THE
PHILOSOPHIC ROOTS OF MONOTHEISM
The territory of theology stretches before us. We are about to embark on a journey through this territory, riding the chariot of rationality with our intellect as our guide and without any excess baggage of preconceptions.
We start our journey with a few simple observations. Thus:
The thing or being on which the existence of another thing or being depends is called a cause.
The thing or being that depends on or owes its existence to something else is called an effect or phenomenon.
The existence of an effect cannot depend on a non-being or nothing or nothingness. This implies that the chain of an effect and its cause should end in a self-existing cause.
Causes are of two kinds, the structural and the creative.
The structural causes are the parts and the components of the effect.
The creative or agential causes are the producing or originating factors, bringing the structure into existence but they are not the part of the structure.
The structural cause is sub-divided into two kinds, material and formal. The material cause is the thing out of which the structure is made. The formal cause is the shape or form by which the structure is what it is.
The creative cause means the factor that produces the parts and affects their arrangement.
Everything or being of composite nature is an effect, i.e. its existence is not by itself, as it depends at least on its parts and its existence is caused by them. The parts of a being or beings cannot be non-beings. The question arises whether the parts exist by themselves or they are also composite, depending on their parts? If they are also composed of parts then we have to trace back the process till we reach the final components which will lead to the conclusion that they are beings of non-composite nature existing by themselves on which the whole edifice of effects and their causes stands. But no being of a dimensional nature presentable in terms of space and time can ever be of a non-composite nature as the simplest and the smallest being which occupies space is dimensional and geometrically divisible and depends on its parts.
Therefore, no dimensional being can be taken as a self-existing being and thus considered as the First or the Beginning in the chain of begins. We have either to accept that the chain is based on non-beings, which is absurd, or we are forced to step out of the realm of the material chain in the search of a non-composite, non-dimensional self-existing 'Being' and assert that the chain of cause and effects is based on this 'Being'. This means that the whole dimensional realm presentable in the terms of space and time is an effect and the phenomenon of a non-dimensional, non-material Being. On this ground we have to leave the dimensional realm and proceed in search of the self-existing Being responsible for the phenomenon of the chain of cause and effect in the realm where the experimental logic and method has no approach to it at all.
Hence, the Self-Existing Being must be unlimited, not presentable in terms of space and time. It should be beyond all dimensional and non-dimensional limitations, and as such, it cannot be but ONE; because the idea of two self-existing beings implies limitations of both.
The conclusion is that the SELF-EXISTING BEING IS ONE, the Real Unit, which is not divisible at all, in any sense of the term, and in any respect of form or any aspect imaginable. Therefore, it is the Real Unique, the like of it in any sense is not possible.
This Unique Unit by which the finite beings in part and as a whole are existing, is not absent from 'Itself'. Hence it is conscious of 'Itself.'
This Unique Unit is who some of us call God.
