What is the difference between conditioned and unconditioned reality

Post by asahi » Thu Apr 01, pm. Post by Tutareture » Thu Apr 01, pm. Post by sphairos » Fri Apr 02, pm. Quick links. Why there must be atleast one unconditioned reality and why it must be spiritual? Forum rules. Re: Why there must be atleast one unconditioned reality and why it must be spiritual? Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.

I am a sufi Muslim exploring Buddhism. Just looking for friendly Philosophical discussion. Post by SarathW » Thu Apr 01, am But the unconditioned reality is the source of all conditioned things by definition. Post by chownah » Thu Apr 01, am I'm wondering what is the connection with theravada because it seems that theravada has no doctrine or texts that talk about "unconditioned realities" Post by sphairos » Thu Apr 01, pm Who created the Creator?

How good and wonderful are your days, How true are your ways? Post by 4GreatHeavenlyKings » Sat Apr 03, pm We must accept the following 2 things before we can discuss whether things are conditioned and to what degree , whether things are dependant upon other things and to what degree , and whether things come into existence and if so, how and when : 1.

Our Senses can be relied upon. If our senses were not reliable, then everything which we think that we perceive including the logic which some people people think proves Christianity to be true and Buddhism false could be an illusion — rather like the logic which seems to make sense in dreams or to the drunken but is absurd when we are awake or not drunken.

That some things are impossible. If nothing were impossible, then arguments aiming to disprove Buddhism or any other religion by proving that something is impossible are themselves bad arguments.

Therefore, the cat cannot be dependent upon a finite number of conditions where every condition is itself a conditioned reality. Hypothesis F is thus false. Could the cat be dependent upon an infinite number of conditions where every condition is a conditioned reality? There are two lines of reason that lead us to answer this question in the negative. The first approach takes into consideration the insufficiency of conditioned realities in accounting for the existence of other conditioned realities.

Consider for example the cells that the cat is dependent upon for its existence. Upon reflection we notice that the cells have no power in and of themselves to be an existing condition for the cat i. These cells, in order to exist right here and right now, depend on the existence of amino acids and proteins. The same applies to the amino acids and proteins. They do not have any power in and of themselves to be existing conditions for the cat because they in turn depend, right here and now, on the existence of molecules.

Now, the molecules have the same existential quality as do the cells and the amino acids and proteins. They are insufficient to account for the existence of the cat because they in turn are conditioned realities depending right here and right now on the existence of atoms. But the atoms in turn are dependent on the existence of protons. This makes the atoms conditioned realties as well and thus insufficient like the molecules, like the proteins, like the cells to account for the cat existing right here and right now.

Notice what we have here so far. The answer is no. The key lies in the fact that the insufficiency of the conditions in the series is not quantitative in nature but qualitative. If the insufficiency was quantitative in nature then the addition of insufficiencies might make a sufficiency e.

But the insufficiency in the series is not quantitative in nature but qualitative. The Creator the unique, absolutely simple, unrestricted, unconditioned Reality itself must be a continuous Creator source of the ultimate fulfillment of conditions of all else that is real at every moment it could cease to be real i. The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought.

Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine will. All spatio-temporal realities are composite in their structure. The principle of divine simplicity, moreover, carries with it certain inevitable metaphysical implications.

One is that God is eternal, not in the sense of possessing limitless duration but in the sense of transcending time altogether. Time is the measure of finitude, of change, of the passage from potentiality to actuality. Another implication is that God is in some sense impassible: that is, being beyond change, He also cannot be affected— or, to be more precise, modified— by anything outside Himself. He also must possess no limitations of any kind, intrinsic or extrinsic, that would exclude anything real from Him.

Nothing that exists can be incompatible with the power of being that He is, as all comes from Him, and this means that He must transcend all those limits that alienate and exclude finite realities from one another, but in such a manner that He can embrace those finite realities in a more eminent way without contradiction… The infinite power of being— the power to be, without any reliance upon some other cause of being, as well as the power to impart being to creatures— must be of infinite capacity, which means infinite simplicity.

Aziz Esmail explains:. Being free from and prior to the dichotomy between subject and object, it is therefore also outside the frame of human discourse. It does not mean that God literally possesses knowledge or justice as distinct attributes. The Thomist philosopher Edward Feser explains this as follows:. But the Unmoved Mover, as the source of all change, is the source of things coming to have the attributes they have. Hence, He has these attributes eminently if not formally.

