thoughts of God.
The limits of our understanding is a fundamental part of Limitation Philosophy. This agnostic character of Limitation Philosophy uses rationality to understand only those things that can be discerned to be true. Having no claim to complete knowledge, Limitation Philosophy freely admits to some unavoidable uncertainty. The truth seeking attitude of Limitation Philosophy renders dogmatism obsolete.
Limitation Philosophy believes human personality is limited and God’s personality is inscrutable to us, so there isn’t anything to be dogmatic about.