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Here’s something different. Think of this post as being consistent
with my thesis/story, but not part of it. My thesis, unbeknownst to my
Professors at the time, succeeded on two levels. First, it satisfied a
degree requirement, and second, it enhanced my argument for the
existence of God, an argument that predated my studies in Sociology.
In so far as the Not-Me-Self is a value assessment mechanism that
critiques the inner deliberations [or] silent arguments conducted
within a single self, it does so by using a voice based in self/other
interdependence. In my argument below, this voice not only establishes
God’s existence, it also establishes the right of the “Other’s
otherness,” as it binds a person’s “self” to “others,” to society, and
to the Universe at large. For me, the possibility of “right thinking”
and “good behavior” necessarily follows from God/Divinity. On a more
personal level, however, what also follows from Divinity (but not
necessarily) are my inner deliberations that identify “right and
wrong.”
[Mead’s I-self, in the God argument below, is symbolically indicated
by ~bb, while Mead’s Me-self is indicated by b~b. Being What Is Not
While Not Being What Is, when understood in this light, describes “the
participatory moment of a conscious self in the physical event of a
self-conscious being.” With this interpretation of Mead’s I-Me
couplet, and by using survey research to link certain kinds of private
self-conscious activity to a tolerance of ambiguity and, thus, a low
level of prejudice, I was able to accumulate empirical data
(scientific evidence) that not only gives the concept of the
Implicative Affirmative of the Not-Me-Self credibility, it also adds
indirect evidence that supports my claim that God exists.]
Lift A Stone And God Is There; Ask A Question And God Is There
In The Beginning was the paradox: How does unity coexist with
multiplicity? How does oneness make room for otherness? How does the
all-perfect source of everything become something less than itself?
God, being up for this challenge, solved this dilemma, and She (gender
is optional here, in fact, it’s probably best to think of God in terms
of process, in terms of “processing divinity”) did it by liberating
Her own non-being. This event had to be performed in such a way as to
both be and not be God in the same phenomenon. Her solution is doable,
even logically doable, in the form of being-what-is-not-while-not-
being-what-is. In this double negation, God becomes free in the
phenomenon of not, not being God, (~~b) while affirming (by
implication) the God that is free to not be God. In other words, the
liberation of God’s non-being becomes God’s immanence while, at the
same time, there exists an implied transcendent God. God’s immanence
is particularly important to humans because it is what we call
“reality.”
[Footnote: The idea that God is free to not be God is unusual but not
unique. In the journal, Deconstruction and Theology (1982, p. 89-90),
Robert P. Scharlemann, in the article The Being of God When God is Not
Being God, adds some documentation to this idea when he says: “The
thesis I should like to propound here is that, in the theological
tradition of this picture (the concept of finite being as ens creatum)
is that the world is itself a moment in the being of God; what cannot
be thought is that the world is the being of God when God is not being
deity, or the being of God in the time of not being.”
It follows from this view that an infinite amount of diversity is both
permitted and discovered in God’s freedom to not be, a diversity that,
ultimately, is at one with God. What makes this possible (and
logically consistent) is the peculiar state of being-what-is-not-while-
not-being-what-is, for, in addition to characterizing God’s freedom,
this divine state of being also characterizes the liberation process
that evolves God’s freedom (God becomes more free as freedom evolves)
and this freedom, ultimately, characterizes physical events,
biological events, and psychological events, (or the divine self-
consciousness of “now”).]
Pure change, or that which is both release and preservation, bond and
liberation, is what’s happening within the polarity of being-what-is-
not-while-not-being-what-is,--the defining poles of God’s immanence.
Unqualified change is simply change, but this change, over time,
evolves into more complex forms of change, eventually creating the
conditions that support life. But even here change is ongoing, life in
its environment continues to change and evolve, bringing forth more
evolved, complex forms of life. And, as life acquires more
consciousness, freedom expands.
