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.