Nov, 2014
What is life? Does existence have meaning? What is my relationship with nature and the environment in which I exist? Is “good” universal, and if so, how is it defined? These formative philosophical questions seem to be embedded in human consciousness. Dating back to the oldest known records, religion has played a central role in answering these questions, incorporating the idea of gods or God. In this way, religion has been intertwined with philosophy for thousands of years. Only in the last century or two have they started to pull apart. For me, the two remain deeply intertwined. I cannot consider the question of God without considering my own consciousness and the epistemological and ontological framework in which the idea of God is constructed. Reciprocally, in constructing a framework for personal experience and values, I cannot help but intuitively identify with the concept we call “God.” What or who is God? What is my relationship to God? I think that the views of today are built on the beliefs of yesterday. In this way, ideas have a sort of evolutionary trajectory, akin to what Richard Dawkins called “memes” (the genes of ideas, if you will). Beliefs that are widely held build biases, mold worldviews and establish paradigms that frame social norms and influence our understanding of life experience. I wish to understand the broad historical framework in which different philosophical ideas and conceptions of God arose. As mentioned in Part 1, I spent most of my life contentedly holding an evangelical Christian worldview. Only in recent years did my search for God and philosophical understanding meaningfully expand to incorporate more diversity. For this reason, I think it was especially important for me to at least try to understand a broader view of the past. That desire has driven me to read prolifically in recent years as part of an effort to build a better and broader base of perspective. Though I have only really scratched the surface in what will be a lifelong process, I do feel as though I have found a sufficiently settled position to at least sketch the rough outline of my current conception of God. Since this essay is longer than most have been, I will break it into two sections: “Section A” is my historical survey of God, science and philosophy, and “Section B” includes my beliefs and speculations based largely upon observations noted in “Section A.”
Part One: Historical Survey
The idea of gods or God has been present from the start of recorded human history. In The History of God, Karen Armstrong observes, “When they personalized the unseen forces and made them gods, associated with the wind, sun, sea and stars but possessing human characteristics, they were expressing their sense of affinity with the unseen and with the world around them. …This sense of the ‘numinous’ was basic to religion. It preceded any desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior.” What may have started as a fearful and fawning fascination with nature ultimately took a more philosophical bent, as entire religious belief systems developed around the understanding of the force(s) behind nature. Invariably, gods or God were these forces, and were believed to be much greater than men. In time, God has come to be understood as the Ultimate reality, for wont of a better description. Hinduism is considered one of the oldest surviving mainstream religions. Though Hinduism has many varieties, at the core of Vedanta Hinduism is a concept of God that can be found in almost all other modern religions: that all of nature and existence emanates (or originated) from God, and is in this way an extension of God’s creative force. This is perhaps the most universal conception of God. As Aldous Huxley asserts in The Perennial Philosophy, “this teaching is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi (“That art thou”); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence.” This concept runs through theistic Eastern thought and into Sufi Islam and mainstream Christianity, where in the words of the Apostle Paul, “it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me”, and “in him all things hold together.” Twentieth-century Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths writes in The Marriage of East and West, “This is the vision of the ultimate reality which is given us in the perennial philosophy. It is common to Greece and to India, China and Arabia, and it is found in the Christian doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, where each creature participates through the indwelling presence of the Spirit.”
The aspect of God that interests me here is how different religions have historically conceptualized the human relationship to God. Most simply, it seems to me that there have been two conceptions: one is an ethereal, transcendent and impersonal “God” that is often closely associated with Nature, and the other is a personal God that acts within time and interacts with mankind, like a sentient Being. To oversimplify, it seems to me that Eastern religions have tended to place God (or Ultimate Truth, as it were) within man and nature in various forms of rough Pantheism or Panentheism, while Western and/or Middle Eastern religions have placed a more personal God above and apart from man in forms of Monotheism. I recognize that my line of delineation is jagged at best, and made with an exceptionally broad brush. Some Eastern religions are non-Theistic, and most Western religions do recognize an indwelling of God upon salvation. But I hope to show that the perceived difference between God (Ultimate Truth) existing internally versus existing externally has profound implications for our conception of God. Karen Armstrong comments on the difference between the ethereal God of Hinduism and the personal God of Judaism in The History of God, when she writes, “Despite his terrifying otherness, Yahweh can speak and Isaiah can answer. Again, this would have been inconceivable to the sages of the (Hindu) Upanishads, since the idea of having a dialogue or meeting with Brahman-Atman would be inappropriately anthropomorphic.” This fundamental question regarding how God relates to mankind is at the heart of religious differences, and more fundamentally, at the heart of all religious experience in my opinion. I think that to follow the trajectory of these divergent conceptions of God can be instructive when considering how the idea and presence of God is folded into modern philosophies of science and religion, and understood and experienced by us individually.