That includes every power, so that He is all-powerful. It also includes the intellect and will that human beings possess, so that He must be said to have intellect and will, and thus personality, in an analogical sense.

Instead, it distinguished between Conditioned Reality and Unconditioned Reality and proceeded to show, by disjunctive syllogism, that there must be at least one Unconditioned Reality in existence.

It further used the very definition of Unconditioned Reality to deduce that there is but one unique Unconditioned Reality in all of existence. If the concept of God were the concept simply of some demiurge— some conditioned being among other conditioned beings—then it would indeed be a concept requiring the supplement of some further causal explanation. But none of the enduring theistic faiths conceives of God in that way.

The God they proclaim is not just some especially resplendent object among all the objects illuminated by the light of being, or any kind of object at all, but is himself the light of being. It makes perfect sense to ask what illuminates an object, but none to ask what illuminates light.

It is the resort of the intellectually lazy. For one thing, it is an approach that already concedes the power of the argument against an infinite explanatory regress, which is definitely not a good first move for the committed unbeliever. However, there are four major problems with this line of thinking. Firstly, the principle of verification itself cannot be verified empirically. There is no empirical observation that tells us that something is only true is verified empirically.

So the entire principle of empiricism is based on faulty circular logic and must be dismissed. Secondly, empirical observation — even with the most sophisticated instrumentation — can only observe material things that undergo change. The only reason that physicists can observe anything at all is because change is taking place at all levels of the material world. For this reason, the scope of empirical observation is limited and will eventually reach a boundary. God is changeless and immutable. Therefore, He cannot be empirically observed by definition.

This does not entail the non-existence of God, it entails the limited scope of empiricism as a method of knowing. Thirdly, the actual practice of science is not strictly empirical. Science includes an interplay of theory, mathematical modeling, empirical observation and trust. Certain branches of physics such as cosmology, quantum physics, astronomy rely heavily on mathematical modelling in order to produce theorems.

Many scientific theories such as relativity, the Big Bang theory, etc. Einstein himself never needed to set foot in a laboratory. Fourthly, many truths are deducted using axiomatic logic and not empirical testing. The Pythagorean theorem can only be proven mathematically and not empirically.

No amount of empirical observations of triangles would ever constitute a proof of the theorem. Compared to logical and deductive proofs, empirical based proofs are at best probabilistic since the sample size can never include the entire set of testable samples.

The rules tell you how each piece moves, how the game is won, and so forth. But why are the pieces governed by these rules, specifically, rather than others? Why do any checkers boards exist at all in the first place?

No scrutiny of the rules can answer those questions. It is impossible to answer them, or indeed even to understand the questions, unless you take a vantage point from outside the game and its rules.

Its domain of study is what is internal to the natural order of things. It presupposes that there is such an order just as the rules of checkers presuppose that there are such things as checkers boards and game piece… Thus, science cannot answer the question why there is any world at all, or any laws at all. To answer those questions, or even to understand them properly, you must take an intellectual vantage point from outside the world and its laws, and thus outside of science.

You need to look to philosophical argument, which goes deeper than anything mere physics can uncover. Response: There are no exceptions to the rule of causality. Modern science has not detected or observed any cases where material things have no cause.

The quantum vacuum contains unstable energy subject to the laws of physics. Even the most fervent materialist must at least grant that quantum particles and functions are not causally independent in an ultimate sense; they do not literally emerge from nonexistence.

Radioactive decay, for instance, still has to occur within radioactive material, and within a physical realm governed by mathematically describable laws. And whatever occurs within a quantum field or vacuum is dependent upon that field or vacuum and that vacuum is not, as it happens, nothing. And all physical reality is contingent upon some cause of being as such, since existence is not an intrinsic physical property, and since no physical reality is logically necessary.

Response: A number of classical thinkers Aristotle, Ibn Sina, Aquinas and contemporary western philosophers have argued and demonstrated that causes are in fact simultaneous with their effects. While common people tend to see cause and effect as two temporal events, this is not actually the case when causation is examined in depth. Even Immanuel Kant admitted that causes are simultaneous with their effects — such as the case where a stove is causing an area to be heated or when a ball impresses a groove when it sits on a cushion.

