October 1st, 2012
Courtesy of Galley Friend J.S.:
We cannot assume Captain America to have had time between battles to study classical philosophy and theology, but his words could be read as containing implicitly the answer to pop atheism’s “one god further” objection (which I have discussed here, here, and here). The God of classical theism is not “a god” among others, precisely because He isn’t an instance of any kind in the first place, not even a unique instance. He is beyond any genus. He is not “a being” alongside other beings and doesn’t merely “have” or participate in existence alongside all the other things that do. Rather, He just is ipsum esse subsistens or Subsistent Being Itself. He is First Cause not in the sense of being the cause that came before the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. causes, but rather in the sense of having primal or absolutely underived causal power whereas everything else has causal power in only a derivative and thus secondary way. He is not “a person” but rather the infinite Intellect and Will of which the persons of our experience are mere faint reflections. Since He has no essence distinct from His existence which could even in principle be shared with anything else, He is not the sort of thing there could intelligibly be more than one of. And so forth.
Go read it all.
Mike C. October 1, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Very interesting; brings to mind a storyline in the Waid/Weiringo Fantastic Four not quite ten years back where Ben Grimm dies and the team sets out to bring him back from Heaven. At the end of their journey they meet God, who turns out to be Jack Kirby at his drawing table (talking at one point to his “collaborator” on the phone). There was a several-issues long trek to get there, but Jack sends them home by simply drawing them in the Baxter Building. Hadn’t put it together before, but I suppose it’s consistent with a universe containing Deadpool.
I mention this because this is on top of the multiple overlapping pantheons inhabiting Marvel Comics, even over the layers of cosmic entities presiding over reality (yet still contingent), there is in Marvel Comics there is a notion of an uncreated creator, an entity beyond the reality of the comics to whom the comic world owes its life and continued existence, the comic writer.