Okay, we're on the same page. Yep, your idea is very strictly dependant on our finitude (indeed obviously so), to which the godhead isn't party, as others are pointing out very well.

Basically, strictly speaking, God isn't a  soul or a mind, but nor is he any of the modified notions that have arisen in the last few centuries. God isn't a transcendental unity of apperception, nor a fichtean ego, nor a Hegelian recognative self-relation through another, nor a Jamesian self, nor a Dasein, nor a brain process... To apply the analysis of any of these to God would be a category mistake based on a common use of mental language.

You're sort of on to something, and I can recall Heidegger suggesting something in the direction you're going, in the following way:

A phenomenologist might rightly show that Thomism has no proper grounds from which to start in its metaphysical project let alone from which to draw conclusions about divinity. If you could, for instance, robustly show that the tradition is in some respect drastically mistaken about the very phenomena of thinghood, motion, relation, quality, category, etc, then you might be able to throw into doubt its ability to get off the ground.

However, that's different from what you're doing now. I don't know the best books on this topic though I can think of two in the direction (though they both try to oppose Heidegger on metaphysics):

https://www.amazon.com/Question-Being-Heidegger-Stanley-Rosen/dp/1587316757

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1441195955/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1475478516&sr=1-2&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=heidegger+aquinas&dpPl=1&dpID=41YQRy6zvTL&ref=plSrch

Edith Stein goes to some length to try and justify much of the traditional thought phenomenologically here:

https://www.amazon.com/Finite-Eternal-Being-Attempt-Collected/dp/0935216324

If Heidegger is right, then his work strongly suggests that at the very least traditional metaphysics has none of the easygoing intellectual necessity sometimes presumed to it, but this is not the same as rigorously demonstrating that you cannot proceed as we do about God. Don't be mislead; Heideggerians often use 'ontotheology' as a slur, as if at some point some true obviously triumphant refutation had been given. I still await that refutation to this day.

Last edited by iwpoe (10/03/2016 2:44 am)