Evolution, in addition to evolving content, evolves “form.” A change
in form is not necessarily a change in meaning however, e.g., two
means 2, 1+1 means 2, 4-2 means 2. In the same way that the meaning of
the number 2 is conserved in the subtraction of 120 from 122, so to is
the meaning of being-what-is-not-while-not-being-what-is, conserved in
the decay/death cycle of life. This birth/death cycle is God’s way of
conserving non-being in feeling-sensing life forms that evolve from
simple to more complex life forms.
Some evolved life forms become sentient, sentient to the point of
answering to a more highly evolved “form.” One might be tempted to
imagine that I am suggesting the existence of an alien creature here,
one that walks among us yet is not one of us. True, aliens do exist,
but we walk among them because we are them. Life forms that answer to
a “more evolved form” are the symbol producing, problem solving,
psychologically complex life forms that go by the name Homo sapiens.
Being born into this select population, being alive in the species
that “answers to this more evolved form,” brings with it not just self-
awareness in a physical environment (the participatory moment of a
conscious self in the physical event of a self-conscious being), but
also the immense potential to expand one’s freedom and horizons. What
I am trying to communicate here is unfamiliar, so what follows is my
attempt to simplify the language with a picture, a picture of the
“forms” that, ultimately, culminates in the species that “answers to a
higher “form” of God’s freedom:
Let the V image represent God’s freedom. Let the left side of the V
represent the empirical world (the world of our senses) and the right
side of the V represent the liberating aspect of freedom. Identify the
vertex, the bottom of V, as ~~b (the purist form of unity). Somewhere
above the V vertex, on the freedom side of the V, let the letter b
represent life and ~b represent the negative space of life (~b on the
empirical side). Life moves freedom forward and in this case upward
too. Further up the V, let ~bb (discontinuity occurring in continuity)
represent the next transformation state of freedom—the participatory
moment of a conscious self, and let b~b (continuity occurring in
discontinuity) represent, on the empirical side of the V, the physical
event of self-consciousness. With the advent of self-consciousness,
freedom again moves forward. The V grows larger (and wider) as the
story of the history of human civilization unfolds.
What the above transformational states of God’s freedom are defining
is God in the phenomenal world as immanence while simultaneously
implying a transcendent Divinity (the God of all religions). All we
can know about transcendent God is that God exists. The space of
logical implication tells us that much. On the other hand, we can know
a great deal about God’s immanence because, as the ancient Greeks have
told us, in Mythos and Logos is where the world lies. We, as self-
conscious beings, embedded in sensual experience, participate in
inquiry, analysis, conscience, and imagination. Now, let’s take a
closer look at what the form of ~bb, (of b~b~bb) entails, i.e., the
freedom to think thoughts.
Discontinuity occurring in continuity (~bb) is like a chisel splitting
wood, the wood (conscious wood in this example) experiences a gap,
hole, or emptiness in itself. Likewise, in human consciousness, the
gap, hole, or emptiness experienced is the result of discontinuity
occurring in the continuity of consciousness. This experience (some
call it psychological time), when deconstructed, has produced a litany
of accomplishments. Descartes turned this experience into doubt and
then proceeded to doubt everything, thus concluding that doubting
implied a doubter, thus Descartes established the validity of his own
existence. The psychologist and structuralist, Piaget, identified this
experience as the center of functional activity, or the locus of the
“constructionist self.” The philosopher, Sartre, labeled this
experience the pre-reflective Cogito, thus recognizing that human
consciousness is based in this experience. Of the three examples
cited, only Sartre put the horse in front of the cart as opposed to
(as they say) putting the cart before the horse. Non-being is the
antecedent of understanding. Non-being is the antecedent of any stand
alone “mental given.”