What I will call the “Eastern” view is fundamentally Nondualistic: there is just one “substance”, and it enfolds both God and Nature, including man. The Sanskrit word used in Vedanta is Advaita, which roughly translates as “not two.” This subtly different than “Monism,” which asserts a single metaphysical “substance,” be it mind (“Idealism”) or matter (“physicalism”). Fritjof Capra summarizes the concept of nondualism neatly in Tao of Physics, writing “The most important characteristic of the Eastern world view – one could almost say the essence of it – is the awareness of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things and events, the experience of all phenomena in the world as manifestations of a basic oneness. All things are seen as interdependent and inseparable parts of this cosmic whole; as different manifestations of the same ultimate reality.” In the Rig Veda, one of the oldest Hindu scriptures, it says, “Though One, Brahman is the cause of the many… Brahman is the unborn (aja) in whom all existing things abide. The One manifests as the many, the formless putting on forms.” The same idea of a unifying singular nature to reality appears in the ancient writings of Greek and Roman philosophers. Said Hericlitus in 500 BC, “All things come out of the One and the One out of all things.” In Meditations, Stoic philosopher and Roman ruler Marcus Aurelius suggests, “Constantly think of the Universe as one living creature, embracing one being and one soul; how all is absorbed into the one consciousness of this living creature; how it compasses all things with a single purpose, and how all things work together to cause all that comes to pass.” This view runs through the philosophical writings of George Berkeley, Arthur Schopenhauer, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, who wrote, “Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.” It extends to the philosophical and religious writings of many modern theoretical physicists like Albert Einstein, David Bohm, and Erwin Schrodinger, who wrote, “the plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy, in which this is a fundamental dogma, has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object.” This view aligns most clearly with Pantheism, Panentheism, and Panpsychism. Its adherents have often been labeled as heretics in the west, or more charitably as “mystics” within Christianity, (Sufi) Islam, or (Kabbalah) Judaism. I have so far encountered a few Christian writers within orthodoxy have advanced similarly mystic views, including Bede Griffiths who wrote in Return to Centre, “In God, the absolute Being, there is no division, or ‘composition’ of any kind. He is without duality and sees and knows all things in Himself as they exist eternally in identity with Him. Everything – and every person – exists eternally in God as God. This is the truth of advaita, a truth as Catholic as it is Hindu.”
In contrast to the “mystical” Eastern view that folded God into nature and all of material experience, Rene Descartes separated material reality from the ethereal, spiritual realm of God, mind, and the human soul. His view is referred to as (Cartesian) Dualism. I believe this concept is central to much of the current conflict between science and religion. Descartes conceived of the Spiritual realm as a separate “substance”, distinct from the material “substance” of tangible reality. His philosophy echoed Plato’s concept of Forms, wherein immaterial, immutable, perfect “Forms” served as the underlying basis for the imperfect material forms that we experience through our senses. According to some historians, Plato’s ideas were first and perhaps most lastingly incorporated into Christian thought by St. Augustine of Hippo. St. Augustine was also strongly influenced by the nondualistic Neoplatonic writings of Plotinus, who felt God was eternal, perfect, and could be found within all men. But for St. Augustine, man’s imperfection precluded such a simple resolution. In Confessions, he writes, “you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all.” In The History of God, religious historian Karen Armstrong observes that to St. Augustine, “God, therefore, was not an objective reality but a spiritual presence in the complex depths of the self. Augustine shared this insight not only with Plato and Plotinus but also with Buddhists, Hindus and Shamans in the nontheistic religions. Yet his was not an impersonal deity but the highly personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. God had condescended to man’s weakness and gone in search of him.” And here St. Augustine drew an important line that separated Christianity from all other religions by emphasizing a doctrine called “Original Sin.” Karen Armstrong writes, “the fall of Rome influenced his doctrine of Original Sin, which would become central to the way Western people would view the world. Augustine believed that God had condemned humanity to an eternal damnation, simply because of Adam’s one sin… Neither Jews nor Greek Orthodox Christians regarded the fall of Adam in such a catastrophic light; nor, later, would Muslims adopt this theology of Original Sin.” The doctrine defined mankind as inherently fallen, forever separated from God. For St. Augustine and Christian theology, mankind’s only hope for restoration with God was salvation as offered through the physical death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This dualistic worldview set up two separate and opposed realities: an imperfect material world of sin and defilement that a Perfect God could not abide, and a perfected spiritual world of God, Truth, and eventual eternal salvation.
