Divine Adventure Time

"Free choices do not exist until they are made." How is this not an analytic proposition, like "a square consists of four equal sides"? Why make God the great exception to rudimentary logic? In other words, if we are genuinely free and God determines everything that happens, one of these must go. 

Moreover, freedom itself is without a sufficient reason in the absence of God, so it's not as if we can keep the freedom and chuck the Absolute. It's just that -- as discussed yesterday -- this Absolute is not a featureless blob, nor a rigidly deterministic machine. 

And yet, many believers want to keep their freedom and God's omni-everything too: unlimited unlimitedness, not even limited by truth, goodness, logic, or anything else.

I get that to a certain extent. After all, God is beyond our finite limits, but then again, there's the Meister's claim -- or testimony? -- that there is something uncreated and uncreatable in man, which is just an extreme way of saying that we are made in his image. 

What if freedom itself is uncreatable, even by God?

That's Berdyaev's view, but something about it doesn't sound right. Nevertheless, how could determinism be the principle of freedom? We'll have to come back to that one as we proceed. But if God is not only necessary being but pure necessity with no contingency whatsoever, whence the freedom, including the freedom to create? 

He could withdraw necessity and thereby create a "space" for freedom, like the Jewish concept of tzimtzum.

Not bad, and I get the appeal, but how would pure necessity be free to create freedom in the first place? I think there's a more metaphysically consistent solution to the problem. I'm going to just flip through and dialogue with The Future of Open Theology while keeping our Question in the background. For example,

it is better to think of the world as God's adventure rather than God's invention, or as God's project, rather than God's product.

Why insist that creation is a one-and-done deal? Why must it be like a deterministic machine? Even physics has abandoned the 19th century machine paradigm. What, is God the last to know? 

Indeed, the Genesis account has God working in stages. He doesn't create everything in a moment or even a "day." Rather, five of these so-called days go by before man enters the stage. So, some prep work is involved to create a free being -- again, more like a project than a product.

And again, to say that God is limited by immutability and impassivity is to place some rather extreme limits on God. What if "total control is not a higher view of God's power but a diminution of it," and "God expresses his power by sharing it with some of his creatures"? 

In the ancient Greek view change is bad, but in reality, "certain changes are 'consistent with and/or required by a constant state of excellence.'" 

Among these are, in my opinion, Life Itself. Which God is. In other words, we have it on good authority that "I am the way and the truth and the life." And what is life but change in order to remain the same? The point is, "unchanging life" is another oxymoron, like a "wise leftist."

God has general strategies in pursuing his objectives for the world and exercises his immense creativity in implementing them.... [God] displays "tremendous resourcefulness" in working to achieve his purposes for creation.

Works for me. And for everybody else:

In fact, people typically live as if open theism were true, whatever their actual theological convictions may be.... If there is really nothing left for us to decide, why should we bother trying to make good decisions or exert ourselves to do the right thing?...

The fact that God has definite plans for the ultimate destiny of his people as a group does not necessarily mean that the identity of every individual who will ultimately belong to it is determined in advance. 

Nevertheless, there are critics, for example, the Evangelical Theological Society, which decreed in 2001 that

the Bible clearly teaches that God has complete, accurate, and infallible knowledge of all past, present and future events, including all future decisions and actions of free moral agents. 

Spot the oxymoron: I've highlighted it for your convenience. I realize we're going around in circles. but

If God infallibly knows that a person will choose to perform a particular action in the future, how could that person be free to do anything else? 

Now, even man can create a machine. But what kind of being could freely create a free co-creator? 

Now, the creator reveals himself in several ways, first via the creation, second via the intellect that knows creation (and by the sheer mystery of subjectivity itself), and third by revelation proper, including "salvation history," which is to say, God's activity in the world, which 

is a genuine self-revelation, a portrayal of what God is really like. We can know who, or what, God is by looking at God's activity in the world.

And it turns out that "God is not sheer, undifferentiated unity." Rather

God is dynamic, living reality. Indeed..., God is relational.... We cannot go beyond the relations of Father, Son, and Spirit to a divine essence that precedes them, because there is no such essence. The relations constitute the being of God.

I call that a Big Hint that helps to resolve all of the metaphysical problems raised in the post. For example, as we've long argued, there is something resembling time in God, i.e., "the doctrine of the Trinity" "applies temporality to the inner being of God." 

Rice briefly traces the history of the doctrine of the Trinity, which must be understood against the backdrop of the Hellenistic devaluation of time and change. It would have been easy enough for early Christians to have identified God with this simple and changeless monad that has nothing to do with time, but instead, they "deliberately refused to do so, and the doctrine of the Trinity was the fruit of their efforts." 

Unlike the Greek view that God's self-identity is immune to all outside influence, leaving him changeless and impassible, the Trinity imputes change, dynamism to God. 

It was Augustine "who attributed to God the very characteristics of Greek ontology" that earlier Christians "had sought to overcome." The latter

wanted to show that God is inherently related to his temporal creation; Augustine wanted to show what God is in himself, apart from creation. For the Cappadocians, God is complex: it is precisely the togetherness of the identities that constitutes God.  

