By Jimmy Stephens:
On Christian Theism, God is self-existent, an idea freighted with a lot of metaphysical baggage. One metaphysical correlate is irrelativity. Who God is is not something defined by Platonic Forms or abstract properties or a force. God’s identity is something God has without depending on or emerging from or participating in anything other than Himself.
Because of this, an epistemological doctrine follows that God is incomprehensible. His identity is not limited to facts about the universe, human thought, and so forth, because all such matters are created. The only way to know God is to *be* Him or for Him to dip His toes into the stream of human experience and tell us Himself, metaphorically speaking.
This runs non-Christian Theists into a dilemma. How is it that we know God?
If we construct a natural theology from some non-revelatory category of human experience, then that entails that God’s identity is defined by that category, and He is not self-existent. Classical theists will readily note the problems following that concession.
For example, if reason unaided by divine revelation can hold God to “laws of thought” and so forth, then it is these laws of thought that exist paramount to all reality, over and above God, defining Him and so removing His aseity.
However, the observant philosophical theist will readily see the upcoming problem. For if revelation from God is not a public, historic matter verifiable by a community, then humans are universally unable to decipher mere claims of private oracle from objective acts of God. The Muslim, Mormon, and Reformed Christian all have means to resolve this problem by appealing to holy books attributed divine authorship.
What does a philosophical theist have?
Further Reading:
The Council 