Dualism came to dominate western philosophy with its inherently monotheistic worldview. Built into its conception of reality is a separate “substance” for God and the supernatural. The Roman Catholic church controlled European culture and politics in the middle ages, directing both science and philosophy. The pervasive dualistic worldview of Europe kept matters of the spirit present in every discussion of philosophy, and compelled every philosopher to double as a theologian. Concurrently, the empirical study of nature was developing more rigorous methods of study, led by Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Galileo Galilei, and eventually Isaac Newton. The surge in natural exploration via the scientific method led to a gradual demystification of the world, and a series of discoveries that challenged many of the Church’s assertions about nature and our place in relation to it. The belief that God was the Universal Cause directing every detail of life found itself under attack. Theories based on Divine sovereignty or idealistic rationality gave way to theories predicated on physical causality. The deterministic nature of Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe lent itself to a separation between physical causality in nature, and the ethereal spiritual realm of Newton’s deistic conception of God. Philosophers like David Hume rejected all supernaturalism and thus rejected the common conception of God, while Christian philosopher George Berkeley embraced the Divine while rejecting all of material reality just a manifestation of consciousness. The wedding of two “substances” made for a messy marriage, and the doctrine of “causal closure” – the belief that material effects always and only have material causes – ultimately pushed beliefs in the supernatural off center-stage among much of western society’s intelligentsia. Christian theology grew increasingly rationalistic in the 18th and 19th centuries to align with the apparent predictability of the physical universe. The belief in the supernatural waned in favor a more deistic conception of God as taken by intellectuals like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, who wrote in The Age of Reason, “The only idea man can affix to the name of God, is that of a first cause, the cause of all things.” Deism is essentially physicalist in that it is a “causally closed” physical system once the miraculous First Cause is actualized. Though Newton and most of the great scientists of his age retained the belief in God as a critically important First Cause, it seemed possible – perhaps for the first time – that science would eventually answer every miracle with a mechanistic solution or material cause. The skepticism towards supernaturalism espoused by deism was challenged by those who rallied around Biblical literalism in a sort of revolt against the scientific revolution. Writes Karen Armstrong, “Once the Bible begins to be interpreted literally instead of symbolically, the idea of its God becomes impossible. To imagine a deity who is literally responsible for everything that happens on earth involves impossible contradictions… The scientific discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus might not have disturbed Ismailis, Sufis, Kabbalists or hesychasts, but they did pose problems for those Catholics and Protestants who had embraced the new literalism.” She continues, “People began to believe that better education and improved laws could bring light to the human spirit. This new confidence in the natural powers of human beings meant that people came to believe that they could achieve enlightenment by means of their own exertions. They no longer felt that they needed to rely on inherited tradition, an institution or an elite—or, even, a revelation from God—to discover the truth.” Many of western philosophy’s most famous thinkers sought to mesh the intellect, instinct and ethics of mankind with the providence of God during the Renaissance. It wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that an outright rejection of God’s existence was acceptable in polite company. Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared in the late 19th century, “God is dead.” That view has become increasingly popular (though still held by less than 5% of the world’s population), especially among those who trust that scientific inquiry can and will remove any need for God as an explanatory device for life’s biggest mysteries. Some would say the last four centuries have involved a relentless succession of overturning reasoned explanations with better causal explanations. A more informed understanding of the physical universe led to a greater awareness that mankind may not be the epicenter of the universe after all. Eventually, divine creation gave way to random chance and the prospect of biological evolution as the most popular explanation for human existence. Newton’s mechanistic universe of the Divine Clockmaker gave way to chaos theory and quantum uncertainty. By the mid-20th century, the physicalist world of science and the spiritual world of religion had largely gone their separate ways.