So, Augustine essentially de-trinitizes the Trinity and insists on a God who "is timeless and impassible, untouched and untouchable by the temporal world."  

So, all his fault?

Nah, that's too simplistic. Nevertheless, it does highlight two very different and irreconcilable visions of God, only one of which resolves our metaphysical anomalies and conundrums, the other responsible for generating them. 

We'll hit the pause button and continue scurrying down this path tomorrow.

Excuse me?

It's an abstract representation, trying to visualize the relationship between divine creation and human freedom, incorporating elements of time, choice, and relationship as suggested by the text and the ideas of open theology.

Try again, this time with a raccoon in the image.

The Limits of a Limitless God

It seems that believers instinctively recoil from the idea of placing limits of any kind on God, even if failure to do so results in a host of troubling consequences, most notably, God's direct responsibility for evil and suffering, and the loss of our own free will. 

It reminds me of a book by Stanley Jaki called The Limits of a Limitless Science, because both a limitless science and a limitless God leave us in a similar boat. As one reviewer puts it,

The materialists' view that all is predetermined by physical causes negates the notions of free will, choice, and decisions.... For the materialists to argue against free will is a contradiction, in that argument and debate are obviously matters of free will.

In reality, science cannot be limitless,

For as long as Gödel's incompleteness theorems are valid, the mathematical structure of that theory cannot contain within itself its own proof of consistency (Jaki). 

It seems that the votaries of scientism want to take the limitless absolute that was lost with their rejection of God, and apply it to nature. But man cannot be fenced in by any quantitative paradigm. Rather, he always escapes via a transcendent doorway that bisects horizontality. 

It reminds me of something Spencer Klavan discussed this morning:

The bawling Hamas groupies that trash Harvard Yard and Butler Lawn aren’t fired with the passionate conviction that nothing is either good or bad, right or wrong. They’re in no doubt at all that the good people -- themselves -- are right, and the bad people -- Jews, mostly -- are wrong.

Absolute relativism retains the absolute and forgets all about the relative:

A man who says that “nothing is true” really means that one thing is true: the thing he says. But if he’s right, it can only be because he says so. Consequently if he meets with contradiction he can only scream, and bully, and fight. Which means there’s no such thing as unbelief -- not in practice, and not for very long. There’s reasoned persuasion, and there’s violence. Everything else eventually turns into one of those two things, usually in short order.

But history obviously shows that something similar happens with a limitless religious absolute: anyone who doesn't share my absolute is my enemy. In the contemporary world Islamists and Hamasites carry on this tradition.  

It seems that relativism has its rights, and that these rights are absolute. If so, this must be because relativism itself is located in divinas, and that is essentially our claim: that the Absolute is "limited" both by its limitless infinitude (as discussed yesterday) and by its own relativity, or propensity to be in relation. 

Indeed, this should be obvious in Christian metaphysics, since it seems self-evident that the Father is "limited" by his eternal generation of the Son. This is apparently something the Father cannot not do, so that's a limit, not to mention a relation. But it's also free, and how can necessity be free? Because freedom is bound up with our nature. We are free to do countess things that are contrary to our nature, but this is a caricature of freedom.

So, God is limited by his nature?

Evidently. For example, if he is Truth itself, he cannot lie. And if he is Love, then this has certain implications for creation, because love would be strictly impossible in a deterministic cosmos, one in which God exerts unlimited power to micromanage every event.

Jaki quotes Clerk Maxwell to the effect that

One of the severest tests of the scientific mind is to know the limits of legitimate application of the scientific method.

I wonder if this is also a test of the religious mind -- to know the limits of... God? Isn't the whole point of God to have an unlimited power and intellect, i.e., omnipotence and omniscience? 

The very idea of God as somehow limited -- in fact, the very use of the word limited with reference to God -- inevitably puts people off (Rice).

Thus, open theism is instinctively rejected because of the supposed limits it places on the limitless. But Rice turns the tables on the absolute absolutists, suggesting that, "far from limiting or diminishing God," open theism presents "a dynamic, interactive view of God's relation to the world," which "actually enhances our picture of God."

Indeed, in comparison to open theism, "it is the traditional view of God that appears limited and restrictive." 

Oh? How's that?

Well, first of all, "limit" is a loaded word: "To describe something as 'limited' suggests that it is inferior to, or less than, it could be." Applied to God, it connotes a being "who is restricted, hampered, in what he can do and know," inferior to the supposedly limitless God of tradition. 

But supposing God is omnipotent, this cannot be "the ability to do anything, period," but "to do the things that fall within the range of logical possibility." Thus, it would be absurd to say that God's omnipotence entails the ability to make a square circle, or to make 2 + 2 = 5. It is not that he lacks the power per se, "but because these expressions do not refer to anything 'doable.' They are logical absurdities." 

So God is limited by not being absurd?

Some people don't think so. For example, there are those who say that God doesn't command things because they are good, but that they are good only because he commands them. Thus, all limits and restrictions are removed from God, even if it results in God -- lookin' at you, Allah -- commanding us to do evil things such as killing Jews and oppressing infidels. 

