A Reality with a Future

This is gonna take awhile.

What is?

Making my way through all these Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. It's like going to the Reality Store and checking out each and every aisle. In fact, Charles Hartshorne once tried to quantify the possibilities based upon various criteria such as eternal, temporal, conscious, knowing the world, and including the world, resulting in 32 "doctrinal possibilities." That's a lot of models to check out!

Nor does that even include all the possible variables. One author (Viney) added a couple more variables and came up with 256 alternatives. Another author comes up with eight more general possibilities, including atheism, agnosticism, deism, pantheism, polytheism and henotheism, monotheism, panentheism, and his favorite, "eschatological panentheism."

But even atheism is never just atheism, because exactly which god are you denying? After all, I too am an atheist, since I reject all gods minus one. But based on what criteria? 

Perhaps the same criteria we use to judge scientific models. Philosopher Ian Barbour (quoted herein) writes that a

theoretical model is an imagined mechanism or process, postulated by analogy with familiar mechanisms or processes and used to construct a theory or to correlate a set of observations.

In science, one criteria is "fertility," which involves three main features: first, it must explain what we observe, second, it must be able to predict future observations, and third, it must be falsifiable. To which I would add coherence and consistency. 

So, are some models of ultimate reality more fruitful than others? Clearly. For example, a model that assigns absolute omnipotence to God thereby denies free will in man and renders our commonsense experience of freedom inexplicable and absurd. No explanation is needed for our free will, since it is simply denied up front. 

But this is like a metaphysic that regards biological life as nothing more than statistically rare physics. You can say that an organism is nothing but a soft machine, but who then is saying it? A machine? That doesn't work for me. Likewise a model that reduces consciousness to biology.

As it pertains to our ultimate models -- or models of ultimacy -- Peters suggests four criteria, including comprehensiveness or scope, logic, coherence, and applicability to human experience. 

Let's fast forward to Peters' preferred model, which is again what he calls "eschatological panentheism." I only mention it because it is pretty close to my model, in emphasizing the teleological structure of creation. For again, God isn't just the efficient cause of things, but the final cause. And last in execution is first in conception, so finality is baked into the cosmic cake from the beginning. 

For Peters, "God creates from the future, not the past," starting "with redemption and then draw[ing] all of creation toward it." 

Whether you call it Genesis or Big Bang, both involve a futurity whereby "To have a future is to have being. To lack a future is to lack being. The very definition of creation includes a future." This also implies that things aren't merely entropic, rather, aimed at an end which requires time in order to attain. 

But it also implies an open future, for if it were closed, this would be an implicit denial of the time it takes to get there. This would be like Einstein's block universe whereby past and future are just perspectival illusions:

The gift of the future builds into physical reality its dynamism, openness, contingency, self-organization, and freedom.

Why even is there creativity within creation? Because "God unlocks the present from the grip of past causation. And this frees the present for newness in the future." Ultimately, "Creation is not done yet. God is still creating the world." With a little help from his friends, which is to say, us.

With that, I'm going to repost something from last summer that touches on some of the themes discussed above:

Setting the stage for what we are 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!

What universe are we actually living in? 

Now, in one sense the universe doesn't change, since it is what it is.

And yet, like the climate, 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 Voegelin'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 (in other words, devoid of form). 

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 (or prior to) 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 (cf. the eschatological panentheism discussed in the first half of this post). 

To be continued....  

"In essence, the text is a journey through various philosophical and theological models of ultimate reality, advocating for a view that embraces complementarity, teleology, and the ongoing creative action of God within an evolving cosmos. The author seems to be gravitating towards a form of panentheism that emphasizes the future and the dynamic interplay between the immanent and the transcendent."

I'll bite. What is it?

Here's how different elements of the image relate to the themes:

• The Central Brightness: This could symbolize ultimate reality, God, or the source of creation. Its intensity suggests a fundamental and powerful origin.
• The Nebulous Background: The swirling colors and cosmic dust evoke the vastness and evolving nature of the universe, referencing the discussion of the Big Bang and the ongoing evolution of the cosmos.
• The Interconnected Network of Lines and Orbs: This intricate web might represent the "Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities" being explored in the text. The various orbs could symbolize different concepts or aspects within these models, and the lines connecting them suggest the relationships and interdependencies between these ideas.
• The Circular Structure: The overall circular or spherical arrangement could allude to wholeness, the cosmos, or the interconnectedness of all things, reflecting the idea of a unified reality that includes both immanence and transcendence.
• The Sense of Depth and Layers: The way the elements overlap and recede suggests the multiple layers of understanding and the complexity involved in grappling with these philosophical and theological concepts.

Essentially, the image attempts to visually synthesize the text's exploration of diverse models of reality, the evolving universe, and the interconnectedness between the material and the transcendent. It's meant to be evocative and thought-provoking rather than a literal depiction.