Sensing that the religious views that have dominated western thought for centuries may be vulnerable to collapse, a recent wave of “New Atheists” like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have sought to chase God out of the picture altogether. But can they really? I believe the most skeptical view of God falls into gross irrationality if it declares with self-assured certainty that God must not exist. An assertion of positive Atheism assumes that all possible knowledge is knowable and indeed known by humanity. It seems to me as certain as certain gets that this is not true. In Part 2, I made my pitch for epistemological skepticism which is basically the belief that we cannot know anything for certain. Naturally, I believe that argument applies to both camps of the “God exists” debate. As I see it, the question of God’s existence is axiomatically unknowable. Even the most remarkable supernatural occurrences do not qualify as sufficient proof of God’s existence. Conversely, a total absence of evidence supporting the existence of God is not proof that God does not exist. It is simply evidence that we have no access to evidence at present. What I think can be discredited (though not disproven) are certain concepts of God (e.g. that God creates thunder and lightning by blowing a bull’s horn from a golden throne on the clouds), because there are causal explanations that seem to quite adequately explain most natural phenomena. But the possible definitions of God handily exceed the limits of this selective exclusion. For this reason (perhaps alone), aggressive Atheistic debaters like Richard Dawkins have conceded the plausibility of Deism and Pantheism. Which makes them not Atheist, right? There is a funny bit of logic wherein Atheists seem only to attack the traditional Abrahamic religions of the West. It seems to me that the argument against the existence of God is often uniquely effective in Western societies because the case for God is generally made by those espousing a doctrine that embraces the historical veracity of divinely inspired Scripture. Dawkins and Harris do not challenge theistic conceptions like deism or panentheism because, alas, such vague conceptions of God are essentially impossible to disprove. This is where the differences between Nondualism and Dualism become important as connected with the word “God” and its relationship to science. And this, after all, is a discussion about the word “God”, so it is an important detail. Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, “Let us remind ourselves of the terminology. A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. …The deist God never intervenes thereafter (creation), and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs. Pantheists don’t believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. … Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.” Richard Dawkins is essentially drawing his line of distinction between Nondualism and Dualism, and defining it as Natural versus Supernatural. As for why he draws the line there when defining himself as an Atheist rather than an Agnostic, it might be telling that self-proclaimed Agnosticism likely sells far fewer books than self-proclaimed Atheism.
So what is natural? What is supernatural? Is something being in two places at once natural? Is instant non-local communication as shown in quantum entanglement supernatural? What if an experiment shows the effects of an interaction before the causal action occurs? Is that natural or supernatural? The causal nature of physical interactions is of primary importance in the standard model of physics, no? Is it natural or supernatural for that “law” of nature to be violated? It seems that perhaps the definition of “supernatural” can change from one generation to the next, as what appears “supernatural” today is understood as “natural” tomorrow. As Arthur C. Clarke famously pointed out: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” When defining the supernatural, the term “miracle” is often used. What is a miracle? Does the Placebo Effect qualify? People are physiologically changed – improved – without a known causal mechanism about 33% of the time when given impotent medication, even when they know the medicine they are taking is impotent. There is a growing body of research that shows documented improvement in faith healing and intercessory prayer. There is also evidence that those who are deeply bound to religious communities have longer life expectancy, recover more quickly from illnesses on average, and show a variety of other enhancements to the quality of their health. The documented health benefits of “mindful” meditation have gained such widespread acceptance as to be fully secularized. All of these findings call into question the relationship between mind and matter, and serve to undermine the case for simplistic causal physical determinism. And what is “physical”? Is reality fundamentally even physical at all? Long before quantum physics, strains of Buddhism and Hinduism, and philosophers like Abu Al-Ghazali, David Hume, and George Berkeley insisted reality has no form outside of the mind. And the scientific method seems to now be backing up that assertion. A piece of steel of is composed of atoms whose volume is over 99.99999% empty space. In Our Mathematical Universe, Max Tegmark writes, “Although we all start our lives thinking about space as something physical, forming the very fabric of our material world, we’ve now seen how mathematicians talk of spaces as being mathematical things. To them, studying space is the same as studying geometry, and geometry is just part of mathematics. One could indeed argue that space is a mathematical object, in the sense that its only intrinsic properties are mathematical properties—properties such as dimensionality, curvature and topology.” The more closely we examine the physical world, the less physical it seems to be. The deeper we dig into matter, the less matter we find. These findings warp the worldview that dominated just a few generations ago. And so, upon closer examination, it seems to me that the hard and fast distinctions between “Nondualism” and “Dualism”, the “Natural” and “Supernatural”, as drawn by both science and religion, are difficult distinctions to maintain.