If omnipotence is limited by logical possibility and non-absurdity, could omniscience be limited in the same way? In other words, limited by what is logically knowable? In point of fact,

On the open view of God, there is nothing limited about God's knowledge. His knowledge is perfect; it includes all there is to know.

Or in other words, God is "limited" to knowing the knowable, and what is knowable is limited by (for example) God's own decision to create free beings -- which I suppose requires extraordinary forethought about the kind of cosmos in which it is even possible for free beings to exist. 

Recall, for example, all those parameters that govern the big bang, and which, if changed one iota, would render life and consciousness impossible. That's a lot of limits, but the limits result in humans and human freedom.

Could God have created a deterministic cosmos devoid of free beings capable of knowing truth and doing good? Who knows? I kind of doubt it, because why bother? It would literally be the largest pointless exercise conceivable.

But let's suppose God has the power to create a universe in which everything is predetermined, or one with an open future that is full of creative possibilities that may surprise even him. If God cannot create the latter world, then this is a pretty severe limitation on what God can and cannot do. 

But I think God is the kind of unnarcissary being who would not engage in the pointless exercise of creating a cosmos that is just a predetermined extension of his own limitless power. Gemini?

The author concludes by suggesting that God's decision to create a cosmos with free beings capable of knowing truth and doing good might be a self-imposed "limitation," but one driven by purpose and value. Creating a deterministic, pointless universe, even if within God's power, would be an exercise contrary to His nature as a loving and rational being.

In summary, the text argues for a nuanced understanding of God's "limits," not as deficiencies, but as inherent aspects of His nature, particularly in relation to truth, love, and the creation of free beings. It uses analogies from science, philosophy, and theology to challenge the notion of an absolutely limitless God, suggesting that such a concept leads to logical and ethical problems.

I get the raccoon, but what's the rest supposed to mean? 

The image depicts a radiant, multifaceted figure within a geometric structure, blending classical religious art with modern abstract expression. It aims to capture the paradox of a God who, while boundless in power and love, operates within the "boundaries" of His own nature and the logic of creation.

Celestial Infinitude and Divine Freedom

Down here, folks somewhat crudely divide reality into two broad dimensions, which is to say, down here and up there, or earth and heaven, immanent and transcendent, material and spiritual, profane and sacred,  terrestrial and celestial, etc. 

But who's to say the latter terms of these antinomies are simple and formless? What if they themselves contain distinctions and/or degrees? After all, In my father's house there are many mansions, and maybe they're not all in the same zip code. For example, purgatory is neither here nor there, but a distinct "degree of reality" or something. Saints don't live there. Only future saints, so it must include a time dimension as well.

But Christians should be accustomed to not thinking of God as a unitary monad, i.e., a blob with no distinctions. God has revealed his triune nature, but who says that's the only distinction? Perhaps there are others, but they aren't things the average believer needs to know about.

Jews, because of their radical monotheism, reject any talk of a celestial One-in-Three. And yet, as touched on yesterday, the Kabbalah makes even more outlandish claims of distinctions in God, e.g., between the absolute nothingness from which even infinity emerges, and the infinite potential of God before manifestation. Sounds like "two Gods," but for a Jew, this can't be. Therefore, it must be two sides of the one God. 

"Absolute nothing" and "infinite potential." Hmm. Why don't we just shorten these to Absolute and Infinite? In addition to the "horizontal" relations of the Trinity, this would imply "vertical" relations; just as Father and Son are complementary, so too are Absolute and Infinite. 

In fact, if not for Infinitude, the Absolute would indeed be a self-enclosed and immutable monad incapable of radiating -- of communicating -- outside itself. Apparently, Infinitude implies a principle of "otherness," analogous to the rays of the sun. It is completely arbitrary to assign a boundary to the sun and say we are literally "outside" it. In fact, we're always inside and outside it, depending upon our perspective. 

For Schuon, our intellect is conformed to the Absolute and indeed proof of the Absolute, as rays are self-evident proof of the sun. 

Now, Eckhart said the intellect is uncreated and uncreatable. Here he is not speaking of the lower intellect that senses and reasons about things herebelow, but a higher or deeper faculty that he likens to the divine spark or hidden ground of the human being. 

And I suppose you could say that the source of this spark is the Divine Fire itself, again, analogous to the sun and its rays, so, not exactly God, but not not God either, rather, a fragment of the divine essence that is present within the soul. Come to think of it, it is like a bit of the Absolute radiated and planted -- because of the divine Infinitude -- into our own ground. 

But why? Because, as Oldmeadow points out, "The Absolute is necessarily infinite Possibility, thus including the necessity of universal Manifestation." Which I think provides the esoteric wedge into which we may fit open theology, since the infinite possibility that is "built in" to the Absolute is impossible to reconcile with changelessness. 

Not only is possibility not necessity, it must be the principle of both divine freedom and of divine creativity. Conversely, absolute necessity could by definition never create -- whether applied to God or to us. Schuon goes so far as to suggest that

The relationship "God-world," "Creator-creature," "Principle-manifestation" would be inconceivable were it not prefigured in God, independently of any question of creation.

