ONTO-COSMOLOGICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD IN WESTERN EUROPEAN AND EASTERN PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

The article explores the question of various ways of proving the existence of God in the philosophical discourse of Western European and Eastern paradigms of thinking on the material of ontological and cosmological arguments related to the field of philosophy of religion. According to the results of the study, conclusions are drawn that the difference lies not only and not so much in the conceptual foundations of the concepts of “being” and “God” (the theistic concept – in Western European philosophy, pantheistic – in the Eastern tradition), but in the ways of evidence-based thinking. The Western European paradigm of thinking, being based on the “extroverted” evidentiary principle (“I think about Him, therefore He exists”), is aimed at objectifying the two objects of proof of “God” and “being”, in which “God” is objectified either in an analytical judgment as a concept of reason “something more than which nothing can be thought of”, from which his “logically necessary” being follows (an ontological argument), or in synthetic judgments about the “actually necessary “ existence of God as a “causeless cause”, a “stationary engine”, a “baseless basis”, based on a logical analysis of the general fact of the existence of the universe (cosmological argument). At the same time, Western thinking falls into a hopeless situation or aporia, when the concept of “God”, being by definition a free being, is thought of as a necessary proven, that is, unfree being, and the very concept of “being” in relation to God is thought of as its opposite – “that which by its nature stands above existence.” The Eastern paradigm of thinking does not fall into such a aporia, since, being initially based on a different “introverted” evidentiary principle (“I think as It exists”), it is aimed not at objectification of the objects of proof (God and being), but at their distribution in the philosophical discourse “from the first person”, in which it is initially postulated the very existence of God (“and first of all He pronounced: “I am”), after which the pantheistic content of his being as “embraced by God” (what He is) is unfolded using the methods of anthropological-metaphorical analogy (“I am Him”, “you are That”, “atman is Brahman”).