What Cosmos Are You From?

History is the series of universes present to the consciousness of successive subjects. --Dávila

Setting the stage for what we're about to discuss, it goes back to yesterday's post, in particular, to the idea that what is needed is proof of a certain vision of the world before proofs of God can be efficacious or operative and religion can make sense more generally.

Exactly what the world is is a rather big question, but it is among the first terms we must define. To repeat an aphorism from yesterday:

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible. 

We ended the post with Voegelin's key idea that "the order of the world is not of 'this world' alone but also of the 'world beyond.'" These "two worlds" always and everywhere constitute the one real world: any definition of our (immanent) world must include the world beyond that is its transcendent ground and telos.

This humanly irreducible complementarity of immanence and transcendence reminds me of other such irreducible complementarities, and let us count them: being and becoming, absolute and infinite, object and subject, time and eternity, interior and exterior, matter and spirit, wave and particle, brain and mind, left brain and right brain, individual and collective, part and whole, Creator and creation...

You could no doubt think of more, but these are not vicious dualisms, rather, dynamic and fruitful complementarities. 

It seems that Christianity alone -- at least today -- does not provide a vision of the world in which Christianity makes sense. Such a vision obviously existed at its origins, which is why it spread so rapidly. There was no friction, so to speak, between the world -- or the vision thereof -- and Christianity.

We no longer have that premodern vision of the world, nor is it ever coming back. And our new vision seems to render a religious vocabulary meaningless and talk of God to be implausible.

Seems to. In reality nothing has changed, in that our world is still situated between immanence and transcendence, except that modernity has collapsed this space into immanence, thus, as a side effect, negated all of the other complementarities referenced above. 

Which is why we are now confined to a flattened, one-sided, left-brained world. No dynamic complementarity for you!

Back to the series of universes present to the evolving consciousness of successive subjects. It seems we're gonna need a bigger question -- not just what planet, but what universe are we living in?

Now, the universe doesn't change. 

Check me on that: it never stops changing, and has been undergoing relentless evolution since it sprang into being 13.8 billion years ago. If the universe is evolving, as is consciousness along with it, where does this leave us? In a world of pure becoming with no being?

It's a tempting offer, but we must again insist on the dynamic complementarity between being and becoming, and also between consciousness and world. Again, for Voegelin this is the real cosmos -- the evolving order -- between immanence and transcendence. 

COSMOS: In Vogelin's usage, the whole of ordered reality including animate and inanimate nature and the gods. (Not to be confused with the modern conception of "cosmos" as the astrophysical universe.) Encompasses all of reality, including the full range of the tension of existence toward the transcendental (Webb). 

Religion makes a heckuva lot of sense in this cosmos, because just as science maps immanence without ever containing or exhausting it, so too does religion map transcendence without ever containing or exhausting it (certain literalists and fundamentalists notwithstanding). 

In short, we can never really eliminate the tension. Unless maybe Shankara and Buddha are correct, but that's another wormhole. On the other hand Christ spans the tension, but that too is a wormhole we won't dig into just yet.

With this prologue out of the way, I've been reading several books by a Catholic process theologian named Joseph Bracken, who actually tries to strike a balance between the being and becoming -- and immanence and transcendence -- of things.

Examples.

These are from a book called The World in the Trinity: Open-Ended Systems in Science and Religion. In keeping with the need for a vision in which Christianity makes sense, 

Bracken utilizes the language and conceptual structures of systems theory as a philosophical and scientific grammar to show traditional Christian beliefs in a new light that is accessible and rationally plausible to a contemporary, scientifically influenced society. 

Consider the following, which echoes what was said above about the complementarity of immanence and transcendence:

the natural order and the alleged supernatural order are in fact dynamically interconnected processes or systems that together constitute a richer reality than what either the natural order or the supernatural order, taken alone, can provide.  

In keeping with the theme of complementarity, "both change and permanence characterize our human experience of ourselves, others, and the world."

Another key complementarity: "coextensive with their Without, there is a Within of things." There is always and everywhere a Within, no matter how inchoate. In its absence, the thing would be unintelligible. 

Where does all the creative novelty come from? What is its principle? For me, a big hint is contained in the first sentence of the Bible, "In the beginning God created..." For Whitehead, creativity is indeed the ultimate principle, but he goes too far, placing it even above God.

As discussed in a recent post, there is both top-down and bottom-up causality, and "God provides a directionality to the cosmic process," i.e., a teleological attraction. 

Here's another one that goes to the complementarity of immanence and transcendence:

Aquinas has trouble explaining the immanence of God as Pure Spirit in the world of creation, and Whitehead has the opposite problem explaining the transcendence of God....

To be continued....