I'm picturing the absolute-infinitude scattering sparks of divinity everywhere and everywhen. Thus, for Schuon, "The separation between man and God is at one and the same time absolute and relative":

The separation is absolute because God alone is real, and no continuity is possible between nothingness and Reality, but the separation is relative -- or rather "non-absolute" -- because nothing is outside God. 

Now, just as Absolute entails Infinitude, I would say that freedom implies contingency, and ultimately for the same reason. Which, according to Rice.

creates a tremendous problem for the traditional concept of divine foreknowledge, because foreknowledge and freedom are utterly incompatible.... If God has absolute knowledge of future events, those events must have been planned by him, and that makes him responsible for everything that happens.

This is essentially a vision of God that makes him Absolute but strips him of his complementary Infinitude. Now what is in-finitude but in-definite and therefore not determined ahead of time? "Far from diminishing God," "this concept of divine knowledge enhances our view of God," for

It takes a far greater being to run a universe that involves changes not known in advance than one that has no unexpected occurrences. 

In other words, it takes a bigger Absolute to encompass Infinitude. But I suppose it comes down to a matter of temperament and preference. In my case, I can't help believing in genuine free will. Even if God didn't make me free, he sure made me someone who believes in freedom and contingency -- ours and his. 

Einsoferable Nonsense?

Maybe that was a bridge too far, i.e., the personal God being the face, as it were -- the marketing department -- of the beyond-personal. But at least it reconciles the anomalies that inevitably result from trying to apply impersonal attributes such as immutability and impassivity to the personal. 

This is not the first time we've discussed this solution, but it is the first time we've discussed it in the context of the challenge of open theology. If open theology relates only to the personal God, then, problem solved. Except traditional theologians believe they are describing the personal God, and both can't be right. Neither camp talks about anything like Eckhart's Godhead, hence the need for an esoteric approach to reconcile the two. 

In the past we've wondered whether this Godhead is ontological or merely epistemological. In other words, even traditional theologians will concede that God is totally beyond our conception, but this is more a function of our own limitations (e.g., finitude) than an actual distinction in God. But for Eckhart the distinction seems to be ontological. As discussed yesterday, "It is the source from which the personal God and all of creation emanate."

Actually, I believe Gemini is not quite correct there -- it is true that the personal God emanates, or is projected, from the Godhead, but it is the personal God who otherwise creates. Back to the Godhead, it

is beyond being and non-being, beyond good and evil, beyond all distinctions that our intellect can grasp. It is a "nothingness" in the sense of being empty of all created characteristics and limitations, not in the sense of absolute non-existence. 

It is utterly ineffable; no words or concepts can adequately describe it. It is passive and unmoving. It does not act or create in the way that "God" does. It is the silent, still source from which all activity flows.

One probably heretical workaround would be to identify the Father with the Ground or Godhead and the Son with the personal God. Except Father sounds pretty personal. Then again, he is said to be the source of the Trinity, only obviously not located in time, for there was never the Father without the Son.

Well, perhaps then the Godhead-God distinction isn't an emanation but a complementarity, the one always present with the other? Here we have to get beyond the necessarily limited and linear picture arising from language, and try to envision a more "complex" (so to speak) God. I mean, if God can be three persons in one substance, why not one substance with two sides? Like a dark side of the sun?

This vision is outlined very clearly in chapter 3 of Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy, called The Five Divine Presences. Let's drive it around the block a couple of times and see how she handles. It starts off with a quote by Schuon going to the linguistic problem referenced above:

God is ineffable, nothing can describe Him or enclose Him in words; but, on the other hand, truth exists, that is to say that there are conceptual points of reference which sufficiently convey the nature of God.

Interestingly, from a Christian perspective, God can in a sense be enclosed -- or at least enclothed -- in the Word, which must be the ultimate "intelligibility" or Truth of the Father.

Oldmeadow points out that the metaphysic we are about to describe is actually found in various guises in numerous traditions, but perhaps not as much in Christianity or Buddhism, since their focus is more on "spiritual therapy," which is to say, the how and not the why. Again, when we begin nosing around traditional Christian theology for a consistent Why, that's when the anomalies begin cropping up.

"The Five Divine Presences" goes to a Sufi conception that draws a distinction in the divine reality between a realm coinciding with "the Uncreated Intellect, the Logos," and one step higher, "the Supreme Principle, the Divine Essence."

Translated into Judeo-Christianese, the two top floors are 

1) Beyond Being, the Godhead, the Divine Essence, the Divine Principle, the Absolute Unqualified (the Divine Principle Itself).

One suspects that this is the neighborhood Aquinas found himself in when he said that, compared to it, all of his writing was so much straw. Whereas all of the writing was about 

2) Being, the Personal God, the Creator, the Uncreated Logos, (the prefiguration of the Manifestation in the Principle).

The Manifestation in the Principle: that there is key, because it situates a principle of creation in the Divine, so our temporal creation is the mirror of a more primordial creativity that takes place outside time. But again, #2 shares a certain resemblance to the Trinity, what with the emanation of the Uncreated Logos.