In fact, all types of causation — even those that appear to be temporal — are in reducible to simultaneous causation. These authors look at several examples from everyday experience, biology, physics and agent causation and conclude that they are all cases of simultaneous causation. This is because an object is not truly a cause until the very instant that it is producing its effect. Before or after that time, the object is not a cause in any meaningful sense.

Causation, we insisted, involved simultaneity. The effect occurs at the same time as its cause. Man has every reason to believe in the reality of causation: indeed, to take it as one of the most fundamental realities in the whole of existence… Causation is as real as anything we know.

It is fundamental: an actual feature of this one true world. Response: The only logical alternative to theism is naturalism or physicalism — the belief that physical reality is all there is. However, there is much stronger support for theism than naturalism — for three reasons. Firstly, there are no deductive or empirical arguments for naturalism. Naturalism, as already mentioned, relies on empiricism which is unprovable and circular in its own logic.

Furthermore, there is no way to actually prove or argue, from observations within the natural world, that the natural world is all that exists. Naturalism, far from being a reasoned position, is merely a prejudice or assumption that one arbitrarily adopts. Secondly, naturalism is self-refuting because under the assumption of naturalism, the human mind is reducible to the brain which has evolved through natural selection for the sole purpose of survival and not to discover objective truth.

As such, all ideas held by a person — under naturalism — are not held because of their truth or rationality but simply because of brain chemistry. This casts great doubt as to the accuracy of human scientific conclusions and knowledge in general — since it could only correspond to objective reality by some improbable miraculous coincidence. Atheism at the end of the day is simply not provable and this should cast doubt on the very rationality of atheist belief which truly amounts to blind faith.

James Cutsinger summarizes this point when he says:. On the contrary, atheism is self-contradictory. Think about it. But omniscience is an attribute of God. While there are no positive arguments for naturalism or atheism, there are good arguments for theism. The argument presented in this article is based on the concept of causality — which no one really disputes.

All physical reality is logically contingent, and the existence of the contingent requires the Absolute as its source. Why the Absolute produces the contingent may be inconceivable for us; but that the contingent can exist only derivatively, receiving its existence from the Absolute, is a simple deduction of reason. Alternatively, reality is essentially absurd: absolute contingency, unconditional conditionality, an uncaused effect.

And the antithesis between the two positions can never be made any less stark than that… The general argument from the contingent to the absolute, or from the conditioned to the unconditioned, is a powerful and cogent one.

No attempt, philosophical or otherwise, to show that it is a confused argument, or logically insufficient, or susceptible of some purely physical answer has ever been impressively successful. Even if one does not accept its conclusions one still has absolutely no rational warrant for believing that materialism has any sort of logical superiority over theism; the classical argument is strong enough to show that naturalism is far and away a weaker, more incomplete, and more wilfully doctrinaire position than classical theism is.

Naturalism, as I have said repeatedly, is a philosophy of the absurd, of the just-there-ness of what is certainly by its nature a contingent reality; it is, simply enough, an absurd philosophy. The arguments presented in this article lead to the conclusion that there is one, single, unique, infinite Unconditioned Reality that continuously creates and sustains the existence of all things — space, time, matter, the Universe, consciousness, etc.

Such an orientation brings one in harmony with God. A man must be at one with God. This may sound old-fashioned to some people. Remember, if restrictions, then incompatibility — no incompatibility, therefore no restrictions. If unconditioned reality itself has no restrictions to its mode of being, then nothing whether real or really possible can be excluded from it, which means that it must be compatible with and inclusive of all other real or really possible restricted states of being. In other words, unconditioned reality must be pure being itself or pure existence itself without any restrictions whatsoever to its act of existence — in short it must be absolutely simple.

The questions remain whether there can be only one unconditioned reality and whether it has the divine attributes classically ascribed to God. I will take up the absolute uniqueness of unconditioned reality in the next post. Image credit: Reasons. After a three-year apprenticeship with Fr. Robert Spitzer S. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in theology from Catholic Distance University and the Augustine Institute, and is currently working on his masters in philosophy with Holy Apostles College and Seminary.

He is one of the most dynamic and enthusiastic Catholic speakers on the circuit today. He resides in Murrieta, CA with his wife and four children. You can view Karlo's online videos at KarloBroussard. You can also book Karlo for a speaking event by contacting Catholic Answers at Tags: simplicity. Note: Our goal is to cultivate serious and respectful dialogue.

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