“Mental givens” are experienced front and center in consciousness (the
unreflective consciousness) while not being the object of
consciousness permits conscious reflection on the content (the “mental
given”) of consciousness. Functionally, ~bb, or the cognitive
experience of discontinuity occurring in continuity, not only
identifies the source of conceptual representation (symbolic meaning),
it also explains why our thoughts should be able to represent the
world outside our mind (especially when it comes to the application of
mathematics to theories of physical phenomena). It should come as no
surprise that since both the world and our ideas are coupled to the
logical form of God, that, on many occasions, a necessary
correspondence arises between logical form (deductive reasoning) and
the physical events predicted by that form. In other words, the laws
of nature correspond to the laws of mathematics reflected in our minds
because both are based on a more fundamental law--the logical form of
God becoming freer in the phenomenal world. Applying this supposition
to the variances that crop up in comparisons of the physics of the
macro world to the physics of the micro world produces some revealing
insights. (Disclaimer here, I read books “about physics,” I am not
physicist. The supposition I am defending, however, is that both the
universe and our ideas are coupled to the logical form of God, thus
the physics of the universe, on one level at least, must be describing
the same phenomenon).
Determinism, locality and continuity allow for the reductionist
methods of science to work only until science penetrates deep into
that area where the integrity of the physical universe breaks down,
where the deterministic motions of mass points no longer exist. At the
depths of the material world there exists a fuzzy world that exhibits
statistical behavior, behavior that only becomes determinate when we
observe it. At this ground level, we find a physical reality with no
uniquely determinable location, a physical reality that exists in
several states at the same time, a physical reality structured by a
mathematical equation. In God’s non-being, or, in this context I guess
I should say, in the theory of freedom’s structural form, two “forms”
stand out as a way to better understand the contradictory concepts
which remain at odds with one another in the theory of relativity and
quantum physics.
The same attributes (discontinuity, indeterminism and non-locality)
that characterize self-consciousness, characterize also the “double
negation” that serves as the ground of freedom. Both of these “forms”
generate implication. At the “ground of freedom” implication remains
open (until observed), while in self-consciousness, implication opens
up the human world-historical-process. In other words, the negation
that lies at the center of self-consciousness, the negation that
permits our capacity to solve mathematical equations, lies also at the
“ground that serves as the ground of freedom.” Because observation
takes place in the space of continuity, determinism and locality (self-
consciousness’s negative space) there is an unavoidable clash of worlds
—the world of continuity, determinism and locality (relativity)
clashes with the world of discontinuity, indeterminism, and non-
locality (quantum physics). Bottom line here is that the theory of
relativity accurately describes natural phenomena. Einstein’s
equations, when applied to the world of physical events, provide
accurate information concerning our status as participating agents in
the physical universe. Likewise, quantum mechanics accurately
describes natural phenomena. Only the phenomena being described are
“fuzzy” because, as it is throughout freedom’s dialectic, the space
that separates also embeds and connects. On the quantum level, self-
consciousness confronts its own ground state in the form of the
phenomenal strangeness of quantum physics.
Ultimately, from the most holistic perspective, the connection that
connects logical form, world, and freedom tells us: Were it not for
the negative space of determinism, continuity, and locality, the
discontinuity, non-locality, and indeterminism of human consciousness
(opposites are necessary to conserve wholeness) would not be free in a
world of our own experience (by degrees, experience of our own
choosing), seeking truth, justice, and religious meaning!
To sum up my spiritual worldview as it relates to modern science
(the three physicists I paraphrase and quote here are described in Ken
Wilber’s book: Quantum Questions, Mystical Writings of the World’s
Greatest Physicists): My worldview is very close to what Wolfgang
Pauli believed. A Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Pauli, earned a
reputation for being a ruthless critic of ideas during the time when
physics was birthing the principles governing sub atomic particles.