Clearly, these top two tiers -- precisely because they are two -- are bound to give pause to the traditional Christian, but now that I'm thinking about it, there's certainly something resembling #1 in Kabbalah, the Ein Sof, which is -- help us out here, Gemini --

understood as God before any self-manifestation in the creation of the spiritual or physical realms. The term literally translates from Hebrew as "(there is) no end," signifying the infinite, boundless, and incomprehensible nature of the Divine essence.

Boom. 

Ein Sof represents the aspect of God that is beyond human intellect, description, or limitation. It is the hidden, primordial source from which all of existence emanates. 

Any name or attribute we ascribe to God in the Bible or through human understanding refers to God's manifestations within creation, not to the Ein Sof itself. Names imply limitations, which cannot apply to the truly infinite. Thus, Ein Sof is considered "nameless." 

Hmm. It appears that Ein Sof is actually #2, as it follows

Ayin: Literally "nothingness." This represents the state before Ein Sof, an absolute nothingness from which even infinity emerges. It is a state beyond our comprehension.

Then comes Ein Sof, which is "Limitlessness, the infinite potential and being of God before manifestation." 

To summarize, the divine or metacosmic dimension has two levels, the Divine Essence which is Beyond-Being, and the Creator and Personal God who is already situated in Being, and is therefore "relative" not just to us, but to Beyond-Being.  

How is any of this helpful?

Well, we don't know yet. We have to get back to the book we've been reviewing, The Future of Open Theology, but we're out of time. 

The Creator God and the Created God

Yesterday we mentioned a metaphysical ancestor named Adam Clarke (1760-1832) who argued that radical immutability on God's part means no freedom or meaning on our part -- that if "God is the only operator," then created beings are but gears in a vast God Machine. 

In God's eternity, this post has already been written and you've already read it.

In that case, at least it should be easy enough to write.

That's a good point. Why is anything difficult if it happens inevitably? Clarke recognizes that

Without contingency, there would be no free agency, and that would leave God as the sole actor, making him "the author of all the evil and sin that are in the world" (Rice).

Honestly, how does one avoid this conclusion? 

If God predetermines everything, and his determinations are all necessarily right, then nothing the creatures do is wrong.

Nor could there be any distinctions between "vice and virtue, praise and blame, merit and demerit, guilt and innocence..." God's immutability is our ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card: instead of the devil made me do it, God did.  

I guess it's the whole notionof contingency in God that people object to. But if there are contingencies down here, it is logically necessary that "God's knowledge of contingencies must itself be contingent." 

I'm obviously aware of the traditional view that says God's all-determining will can somehow be reconciled with our genuine freedom, but I don't -- can't -- buy it, for it is as unintelligible as a square circle. 

Why even does God give us commands? It makes no sense whatsoever, and are we supposed to believe in a nonsense God? Or is that determined too? 

Here's another reasonable fellow named Lorenzo McCabe (1817-1897) who "insisted that free actions are of necessity contingent." That is at once a bold statement and plain common sense:

How could contingent events be known before they occur? Absolute divine foreknowledge excludes all contingency.... Remove all notion of contingency from God, and we are left with a God who is "immovably fixed," locked in "the iceberg of indifference," in short, a God who is not, in any meaningful sense, a personal... being.

The Iceberg of Indifference is very much like Einstein's block universe, in which the passage of time is but an illusion because everything has already happened. But "a truly personal God is one whose experience involves temporality," which, for some reason, is regarded as a metaphysical boo boo of the highest order by those in charge of these things. 

Why do that hate time?

It goes back to the idea that a perfect being cannot undergo change, because the change would result in more or less perfection. 

First of all, I don't think you can deduce the nature of God by placing an arbitrary limit on what he can or cannot do, but who says you can't engage in perfect change forever? God doesn't surpass Godself, but surely it must be fun to try?

I say if God is not involved in time, then it is the trad-man who has placed an indefensible limit on his infinitude, not me. But in any event,

Just as omnipotence is "circumscribed by the possible," "omniscience must be limited by the knowable," and this excludes future contingencies.

God cannot do the impossible -- e.g., make a square circle -- or know the unknowable -- e.g., the final number of pi. 

We've written before about how genuine creation is necessarily a risky isness, and McCabe agrees that

creation was a "pure venture" on God's part, a great and fair experiment. While God's purposes must ultimately prevail, just how this will happen is "unfixed, undetermined, and therefore uncertain."  

This certainly makes things more interesting and spicy, for both us and for God:

What God ultimately wants is is a kingdom of "co-creators, co-causes, co-originators, and co-eternal with himself in the realm of the contingent." 

Which is nice. It not only gives our life a meaning and a telos, "but takes nothing away from God," rather, "significantly enriches our picture of God," so it's a win-win for the bothovus:

The view that God is actively engaged in the world, responding and reacting to the actions and decisions of humans, provides us a far more personal picture of God than the one that absolute foreknowledge requires.

This is not a smaller God, but a much bigger one. 

Now, yesterday's post alluded to an esoteric open theology, which we are in the process of discovering. But our old friend Lequier hints at such a vision with the outrageous claim that 

Since God's creatures have a genuine effect on God, there is a qualified sense in which the Creator himself is created.

