Wherever the Truth may "Lie"bniz
If Lions had gods, They would be Lion(s)
Setting: A boundless, celestial garden where logic and nature intertwine. Marble pathways cut through flora that grows according to mathematical principles. Sophia, robed in twilight, sits across a simple stone table from Gottfried, who gazes intently at a blooming flower whose petals are arranged in a perfect logarithmic spiral.
Sophia: Tell me, Gottfried, your thoughts are ever on the nature of what is real, of what can be conceived as true. Consider the lion, a creature of magnificent and simple purpose. If such a beast were to possess the capacity for theology, what form would its deities take?
Gottfried: An intriguing proposition, Sophia. For any idea to be held as genuine, its very possibility must be demonstrable. My mind gravitates to the two paths by which such a demonstration can be made.
Sophia: Let us walk them together. Begin with the world as it is perceived.
Gottfried: Very well. The first path is that of experience. The lion knows the world only through its own senses and its own being. It understands power through the strength in its limbs, majesty through its own reflection, and providence through the success of the hunt. All that it experiences of greatness in nature is, in essence, some quality of itself. Therefore, by observing the world, its a posteriori conclusion would be that the ultimate being must be the perfection of these qualities. Its god would have the mightiest roar, the sharpest claw, the most magnificent mane. Its god could be nothing other than the archetypal Lion.
Sophia: It builds its god from the evidence of its own existence. And the second path? The one of pure reason?
I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiving its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact in nature.
— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)
Gottfried: That is the a priori path, the one constructed from cause and logic, independent of specific experience. The lion, if it could reason on its own origin, would seek a sufficient cause for its own ‘lion-ness.’ It would deduce that whatever created it must possess the essential attributes to produce a lion. The cause must contain the reason for its strength, its courage, its very form. By this chain of logic, it would arrive at the same conclusion: the first cause of a lion must, in its essence, be a supreme Lion. Any other concept would be an insufficient reason for its own being.
Sophia: So both the world it sees and the logic it could conceive would point to the same image. Both experience and reason are captive to the nature of the thinker.
Gottfried: Precisely. An idea’s possibility is proven when it aligns with what we can either observe or rationally deduce. The lion’s idea of a god is genuine to it because both methods validate the same form.
Sophia: (A faint smile touches her lips) Then turn that formidable intellect of yours from the savannah to the cities of men, Gottfried. If the lion’s god is proven to it in its own image, what does that say of the divine as conceived by humankind?
Gottfried: (He pauses, his gaze turning from the flower to the infinite starscape above the garden) It would mean… that our own conception of God is also shaped by the limits of our own nature. We prove the possibility of a divine being a posteriori by observing intelligence and purpose in the cosmos, for intelligence is what we value in ourselves. We prove it a priori by reasoning from our own consciousness and morality back to a first cause that must therefore be supremely conscious and moral.
Sophia: So the image…
Gottfried: The image we conceive is inevitably a reflection. Whether we arrive there through observing the world or through the pure mechanics of thought, the God we find is imbued with reason, with justice, with love—the highest principles of humanity, elevated to the infinite. Our genuine idea is a projection of our own perfected form.
Sophia: And is that a failing? A limitation to be mourned?
Gottfried: Not a failing. A principle. It is the very structure of how a mind apprehends what is greater than itself. A lion that conceived of a god that was a lamb would be a paradox. It is the nature of the eye to see, and the nature of the mind to understand through the framework of its own being. It is, perhaps, the most coherent and harmonious way for the universe to understand itself.
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