His contributions were numerous, including the famous “exclusion
principle” and the prediction of the existence of the neutrino. At the
center of Pauli’s philosophical outlook was his “wish for a unitary
understanding of the world, a unity incorporating the tension of
opposites,” and he hailed the interpretation of quantum theory as a
major development toward this end. (p. 173)
My worldview is also very sympathetic to the profound reverence
Einstein held for rationality. Einstein believed that scientific
knowledge ennobles true religion—not the religion that inspires fear
in God, but rather a religion “capable of cultivating the Good, the
True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself.” For Einstein, “the
grandeur of reason incarnate in existence” was the highest religious
attitude. (p.113)
But, even more than with Pauli and Einstein, my worldview resonates
with what Arthur Eddington believed. He was possibly the first person
to fully comprehend Einstein’s relativity theory. He also headed up
the famous expedition that photographed the solar eclipse which
offered proof of relativity theory. Eddington believed that if you
want to fill a vessel you must first make it hollow. He also said,
“our present conception of the physical world is hollow enough to hold
almost anything,” hollow enough to hold “that which asks the
question,” hollow enough to hold “the scheme of symbols connected by
mathematical equations that describes the basis of all phenomena.” He
also said, however, “If ever the physicist solves the problem of the
living body, he should no longer be tempted to point to his result and
say ‘That’s you.’ He should say rather ‘That is the aggregation of
symbols which stands for you in my description and explanation of
those of your properties which I can observe and measure. If you claim
a deeper insight into your own nature by which you can interpret these
symbols—a more intimate knowledge of the reality which I can only deal
with by symbolism—you can rest assured that I have no rival
interpretation to propose. The skeleton is the contribution of physics
to the solution of the Problem of Experience; from the clothing of the
skeleton it (physics) stands aloof.” (p. 194)
In my God argument above, without the Not-Me-Self, science, books,
ethics, all that gets called civilization would not exist. The Not-Me-
Self has an even greater significance, though, for in it resides the
potential to liberate Divinity. The Implicative Affirmative of the Not-
Me-Self is, in fact, the Logos image of God made whole in woman/man/
humanity.
I want to conclude this post with a brief account of the social
implications that follow from the Not-Me-Self (the “~bb” of b~b~bb).
In addition to liberating human cognition, the Not-Me-Self also
liberates good and bad feelings. The “or else,” that typically follows
a command, is written in the blood of the rise and fall of
civilizations. The civilizing process, to be sure, is not just a
product of war mongering, influence peddling, and greed. Benevolence,
generosity and good will move the civilizing process forward. I
believe that, under the best of conditions, humans will choose
kindness and consideration over uncaring and selfish behavior. In
fact, for me, altruism, compassion, the “golden rule” (in all its
forms) defines the Omega point of Divine liberation. This is not just
wishful thinking; it is the only voice that calls forth from the Not-
Me-Self. Because this voice is based in self/other interdependence,
whose only claim to authority is a claim to contingency, this voice
grounds individual freedoms and the emancipatory right of Others. This
contingency, at the center of the Not-Me-Self, establishes the right
of the Other to his/her otherness while it also establishes the basis
of legitimacy from which to construct, express, and defend my own
rights. Because this voice is universal, it also provides an ideal
basis from which to critique the legitimatization of social and
political power structures, as it also provides the ideal basis from
which to evaluate justice, equality, and individual and collective
freedoms.
Following from the right to my own contingency, and following from the
right of the Other to her/his contingency, arises the politics of
emancipation. This politics entails 1) the freeing of social life from
the fixities of tradition and custom, 2) the reduction (or
elimination) of exploitation, inequality and oppression (which
includes the right to a living wage, universal health care, and
protection from wrongful harms), and 3) the liberation of Divinity—the
perpetuation of a more egalitarian social order, a social order that
is based on insuring the availability of a standard of living (quality
of life) sufficient for the actualization of individual freedoms. In
other words, in the language of “how one ought to behave,” one should
behave in a way that is consistent with Divinity’s liberation,
consistent with self/other interdependence, consistent with life
enhancement—righting the wrongs that perpetuate unnecessary suffering
and pain. |
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