(?!). In other words -- or words rather -- how do we work that one out? For starters, how about with recourse to Eckhart's distinction between God and Godhead? Review this for us, willya' Gemini?

For Eckhart, "God" typically refers to the personal God, the Creator, the God we encounter in religious practice and scripture. This is the God who acts in the world, loves, judges, and is the object of our worship and prayer. 

God is understood with attributes such as goodness, wisdom, power, and love. These are the ways we can conceive of and relate to the divine. 

God is seen as active, involved in creation, redemption, and the unfolding of history.

Now, this God is distinct from Eckhart's Godhead which is

the ultimate ground of all being, lying beyond our comprehension and any specific attributes. It is the source from which the personal God and all of creation emanate. 

The Godhead is beyond being and non-being, beyond good and evil, beyond all distinctions that our intellect can grasp. It is a "nothingness" in the sense of being empty of all created characteristics and limitations, not in the sense of absolute non-existence. 

It is utterly ineffable; no words or concepts can adequately describe it. Eckhart often emphasized the silence and mystery surrounding the Godhead. He famously said, "Everything within the Godhead is unity, and of that there is nothing to be spoken."  

The Godhead is passive and unmoving. It does not act or create in the way that "God" does. It is the silent, still source from which all activity flows. Eckhart stated, "God works, the Godhead does not work; for it has nothing to do." 

Which is more than enough to give me something to chew on for the next 22 hours or so.

Esoteric Open Theology?

Wait, what's wrong with garden variety open theology? Come to think of it, what's wrong with plain old theology, period? Why the qualifiers, "open" and "esoteric"? 

Because we -- I do anyway -- need a theory that fits the facts and evidence while leaving the fewest loose ends and generating the fewest anomalies. 

Nor do I care going in if the theory is theistic or atheistic. Rather, I just want an explanation, and think I am entitled to one. Not in an arrogant or hubristic way, rather, in the way a child is entitled to loving parents. 

If you don't want to provide a child with that much -- or little -- how about not bringing him into the world to begin with? Is this asking too much? Or are we truly just thrown here with no possible explanation -- cosmic orphans with no parents? The famous Nazi Heidegger thought so, right Gemini?

in Martin Heidegger's seminal work, Being and Time, he describes the fundamental condition of human existence. Essentially, thrownness refers to the fact that we humans find ourselves already existing in the world without having chosen to be here, nor having chosen our initial circumstances. 

That much is true: we didn't choose to be here, and the world was here before we arrived on the scene.

Think of it this way: you didn't decide when or where you were born, who your parents would be, what your native language is, or the basic cultural and historical context you were born into. These are all facts of your existence that were "thrown" upon you. 

In essence, Heidegger's concept of thrownness highlights the contingency of human existence. We are not self-created or fully in control of our being. We are born into a world with a history and a set of givens that shape our existence from the outset. 

I say, if it is absolutely true that we are contingent, then we have proved the Absolute via the backdoor, and thereby refuted contingency. For even

to say "I do not know" is to imply that I know that one thing is true and that is precisely the fact that "I do not know" (Bina & Ziarani).

A modest thing, but the fact remains that in order to be logical, "one has to assume that there is such a thing as truth before one presents any reasoning" (ibid.). 

Moreover, one must assume it is possible to symbolize this truth and communicate it to another, and what is your principle that accounts for both truth and its interpersonal propagation? And supposing you affirm that our fundamental condition is thrownness, this entails that it is not not thrownness, in other words, that the principle of noncontradiction applies. 

So, we aren't just thrown into any old cosmos, but a logical one in which we can know and communicate truth (because the cosmos first communicates truth to us, i.e., is intelligible):

This is a fundamental "dogma" without which nothing holds.... A "dogma-free" starting point is itself a dogma, though a self-contradictory one (ibid).

For "To say there is such a thing as truth is to speak in absolute terms." So, is there? And if so, how? What is the sufficient reason for man being a truth-bearing and truth-propagating being? 

Anyone who has any judgment about anything and communicates it to others has already assumed that what he tells them will mean essentially the same thing to them, and that they will recognize the truth of his opinion, that is, they will have the same judgment (ibid.). 

So, to say man is contingent and thrown cannot be a first principle, since it flows from principles that are prior to it, to wit, 

(i) that there is such a thing as truth, (ii) that this truth corresponds to reality, and (iii) that he, as well as others, has access to this reality (ibid.). 

That's a lot of assumptions. But this is a man who never apologized for being a Nazi, so don't expect him to apologize for trying to steal first base when everyone knows you have to earn your way there. In short, if we were thrown here we could never know it, and in knowing it we know a lot of things that imply we're not thrown. 

In other words, he has assumed that that the truth of what he says relates to an objective reality that is independent of the human subject who says or hears it (ibid.). 

And now he's really in trouble, for he has not only "implicitly accepted the notion of objectivity," but "Any attempt to deny the self-evidence of truth -- or being, or reality, or absoluteness -- will be self-defeating." Bottom line:

Any system of thought that proposes an absolute principle while denying the notion of truth -- hence the notion of objectivity -- is condemned to self-refutation (ibid.).

