There are two major sections left in Book II, but a note to myself indicates that this one needs more work because it may contain repetition. More charitably, perhaps it is a summary of the previous 40 posts, as we transition to Book III. Let’s find out; it is over 3,500 words, so I’ll break it in two or three:
Speaking of ontological shrinkage and metaphysical wrongthink, celebrity atheist Daniel Dennett came up with the metaphor of cranes and skyhooks to characterize naturalism and theism, respectively. According to his cosmic rules, skyhooks are not permitted, being that they posit a transcendent and immaterial intelligence that he dismisses as a gratuitous miracle.
Now, supposing we are limited to only One Free Miracle, cosmotheandrism chooses an intelligible universe mysteriously ordered to man’s intellect, including even Dennett’s. Moreover, the very existence of immanent cranes is already a miracle that cannot be explained without recourse to a transcendent skyhook — a vertical form or telos. In reality, crane and skyhook are complementary, another way of talking about the primordial and irreducible complementarity of immanence and transcendence.
To pretend that cranes are entirely self-sufficient is but another case of left-brain capture of the right — as if one can build a skylight out of floorboards, when the very act of building a crane requires a skyhook to hold the blueprint — i.e., the form — and without which the crane is a meaningless pile of metal on the ground. In the traditional view, last in the order of execution is first in the order of intention, which implies that the Why must be prior to the How. Cosmos and intellect are mysteriously ordered to one another, but why? Either for no reason at all, or for a reason that lies in the order of intention. Which implies that the Anthropos may be temporally last to arrive on the terrestrial scene, when in fact he is ontologically first — not an intracosmic afterthought but a extracosmic forethought.
The Omega is the Alpha?
That’s getting ahead of ourselves. But then again, man is always ahead of himself, having one foot in the ceaseless discovery and mapping of an ontologically prior transcendent dimension.
Indeed, what is a crane even for? There can be no horizontal answer to any Why question, for no amount of How adds up to a single Why. E no doubt equals MC squared, but why are there physical laws to begin with, to say nothing of physicists who discover and understand them?
But for Dennett, the skyhook concept is intended to ridicule the idea of intelligence grounded in a transcendent principle — or from what regular folks might call God. He contrasts this with earthbound cranes that are ultimately constructed out of immanent bits of matter.
But this arbitrarily restricted view only demonstrates how LH human intelligence may be extremely acute on the horizontal plane alone while rendering itself impotent on any level above it. For either the whole of reality is ordered to the totality of intelligence, or what are even pretending to talk about? Cages are for animals. Why escape the immanent zoo only to confine oneself to an intellectual museum full of dead artifacts?
At antipodes to the craniac perspective are skyhookers such as Wolfgang Smith, who writes that the Darwinism of our times — which is to say, the metaphysical kind — is “no longer science, properly so called, but proves to be, ultimately, a kind of religion: a counter-religion, to be exact.”
Fighting words. But if Darwinism is a faux-religion, it must have a secret skyhook of its own hidden away somewhere, i.e., the One Free Miracle that gets it off the absurcular goround.
Now, I don’t doubt the existence of cranes, but they are not self-explanatory. You could say they are built from the laws of physics, but this leads to two problems, first, the origin of those laws, and second, how these laws give rise to beings who transcend them.
Richard Dawkins, for example, writes of how human beings ought to develop a morality that is free of religion, but whence this “ought” in a deterministic world of selfish genes? There is no ought in natural selection, nor any freedom to conform to it. To even say that one morality is superior to another is to sneak in a vertical hierarchy that is forbidden by the principles of Darwinism.
He sounds just like a skyhooker with a heart of gold.
If a miracle is something that has no naturalistic explanation, then high on our list is the miracle of subjectivity in an otherwise objective universe; and if this weren’t miraculous enough, we have the human intelligence that somehow mirrors the intelligibility of the world. Which — agreed — we ought to engage in.
Is it reasonable to suppose that this immaterial intelligence was simply lifted by a material crane out of a monkey’s head? To believe this is to simply not know what intelligence is — which is to say, adequation to reality.
For cosmotheandrism man is always suspended between the crane and the skyhook, i.e., immanence and transcendence, or time and eternity, respectively. The human state abides precisely in the weird vertical tension between these poles, skyhook above, cranes below, out of which the Cosmic Area Rug is weird-woven.
Looked at this way, evolution is indeed a journey through time, but to recognize the journey is to already be partly outside of it — as Dawkins implicitly acknowledges with his immaterial preference for a morality that is higher than mere survival of the fittest.
Try as we might, we can never really domesticate this weirdness. Which is reminiscent of Haldane’s suspicion that The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. The full quote adds that
I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of [the universe], from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any [LH] philosophy.
Which is necessarily true, since being cannot be enclosed in anything from within being. Along these lines, Haldane made some similarly wise cracks:
Reality is the [LH] cage of those who lack [RH] imagination.
The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of [RH] wonder.
The advance of [LH] scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our [RH] inner life in it any less mysterious.
It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms [or RH can be reduced to LH abstractions].
The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized [LH] world, while the real [RH] universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.
As the bracketed material indicates, the problem lies in the relentless effort of the left-brain to enclose reality in its linear and logical dreams and schemes, in the attempt to make the weirdness go away. But the weirdness remains, and the right brain knows it.
Ideology is one way to make the weirdness stop, but a mind constrained within an ideology renders itself a kind of “artificial intelligence” — but genuine stupidity —since it can only perceive and articulate that which is permitted by the internalized model. It can only think within the grooves of its own preconceptions, thus stifling the imagination.
Which brings to mind C.S. Lewis’ comment about his belief in Christianity — that it is less something that he sees than something by which he sees everything else — in other words, not something to look at, but rather, to see through. For among other things, like religion in general, it furnishes points of reference that allow us to speak of the farthest regions of the soul that extend into, and down from, the transcendent pole of the Cosmos, i.e., what we call a Grammar of Infinitude.