Bask on March 25, Andy Latto wrote:
My view is that philosphers often worry too much about ontology (which things "exist" and which don't), when it really isn't a very interesting or important question, and it's just the nature of our language that misleads us into thinking it is.
[followed by a whole bunch of stuff, all of which I agree with and think is expressed extremely well, including a very trenchant thought-experiment about mental experience] Have any theologians tried to develop a theology without ontology, along lines suggested by 20th century mathematics? For instance, if one believes that the differing moral verdicts that two people reach are in principle reconcileable by way of a sufficient amount of dialogue and/or shared experience, one might define God as a kind of projective limit in the category of people-who-could-exist, in which the existence of the limit is not as important as what it entails about mappings between finite beings. This actually brings us back to qualia: Presumably you and I could reach agreement about a whole lot of things if I could experience your life from birth to the present day from your own perspective, and vice versa; but what does it mean for one person to have the experiences of another? I suspect that some science fiction writer must have explored this avenue for the future evolution of religion, even if the theologians haven't! I also suspect that some category theorists have thought along similar lines. Jim Propp