Except there's a big wrinkle, courtesy of Gödel, since we also know that no formal system of thought can account for itself, but rather, contains assumptions not provable by the system. Man uniquely has access to a realm of transcendent truth that cannot be reduced to any formal system, such that we escape any ideological or immanent prison, including existentialism.

In point of fact, remove this unformalizable Absolute, and "every logical argument is devoid of foundation." 

Man cannot be certain of anything in the absence of this notion, because as soon as he becomes absolutely certain of anything without the implicit assumption of the notion of the Absolute, logically, he must let go of his certitude and start over in a vicious circle of doubt (ibid.). 

So, no Absolute, no truth or certitude. Any truth must be backed by the full faith and credit of the First Bank of Absoluteness, otherwise we're just circulating relativistic funny money with no actual value. In other words, we are back in college. 

This is all very nice, but what does it have to do with the subject of the post?

Just that man, by virtue of being one, can know truth and has a right to it. And this right is rooted in our freedom to know it. In other words, freedom and truth coarise, the one being impossible in the absence of the other. 

And it turns out that freedom -- both ours and God's -- is essential to open theism, since it is the opposite of a predestination that is in turn the opposite of "thrownness," in that it denies all contingency and instead situates us in divine necessity.  

But in reality we must be situated somewhere between necessity and contingency, so there is an element of "thrownness" after all, only not total. If it were total, then we would be plunged into an unintelligible chaos with no possibility of even knowing it or anything else.

In the book The Future of Open Theism, Rice surveys a number of forerunners, for example, a guy named Adam Clarke (1760-1832) who argued that

God ordains that certain creatures have freedom, their free actions and decisions are therefore contingent, and God's knowledge of these contingencies is therefore contingent. If creatures are not genuinely free, "then God is the only operator" and "all created beings are only instruments."

Cosmic tools. Utensils. Not thrown here, but implanted here in the God Machine for no ascertainable reason. Which is unacceptable. To be continued.

The Structure of Theological Revolutions

Well, I've read a string of underachieving duds over the last week or two, leaving me with nothing in particular to blog about. I could repost one from the arkive, but why bother? You know as well as I do what's down there, which is to say, no one knows. Besides, anyone who just can't get enough Bob can pick one at random, but no such person exists. 

I've been reading several books about open theology, but -- ironically -- they're all the same. Predetermined, as it were. I just started one that surveys developments in the field over the past three decades -- The Future of Open Theism -- but I've only read the introduction. 

No doubt the majority of Christians reject the idea of open theism, even though everyone believes it in practice, since it is impossible to live as if one's life were determined. Likewise, people who believe in the efficacy of prayer behave as if God hears and responds to them. 

Then there are the countless passages in scripture that are inconsistent with changelessness and unrelatedness. They say those are anthropomorphisms, whereas I say immutability and impassivity are just human abstractions.

The author briefly compares it to a paradigm shift, as in Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As you no doubt know,

A paradigm is the established set of theories, methods, and assumptions that define a scientific discipline during a particular period of normal science. Scientists working within a paradigm solve puzzles and extend its scope. However, over time, anomalies -- persistent problems that the existing paradigm cannot explain -- may emerge.

That's a book I read so long ago that it never occurred to me to apply it to religious paradigms. The paradigm is unconsciously assimilated, such that one is generally unaware of its existence. Nevertheless, it is like the container that conditions the content and determines not only what one sees but what one is able to see. 

I was very aware of the issue in psychology, since, unlike physics, it is essentially "pre-paradigmatic," in that no one agrees on the basics. Not only does a behaviorist have an utterly different paradigm than, say, a psychoanalyst, but there are different psychoanalytic paradigms, each defining and determining the phenomena one considers "important." 

An obvious example is Freud, who dismissed religion as an infantile defense mechanism, vs. his one time disciple Jung, who was convinced that

life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals. The main task for people, he believed, is to discover and fulfill their deep, innate potential. Based on his study of [world religions], Jung  believed this journey of transformation, which he called individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions.

That's a rather large difference: a flight from maturity and regression to infancy vs. a teleologically ordered spiritual transformation. 

I once applied to the Jung Institute for post-doctoral training, not because I wanted to be a Jungian per se, but because it seemed the logical place for a guy like me. But it has its own dogmas and orthodoxies that would have constrained me. In other words, a paradigm.

Back to scientific paradigms, they work well enough until anomalies begin to accumulate, which is to say, facts and observations that cannot be accounted for by the paradigm. A quintessential example is the quantum revolution that overturned the Newtonian paradigm. The quantum paradigm is likewise full of anomalies -- in particular, how to square it with relativity:

reconciling quantum physics and relativity is one of the biggest open challenges in modern physics. While both theories are incredibly successful in their respective domains, they appear to be fundamentally incompatible when we try to apply them to situations where both quantum effects and strong gravitational fields are significant, such as at the singularity of a black hole or during the Big Bang.