It is my view that Dualism is a false paradigm, but so too are the Monistic version of physicalism or materialism that dominate modern secular and scientific thought. I prefer the middle ground of Nondualism. I think what we find at the core of “physical” reality more closely approximates information than matter. Writes James Gleiss in The Information, “Increasingly, the physicists and the information theorists are one and the same. The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract—a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence. Bridging the physics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, John Archibald Wheeler, the last surviving collaborator of both Einstein and Bohr, put this manifesto in oracular monosyllables: “It from Bit.” Information gives rise to “every it—every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself.” This is another way of fathoming the paradox of the observer: that the outcome of an experiment is affected, or even determined, when it is observed. Not only is the observer observing, she is asking questions and making statements that must ultimately be expressed in discrete bits. “What we call reality,” Wheeler wrote coyly, “arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions.” He added: “All things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this is a participatory universe.” The whole universe is thus seen as a computer—a cosmic information-processing machine. …When photons and electrons and other particles interact, what are they really doing? Exchanging bits, transmitting quantum states, processing information. The laws of physics are the algorithms. Every burning star, every silent nebula, every particle leaving its ghostly trace in a cloud chamber is an information processor. The universe computes its own destiny.” It seems to me the word “universe” could easily be replaced by the word “God”, and we are suddenly revisiting an organically quantum version of Newton’s clockwork universe, “inside the mind of God” in a sense. In From Science to God, Peter Russell asserts, “Five hundred years ago, there was little difference between them (science and religion). Science, limited though it was, existed within the established worldview of the Christian church. Following Copernicus, Descartes, and Newton, Western science broke away from the doctrines of monotheistic religion, establishing its own atheistic world-view, which today is very different indeed from that of traditional religion. But the two can, and I believe eventually will, be reunited. Their meeting point is consciousness. When science sees consciousness to be a fundamental quality of reality, and religion takes God to be the light of consciousness shining within us all, the two worldviews start to converge. Nothing is lost in this convergence.” He continues, “All our scientific paradigms are based on the assumption that the physical world is the real world, and that space, time, matter, and energy are the fundamental components of reality. When we fully understand the functioning of the physical world, we will, it is believed, be able to explain everything in the cosmos. This is the belief upon which all our scientific paradigms are based. It is, therefore, more than just another paradigm; it is a metaparadigm—the paradigm behind the paradigms. So successful has this metaparadigm been at explaining just about every phenomenon we encounter in the material world, it is seldom, if ever, questioned. It is only when we turn to the nonmaterial world of the mind that this worldview begins to exhibit weaknesses. Nothing in Western science predicts that any living creature should be conscious.” As Nobel Prize winning quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger notes in Mind and Matter, “The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it.” In his essay A New Theory of the Relationship of Mind and Matter, theoretical physicist David Bohm ties information to consciousness. He writes, “it is clear from all this that at least in the context of the processes of thought, there is a kind of active information that is simultaneously physical and mental in nature. Active information can thus serve as a kind of or ‘bridge’ between these two sides of reality as a whole. These two sides are inseparable, in the sense that information contained in thought, which we feel to be on the ‘mental’ side, is at the same time a related neurophysiological, chemical, and physical activity (which is clearly what is meant by the ‘material’ side of this thought).” He continues, “For the human being, all of this implies a thoroughgoing wholeness, in which mental and physical sides participate very closely in each other. Likewise, intellect, emotion, and the whole state of the body are in a similar flux of fundamental participation. Thus, there is no real division between mind and matter, psyche and soma. The common term psychosomatic is in this way seen to be misleading, as it suggests the Cartesian notion of two distinct substances in some kind of interaction.”
Continue to Page 2 of "That Art Thou"
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