Yesterday’s post pushed the bipolar architecture of Cosmos and Anthropos into the Theos and made the case for openness, relationality, and movement as divine perfections rather than privations. Thus, it is beginning to look like there is tripolarity between Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos. If so, then we may be on the verge of locating the Cosmic Area Rug that ties the whole existentialada together while leaving nothing out. The dynamic Structure of Being, as it were.
I don’t see how that’s possible.
Why not?
Because you have 300 pages to go.
That’s true. As I said, I haven’t examined the file for Book III in a few months, so there must be a lot of remaining ins & outs to this cosmotheandrism business. The following section may contain a recycled passage from Book II, but who can remember that many words ago?
∞
In a Thomistic treatise on the nature of God, T.J. Walsh rightly states that on the one hand “absurd ideas such as that of a ‘square circle’ have no relation to being,” so it is not so much that God cannot make one as that such a thing simply does not and cannot exist. But in the next breath he says that “God can infallibly move the human will to come to a free decision” (emphasis mine).
No offense to our competitors, because I never knock the other fellow’s merchandise, but I can do just as well for you. I have a very attractive theory here, and it wouldn’t take me two minutes to put it in front of you.
Go ahead. Make your telovator pitch.
Okay, a truly free decision that is infallibly determined by someone else is no longer free, and can no more exist than a square circle. Influence our decisions? No problemo. But infallibly determine our free decisions? Un problemo grande, because then God is determining even, say, our defiance of, or hostility to, him.
That makes God the author of atheism.
Let’s take another example of a theological blunder that is not only a turnoff to the intellect but even a heavy bummer to common decency. Suppose you see a child running into a busy street. You are not some uptight moralist, so you decide not to intervene based upon the lofty principle that you want to respect the child’s freedom and autonomy. Besides, supposing the child is run over, you’ll find a way to pull some good out of it.
This is, of course, deficient moral reasoning, for no one is permitted to allow an easily prevented evil from occurring. And yet it is routinely attributed to the omnipotent God who has the power to stop both retail and industrial scale evils — say, the Holocaust — but refrains from doing so.
Perhaps he has his reasons.
Charles Manson had his reasons too, but that’s not an excuse, it’s an indictment. The White Album is not the recipe for a race war, rather, just the sound of a band breaking up. A human being is not permitted to treat another human being as a means to an end, because there is no higher moral end than human life. But if God allows evil because he’s going to pull something better out of it, isn’t he using us as a means to his inscrutable ends?
This is not to say that God doesn’t pull chestnuts of good from the fires of evil, only saying that he is in no way implicated in the original evil, because he doesn’t have that kind of power. In short, instead of having all the power, He is the most powerful, but even the most powerful cannot do the impossible, for example, knowing ahead of time what a genuinely free creature will do, or creating something or someone separate from oneself while still exerting total control over it.
Insert Jewish mother joke here?
Our free choices are not predetermined but nor do they happen in a void. Rather, they are shaped by, and ultimately ordered to, what we have called the Great Attractor in a vertical and hyperdimensional phase space.
Well, that’s a fancy way of saying nothing.
Only if there is no such thing as teleology, which — you will pardon the double negative — is simply another of the things that Cannot Not Be, both in the Cosmos and Anthropos. For again, science in no way disproves teleology, and as a matter of fact, cannot avoid it. Absent a teleological element it would be impossible to even identify a cause of any kind. The attempt to completely eliminate teleology in favor of blind mechanical necessity is an expedient scientific piety, for the moment a scientist attempts to examine such a system, he has already performed a highly selective, purposeful act. On the one hand, this involves the imposition of a top-down, meaning-seeking framework onto nature, but then turning around and claiming the system proves that no such top-down meaning exists.
However, if a cause has a reliable effect, this means that the present is ordered to the future, as in Robert Rosen’s anticipatory systems discussed in Book II. There must already exist an overarching, continuous field of intelligibility that bridges the “now” and the “not yet,” without which science is inconceivable. Which implies that the relational Aboutness of things isn’t just present in space but time. Or spacetime rather. In other words, the Area Rug is held together by a nonlocal relationality, i.e., a substance-in-relation in both space and time.