One of the biggest anomalies is nonlocality:

Quantum entanglement exhibits non-local correlations between particles, where measuring the state of one particle instantaneously influences the state of another, regardless of the distance separating them. This seems to clash with the principle of locality in relativity, which states that interactions should not travel faster than the speed of light. 

Anyway, when the anomalies pile up, this results in a crisis which can in turn lead to a true scientific revolution, when a new paradigm emerges and eventually replaces the old one. 

This shift is not just a gradual accumulation of new facts but a fundamental change in the way scientists perceive the world and conduct research. Kuhn argued that different paradigms are often incommensurable, meaning they are difficult to compare directly due to different concepts, methods, and goals.

Now, it is obvious to me that classical theism leads to countless anomalies, which are often just dismissed as "mysteries," i.e., God's ways are not our ways, and all that. One of the biggest is how to reconcile predeterminism and divine sovereignty with real human freedom. There is also the matter of reconciling divine omnipotence with the existence of evil. If you or I can easily stop a terrible evil and fail to do so, we are complicit. Is God less moral than we are?

More generally, Schuon would say that this problem is intrinsic to exoteric religiosity. He said something to the effect that this is the very purpose of esoterism, i.e., to reconcile the anomalies that inevitably plague an exoteric approach. I just searched the blog for the exact quote but couldn't find it. However, I found lots of other stuff. For example, in a letter he briefly summarizes his metaphysical views before observing that

if one says all of this to me, then I pay attention, I understand something, I feel happy. I feel attracted to God, I attach myself to the Divine.

Conversely,

When on the contrary I am told: a God, who owes me nothing because He is almighty, gives me this or that command, and that my intelligence is only there to carry out this command as well as possible, and other things of this kind -- when I am told this, I do not understand anything, I feel unhappy, I do not feel attracted to religion, I no longer know what I am, nor why I am a human being. But this is what theologians too often reduce religion to, as if they could please God thereby! They underestimate God just as they underestimate men.

That last point is essential: the classical theists accuse open theists of diminishing the majesty of God, whereas the open theists say it's the opposite -- that an utterly impassive and immutable deity "denies important things to God, in particular, the elements of genuine personal interaction, such as momentary responsiveness and sensitivity to others in all their complexity." More generally,

Those who embrace the open view of God do so because they believe that it enhances and enriches our concept of God rather than limiting it.

In the post quoted above, Bob writes that " the conventional (non-esoteric) approach underestimates man and God." And I found the quote I was looking for in another post:

"In fact, sapiential esoterism -- total and universal, not formalistic -- can alone satisfy every legitimate mental need," for only it "can reply to all the questions raised by religious divergences and limitations..."

So, a more comprehensive paradigm. But people feel squeamish about the idea of situating scripture -- a God-given paradigm, as it were -- in anything transcending it, as if our paradigm trumps God's. In the post, Bob speaks of 

the doctrine of sola scriptura. In a very real way, it runs headlong into the Great Wall of Gödel, since it endeavors to be both consistent and complete. But no amount of cogitation can eliminate certain inconsistencies. When people come up against such a wall, they often just rename the inconsistencies mysteries, and leave it at that. 

Is it fair -- or even legitimate -- to apply Gödel's theorems to scripture? Probably not, but there's a more general point -- one hammered home repeatedly by Eckhart and other mystics -- to the effect that finite language can never enclose or contain the infinite, and the moment it tries, it is wrong. The post goes on to suggest that

there are certain keys -- AKA principles -- that allow us to not only enter this or that religion, but religion as such. Importantly, this doesn't imply that all religions are equal, any more than positing the existence of beauty means that all artistic objects are equally beautiful....

Consider the fact that certain parts of a religion are more important or fundamental than others. How do we recognize this? It must be because certain ideas are closer to the Principle that animates them. Not only are some more distant, but in another essay Schuon posits a "human margin" where the revelation shades off into a region that is more man than God.

Could it be that immutability and impassivity are more man than God? That these imply a smaller God than the real one? Here's something from another old post:

The point is, integral esoterism puts us in contact with the formless essence which religion clothes in doctrinal form. Indeed, the Catechism quietly expresses something similar in a different way when it says "We do not believe in formulas but in those realities they express" (emphasis mine). 

In other words, the formless reality always transcends the exoteric doctrines and formulas. Interestingly, here's a post that says

In rereading Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity I've been re-reminded of something Schuon said to the effect that Christianity is an esoterism masquerading as an exoterism.... 

Some people -- atheists at one end, "fundamentalists" at the other -- get hung up on the words and thereby lose what they're referring to. Then again, not exactly, because God knows his own, and there is still something of the essence in the revealed forms the fundamentalist takes overly literally, while for the atheist there are only the meaningless words. 

But Schuon warns that

The exoteric viewpoint is, in fact, doomed to end by negating itself once it is no longer vivified by the presence within it of the esoterism of which it is both the outward radiation and the veil.... the atrophy that overtakes dogmas when they are deprived of their internal dimension recoils upon them from the outside, in the form of heretical and atheistic negations.

Hmm. Someone needs to come up with an esoteric open theology, because open theology has problems -- anomalies -- of its own. Petey, let's get to work on this revolution at once.