Saturday, May 4, 2019

The Masonic God, no God at all

My understanding of the Masonic god is that it widely falls into the deistic interpretation of God. That is, God is the mechanistic god that set the wheels in motion for creation, and then walked away unconcerned about the goings on on this little earth. There are a myriad of issues with the mechanistic picture of reality, but today I would like to focus on the problem with deism and a "god" that is unconcerned with His or "its" creation. In Aristotelian Thomism, the foundational constituent principles of reality are act and potency. Indeed, if one is to study Aristotle or Aquinas at all, one must understand these two principles. The basic way to understand act is as the "full perfection of a thing" and potency as potentialities or "what a thing can become given its nature absent limiting factors." The classic example given is that of the acorn and the oak tree. An acorn is in potency to becoming an oak tree if it will realize the full perfection of its nature, or if it will become actual. In classic metaphysics, ultimately potency cannot precede act in the coming to be of things. So, for a human being to come into existence, there must be adult human beings that have reached perfection, or humans in act to realize the potency of sperm and egg. Now Aquinas defines God as Pure Act. He is the actuality that ultimately actuated the potency of creation. As an infinite power, He did this ex nihilo, or out of nothing. This is something only an infinite power can do. As Pure Act, there is no perfection that can be lacking to God. Thus, he cannot lack any knowledge, or any power, or any goodness or beauty or truth. So how do we know that God is the Pure Act, or Actus Purus? First off, any perfection there is in reality must come from a cause that has the actuality to cause the effect. That is, an effect cannot have something in it that is not first in its cause either actually, virtually, or eminently. So, God cannot lack any perfection, at least of what we are aware of. Secondly, if God is lacking a perfection, then He is not God. We can arrive at this by considering the idea of dualistic theology. Dualism, in theology, suggests that there are two equally powerful deities, one good, and one evil. Now, it is not possible for there to be two all powerful gods, as the power of the evil god would be lacking to the good god and vice versa. Thus each god would have a potency, or lack the perfection, of the power of the other god. Therefore, neither would be all powerful gods. There would have to be a third, all powerful cause of the powers of the two gods that were lacking these perfections. Thus, there is only one all powerful God. So, there must be only one Pure Act that has all perfections. If we return to the idea of adult humans having the act, and semen and egg having the potencies, we quickly realize that there must be an actuality prior to all potencies. As noted before, an effect must have in it what was first in the cause. Thus, anything in existence must have come to be by something already in act. You do not have a pile of dirt, that after sitting as dirt for 2000 years, become a tree, unless something in act draws out the potencies. It is similar in the creation of the human intellect. Evolution seeks to demonstrate that, through time, potencies are actualized. The theory generally works as long as there are myriad of actualities that bring out potencies latent in material reality. Two big question marks are a) the beginning of evolutionary biology, i.e. what set it in motion, and b) how does one arrive at the actuality of intellectual activity from material potencies? There seems to be an infinite gap there, which is why I posit a God, or intellectual actuality. So what does all of this have to do with the Masonic god? A Pure Act can lack no perfection, meaning that the attributes of a Pure Act would be omniscience, omnipotent, all good, all truth, all beautiful, etc. If this is true, however, it means that the deistic god cannot be Pure Act. For what being that is all knowing and all good, these are necessary consequences of the concept of Pure Act, could even begin to be unconcerned about its creation? If creation is good, and this is demonstrably the case, then how could what is all good be unconcerned about goodness? Furthermore, what being, if it had all knowledge, could not always be aware of the goings on of its creation? Catholicism holds that God created man in His image, which is exemplified by the intellectual powers (intellect and will). If, indeed, intellect and will are a good God's image, then it further intensifies this Pure Act's concern for His creatures. As we see from before, the actuality of intellectual activity cannot be explained by material potencies as intellectual activity is immaterial. (Aristotle notes that all material powers of the soul have a limited range, but the intellect is infinite in range, thus showing its immateriality. Further evidence of the image of God being stamped in humanity). In short, this all shows that a Pure Act, based on the attributes that must follow on Its being, would be concerned with creation. Thus, the Masonic deistic god is no god at all, for to be unconcerned about reality would mean either it had not the knowledge, or was not good, but then it would not be God. As we know, at it's highest ranks, Freemasonry is Luciferian. And yes, Lucifer certainly is NOT concerned about creation, other than to destroy the image of God that is in it. The Freemasonic god is no god.

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