Primacy of the Supernatural Consciousness

Under the supernaturalistic primacy of consciousness, existence is a product of and subservient to a divine consciousness, namely God. This is implicit in Plato and made explicit in the early Christian philosophy. A believer of this view will often ask something like “who created the universe?”—they ask this because they reject that you can have existence as the starting point, “but what caused existence to exist?” then they will happily take the divine consciousness as the starting point. So they agree that there has to be some irreducible primary, they are just unsatisfied with existence being said primary.

This fact–that they accept there to be an irreducible primary–is made clear when one interrogates the theist on the implied infinite regress involved in the naïve primacy of the supernatural consciousness: if a creator is required to explain existence, then a second creator is, by the same reasoning, surely required to explain the first creator, and so on ad infinitum. The typical theist will respond to this by asserting that one cannot ask for an explanation of God, he is an inherently necessary being, he is the irreducible primary. After all, one must start somewhere, right? Such an individual refuses to begin with what can actually be known and verified by any sane man with working faculties of perception: that existence exists; instead he insists on escaping from the world into the completely unknowable, ineffable, and unverifiable, leading to a procedure that cannot actually explain anything.

According to Christianity (and Judaism), God is an infinite consciousness who created existence, sustains it, makes it lawful, then periodically subjects it to decrees that flout the regular order, thereby producing “miracles.” Epistemologically, this variant leads to mysticism: knowledge is said to rest on communications from the Supreme Mind to the human, whether in the form of revelations sent to select individuals or of ideas implanted, innately or otherwise, throughout the species.¹