Indian Philosophy v2.c26.s18.2

v2.c26.s18.2

Īśvara, according to Śaṃkara, is the determinate (saguṇa) Brahman regarded as the supreme personality. Śaṃkara believes that the question of God’s existence is an absurd one. If God exists, then he must exist as other objects do, which would be to reduce God to the level of the finite, making him simply a unit in the indefinite multiplicity of objects, distinct from them all, even as they are distinct from each other, or merging him in the totality of existence in a pantheism which will be practically indistinguishable from atheism. To state the question of God in terms of existence removes in advance all possibility of solving it. If the rigidity of reason is any security for the attainment of truth, we should have arrived at it long ago. As a matter of fact we find different schools, each pretending to be logical, in conflict with the rest. Śaṃkara takes up the so-called proofs for the existence of God, the epistemological, the cosmological and the physico-theological, and shows their futility, as Kant did at a much later day.