open source theology

I like where you’re going here, Jacob. Here are a few thoughts that come to mind.

"1) narratives are more or less fruitful at 2) effecting a world into existence."

I would describe Baruch Spinoza’s elaboration on this idea if only I’d actually read Spinoza. He’s undergoing a sort of revival, largely because of his thoroughgoing commitment to immanence as the means by which worlds come into existence. Spinoza, a Jew, resisted the mind-body dualism inherited from the Greeks and systematized by Descartes. For Spinoza the ideas of God and the words He speaks are not essentially different from the materiality by which He also manifests himself. Humans too are mistakenly divided into mind and body. I think that for Spinoza, people’s ideas originate from and/or resonate with God’s idea, their creative actions with God’s ongoing creation. One gets a pantheistic vibe from Spinoza, at least as I’ve heard his ideas described.

Alternatively there are the social constructionists, following sociologists Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality, which I actually have read and which I do recommend. Their position is that existing material stuff doesn’t become meaningful reality until it’s been thought about, categorized, named, and assembled into a coherent structural whole. B&L don’t go as far as Spinoza, or possibly as you do, in dismantling the distinction between the material and the conceptual. Still, a pre-existing material something isn’t experienced subjectively or collectively as having reality until it’s been embedded in the mental and linguistic order of things.

"God spoke the world into existence, in other words. Similarly, God gave man the capacity to name the animals; that is, to effect “lions” and “monkeys” and “cows” and “donkeys” into existence."

Your construal here sounds more like Spinoza’s immanent position on realism. For Berger and Luckmann, the world and the animals might have existed before being named; they just hadn’t entered into meaningful reality yet.

"we will never reach back through history and touch the original event."

This is a puzzle currently being explored by contemporary "speculative realists" in continental philosophy, notably Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, Bruno Latour, and Quentin Meillassoux. This last fellow in his short but dense book After Finitude is trying to understand the "arche-fossil," the world as it existed before sentient beings inhabited that world. The question is this: How is it possible to think about things that existed before there was human thought? Empirical science claims to do just that in investigating long-term environmental change and evolution, the big bang and the expanding universe, etc. Meillassoux wants not to debunk science but to arrive at a philosophical understanding of how and why it might be possible.

"In Genesis, for instance, God said “Let there be light” and there was light. God spoke the world into existence, in other words. Similarly, God gave man the capacity to name the animals; that is, to effect “lions” and “monkeys” and “cows” and “donkeys” into existence."

And out of the ground Yahweh Elohim formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. (Gen. 2:19)

It seems that the writer of the second creation narrative intended to distinguish the thing from its name, its material existence from its socially constructed reality. The thing comes first, then the agreed-upon meaning of that thing. The writer of the first creation narrative conflates these two operations, perhaps even inverts them: the name comes first, then the thing to which the name applies.

If we follow Berger and Luckmann (both Lutherans, I believe), the purpose of religion is to weld the names to the things so tightly that they cannot be pulled apart without risking chaos. It’s what B&L refer to as the "reification" of reality. Here’s a passage from their Social Construction of Reality:

"Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra-human terms. Another way of saying this is that reification is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products — such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness. The reified world is, by definition, a dehumanized world. It is experienced by man as a strange facticity, an opus alienum over which he has no control rather than as the opus proprium of his own productive activity.

“…reification can be described as an exreme step in the process of objectivation, whereby the objectivated world loses its comprehensibility as a human enterprise and becomes fixated as a non-human, non-humanizable, inert facticity. Typically, the real relationship between man and his world is reversed in consciousness. Man, the producer of a world, is apprehended as its product, and human activity is an epiphenomenon of non-human processes. Human meanings are no longer understood as world-producing but as being, in their turn, products of the “nature of things.” It must be emphasized that reification is a modality of consciousness, more precisely, a modality of man’s objectification of the human world. Even while apprehending the world in reified terms, man continues to produce it. That is, man is capable paradoxically of producing a reality that denies him.

“…It would be a mistake to look at reification as a perversion of an originally non-reified apprehension of the social world, a sort of cognitive fall from grace. On the contrary, the available ethnological and psychological evidence seems to indicate the opposite, namely, that the original apprehension of the social world is highly reified both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. This implies that an apprehension of reification as a modality of consciousness is dependent upon at least relative dereification of consciousness, which is a comparatively late development in history and in any individual biography.”

By implication, humans can follow the examples of creation given in Genesis 1 and 2 in two fundamentally different ways. First, we can accept reified reality as its been handed down through the religion: the names are integral to the things, unchangeable, built into their creation as things, so that if we abandon the names then the material world will fall apart. Or we can recognize that, like Adam, we are the ones who assign names to things, and that by changing the names we can rearrange reality — our understanding of what things mean and how they fit together — without the whole world descending into chaos. We can stop thinking about the sky as a firmament separating the waters above from the waters below without the risk of precipitating another cosmic-scale deluge.

A bit like Saul calling up the spirit of Samuel through the witch of Endor, perhaps? Or would it be a different illustration of the power of reification? (Just a quick thought from the cave in which I have been temporarily skulking).

It’s curious how many drastic actions are justified in the name of preventing chaos. America and associates’ continued occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan prevents political chaos, the governmental bailouts of the big banks prevent economic chaos, etc. This sort of hyperbole exemplifies the language of reification, where the dominant sectors of society claim to be holding the universe together. The mystifying words which descend from on high: do they describe reality, or create it? Of course it’s possible to identify religious examples as well: the Law and the priesthood prevent moral chaos, etc.

At last, a root metaphor. In the beginning, before God there was freedom (see Berdeyev), which is another word for chaos. There was the water, an ancient metaphor for chaos. And God caused his breath to blow over the water. He ordered being—perfectly. Man, in his image and likeness—orders being—imperfectly. At the eschaton, which is proleptic, the perfect order of God and the imperfect order of man will be merged through justice, and in order there will be unity which is to say perfect simplicity, which can never be chaotic.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all and may you have a blessed day.

Happy Thanksgiving to you too, Shiert. I wonder if the English, Australian and other Anglophone participants in this blog have ever eaten pumpkin pie, the classic Thanksgiving dessert. When we lived in France and served it to French people, reactions ranged from incredulity to revulsion.

Regarding humanity’s imperfect ordering of being, there’s this from American journalist Ron Suskind:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Of course we could take Saint-Exupery’s epigram to its nihilistic enpoint, whereby creation is perfected in total destruction. Here’s an earlier Frenchman’s minimalist maxim, oft unheeded in these parts:

"I have made this letter rather long only because I have not had time to make it shorter."

- Blaise Pascal