Relational Cosmology and Process Pneumatology

Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness. --God 

No one knows what God is or what Life is. On the other hand everybody knows what God is -- atheists included, or they couldn't reject him -- and everyone knows what Life is, even babies, who have no trouble making the distinction. Ever see a baby encountering a dog for the first time?

They say you can't mix science and religion, but in reality you can't unmix them unless I say so. 

On a tangential note, this especially applies to political disputes, which are ultimately religious in nature (and these days quite religulous, but we'll come back to the left later. Suffice it to say that the idea of the state offering free genital mutilation to illegal aliens was quite beyond even the wildest nightmares of the founders).

I see a deep connection between God and biology, because -- come to find out -- both are deeply and irreducibly relational. But "relation" is a tricksy concept, in particular, when we try to regard it as prior to that which it relates. Which we must do if we are to see rightly. 

For example, in the Trinity, the persons are defined strictly in terms of relations: the Son is related by way of engendering, while the Spirit proceeds from the two thus related: the only distinctions of the one substance are a "consequence" of the prior relations, or rather, the distinctions are the relations. This is our model for how "all things are made"-- both the visible and invisible -- and for the "giver of life," AKA the bio-logos.

To further set the stage, I'm going back and forth between two books, and explicating a deeper relation between them, one on Pneumatology, the other on Life Itself. Will the post succeed, or end in a train wreck?

Again, Rosen proposes a new paradigm for Life itself, which he calls relational biology. Let's consider some of his main ideas in the raw, before I cook them up into something more digestible:

reductionism dispenses with the organization as the first, essential step in analysis. It expects to recapture the organization later.

I call that a promise it can't keep, since you can't get from analysis of the organization back to the holistic presence of Life. 

Conversely, "In a relational approach, it is the matter that is dispensed with," so just the organization -- the relations -- remains. Obviously, in biological organisms, this organization 

is at least as much a part of its material reality as the specific particles that constitute it at a given time, perhaps indeed more so. 

I say there's no perhaps about it: looked at this way, Life is not a "ghost in the machine," rather, the biological system is a corporeal ghost of Life, so to speak. 

Now, to say Life is to say open system, and  

there is still no "physics" of open systems. Largely, this is because of the insistence on thinking of an open system as only a closed system with some additional terms.... 

In every case, the strategy is then to regard the "open" system as an underlying closed system plus something.

But if we turn the cosmos back right-side up, the closed system is just a mental construct; we might say it is an open system minus x. 

Now let's switch gears and talk about God, in particular, the Spirit. Again, as described yesterday,

As God's divine energy that permeates all life and everything in the cosmos, the Spirit is... the most intimate "contact point" between the Triune God and human beings (Kärkkäinen, emphasis mine).

That all sounds very romantic, but can we be more specific? Kärkkäinen references a book called Process Pneumatology. I don't know anything about the book, but I am definitely yoinking the phrase, because the human being is a kind of process structure that is open to x, AKA the Holy Spirit. This is the same x to which Life Itself is open. For example, the Spirit 

can stand for life itself as a gift of God. God is the source of human (and animal) life (ibid., emphasis mine).

Eh, still too vague.  

The Bible often uses the term ruach for the Spirit. It variously refers to 

the principle of life, in other words, the force that vivifies human beings; [and to] the life of God himself. 

Similar to Rosen's idea of abstracting relations from matter, "It is a subtle corporeality rather than an incorporeal substance" (emphasis mine). It is "not discarnate. It is rather what animates the body." Ultimately, "God is the only one who gives the life force," and "related to this concept" is "the Spirit's cosmic function, which goes far beyond the human sphere of life."

Again: IT'S ALIVE! But this is still too animistic sounding. Can we do better? 

Let's get down to cases, to human experience. For example, "the first Christian communities experienced the Spirit in their life and ministry with visible signs." This Presence "was indeed so powerful that those signs were taken as the evidence of the work of God," a "source of extraordinary power and guidance." 

The Spirit was discerned to be working everywhere in the church and in the personal spiritual lives of believers.

Good for them, but what about the restavus? Maximus the Confessor confesses that

The Holy Spirit is not absent from any created being, especially not from one which in any way participates in intelligence.

It is "the office of the Holy Spirit to make alive," and why not? I don't usually quote Calvin, but he's not wrong: it is through the Holy Spirit 

that the world is daily renewed, because God sends forth his spirit. In the propagation of living creatures, we doubtless see continually a new creation of the world.

No, this post didn't derail. We're just stopping at the station to pick up some more passengers, including this guy:

I have come that they may have life, and have it in abundance.