Perhaps scientists have their reasons for ignoring teleology?
Experienced from our side, teleology is the asymptotic arrow pointing toward the transcendent pole of being. In its absence, then nothing can make sense, including science. For again, science can only pretend to eliminate two of the four causes required to explain anything, in particular, the Why?
For purely methodological purposes — note the word — it is fine to look at things in terms of material and efficient causes only, in the same way your orthopedic surgeon doesn’t need to concern himself with your dreams and aspirations in order to repair a broken bone in your coccyx. Once the bone heals then you can do anything you wanna do, from hunting for wolverines in Alaska to throwing a football over them mountains, from drawing your favorite animal to making yourself a dang quesadilla.
To cultivate some skills that girls might like?
Sure — cage fighting, nunchuck skills, bo hunting skills, computer hacking skills, catching a delicious bass, whatever.
Clarke says something similar vis-à-vis the workings of providence, which operate “by persuasion, by luring to the good — not by coercion.” Thus,
God determines the general set of goals He wishes to achieve, the goals at which He aims the universe and knows that in general He will be able to achieve by His suasive power, but does not determine ahead of time in detail just whether or how each particular creature will achieve its share or not in this overall goal.
Like the Wright Brothers, just because they invented human flight, you can’t blame them for airplane crashes, much less flight delays. Likewise, God provides the space for, and the ultimate destination of, our vertical flight, but we are the ones in the cockpit, for better or worse.
This is not a deist God, because God is still quite active, only more in the sense of a final rather than efficient causes, operating more from the top-down or future-to-present rather than the past-forward or bottom-up: “Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous ‘improvisation’ of the divine mind and will — from his always contemporaneous eternal now — precisely to fit the actual ongoing activities, especially the free ones, of the creaturely players in the world drama” (ibid.).
This simultaneously acknowledges and reconciles our real freedom with God’s power, for
God does not “foresee,” from his point of view, anything: He only sees what is going on, and acts accordingly. In a word, predestination does not and could not imply total predetermination. It leaves a large dose of indetermination, to be made determinate — not ahead of time, independently, but only contemporaneous with the actual ongoing development of the world (ibid.).
Could the principle of this dynamism be grounded in an open and relational Godhead? Yes, because the triune Godhead of cosmotheandrism (expressed in Christian terms) “illustrates how God’s own inner life is already rich in infinite self-expression by the Father’s total gift of His own being to the Son” (ibid.). And if creation is patterned after this dynamic archetype, then it is “purely out of the joy of giving that this divine inner life can pour over to share itself with creatures.”
Consider just this single example, wherein John tells us that the Word became flesh. But he also says that this Word is God. Therefore it ineluctably follows that God became.
QED.
Yes, the case for openness is closed, for it means that God cannot be immutable, full stop, rather, is capable of becoming.
Moreover, Clarke adds that “in some real and genuine way God is affected positively by what we do,” even though he “does not become a more or less perfect being because of the love we return to Him” (ibid.). Certainly he must have been affected by becoming one of us. If not, then that is one rigid personality.
The point is, relation is not an imperfection in God, any more than it is for human beings. Rather it is “precisely a dimension of the perfection of personal being as lovingly responsive.” Clarke compares God to “the Great Jazz Player, improvising creatively as history unfolds.” Thus, “The complete script of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out together in our actual ongoing now’s.” That is cosmotheandrism in a notshall, because we are free not to do what we shall — such as shall not murder, lie, steal, et al. Why even issue commandments for what we shall or shan’t inevitably do anyway?
In another essay, Clarke bottom-lines it for us in describing how “God as the ultimate One now appears as both the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, at once the Source and the Goal of the restless dynamism of all of nature, of all finite beings.” The structure of this “total journey” is “in the form of a circle,” the Great Circle of Cosmotheandrism whereby “In the emergence of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circular movement, in which all things return, as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin in the first place” (Thomas, in Clarke).
So, it seems we’re always already in the place toward which we are striving, only now finally knowing it for the first time.
