RETHINKING GOD

Abstract

Believing in God if often taken as involving the following three propositions: 1. God currently exists (perhaps necessarily so); 2. God has a definite nature or essence and therefore can be finitely described; 3. God is independent of the rest of the world. In this paper I explore what would happen to natural religion if we deny each of 1-3 (in turn). The denial of these propositions have been tacitly or explicitly defended respectively by Meillassoux, Levinas and Whitehead. Rather than showing that religion cannot do without any of them is, I intend to show how new religious possibilities are open by the denial of each of them. In order to see that, we need to consider what would be to religiously deny each of these propositions ”“ that is, denying them without slipping into some form of atheism.