[This is the start of Section Three, Creation and the Second Person. An index with links to all parts of the work as they are posted can be found [url=https://forum.evangelicaluniversalist.com/t/sword-to-the-heart-creation-and-the-second-person/1209/1]here.]
[This series constitutes Chapter 22, “The Aseity”.]
[Entry 1]
I have discovered (if my argument holds water) that the fundamental ground of all reality is active and sentient, and thus is a Personality. He must, at the barest minimum, be sentient to the degree that I require my own active and sentient properties to be distinctively real. What more He may be, remains to be discovered, if possible.
Let me look at a potential problem that many readers will now have. Where did God come from?
In one sense, the answer can be deferred; for no matter what philosophy we espouse–atheism or pantheism or theism or anything else–we will fetch up eventually with a reality that just is. (Even if an infinite regression could be possible, it still would finally be an infinite regression. Such a finality, of course, is contradictory to the whole notion of an infinite regression…) The naturalistic atheist who rejects God is still left with an entity–Nature–that just is; if she seriously asked where Nature ‘came from’, other than from Itself, she would be tacitly denying naturalism. She might thus become a supernaturalistic atheist; but then she would fetch up at a new irreducible stopping point.
Yet, although the question (‘Where did God come from?’) could be deferred, I would rather not. I think the question leads directly to a highly useful understanding about the characteristics of God; and simultaneously ratifies, in a minor way, my developing argument that a non-sentient Independent Fact is not the end, and source, of reality.