daverupa wrote:But it's English, so there's no additional foreign language issue here.
There is - it's a matter of a different, a foreign discourse. A discourse is a language. That's how I mean it here -
The totality of codified language (vocabulary) used in a given field of intellectual enquiry and of social practice, such as legal discourse, medical discourse, religious discourse, et cetera.
In the humanities and in the social sciences, the term discourse describes a formal way of thinking that can be expressed through language, a social boundary that defines what can be said about a specific topic; as Judith Butler said, “the limits of acceptable speech”, the limits of possible truth.
Discourses are seen to affect our views on all things; it is not possible to avoid discourse. For example, two notably distinct discourses can be used about various guerrilla movements describing them either as "freedom fighters" or "terrorists". In other words, the chosen discourse provides the vocabulary, expressions and perhaps also the style needed to communicate.
Discourses are embedded in different rhetorical genres and metagenres that constrain and enable them. That is language talking about language, for instance the American Psychiatric Association's DSMIV manual tells which terms have to be used in talking about mental health, thereby mediating meanings and dictating practices of the professionals of psychology and psychiatry.
Just like there is, say, "feminist discourse," and in it, particular terms have their own specific meanings that they don't necessarily have in other discourses.
To then argue that the feminists have it wrong, is to assume that one has a discourse that is superior to all others. (This is where it gets iffy.)
It's the fact that "First Cause" is a bankrupt idea,
I still fail to see why.
It doesn't make any hay to say that it's been defined that way, and that's just the way it is.
I think it makes perfect sense to say "God is defined by some theisms as First Cause, and that's just the way it is."
I wouldn't try to understand a Turkish word outside of Turkish. In the same manner, I wouldn't try to understand a theistic term outside of the theistic discourse.
God, when defined as e.g. a First Cause, functions as a "here there be dragons" - which is to say, a reason to stop drawing certain cognitive maps without simply admitting that it's unknown territory.
That's a projection. It's assuming, among other things, that those who claim to know about God have arrived at that knowledge the same way the speaker assumes he would.
On the other hand, e.g. SN 15.3
describes the situation as an inconstruable beginning.
Maybe to some people, that beginning is evident. Why should this be such a preposterous proposition - namely, that some other people may know things one doesn't know?
Very different than saying "and then, it's just the end, and there's a God there doing deus ex machina because of philosophers and their questions."
Yet nobody here is saying that.