Nearly everybody nowadays (except young children, and maybe some residual tribal people) believes that the universe was originally unalive, and most of it is still unalive.
And this is a shared assumption among mainstream modern materialists, and all of the major Western religions.
The assumption that there was a time when the universe was just physics, biology came along much later - and consciousness later still.
The addition of God doesn't make all that much difference; because God is supposed to have created unalive physics first, then plants then animals; and only to have added conscious humans at the end of the process...
So that the unalive world of physics is still asserted to be the first and predominant reality.
Modern people - religious and atheistic - conceptualize themselves as islands of life (plus or minus consciousness) in a vast ocean of unlife.
This unlife-assumption is one of the iron chains that unbreakably binds modern Man's soul to the ideology of atheistic materialism. Because the assumed possibility - and even worse predominance - of unlife, negates the divine in ways that are crippling.
For instance, the unlife-assumption renders the individual here-and-now powerless whenever that individual lacks the material power to change the unalive environment.
the sheer mass of the unalive seems to be a colossal inertia, such that (with such a picture of reality in our minds) it feels like an individual spirit cannot overcome that mass.
If the physics world of the unalive is given temporal priority and spatial predominance (i.e. the unalive came first and comprises most of reality); then the spiritual is thereby rendered secondary in importance and minority on influence.
These assumptions make it very hard to believe, to convince ourselves, that the spiritual in me (e.g. here and now); can really affect the vast ocean of unlife in which I am supposed to be dwelling.
Little me thinking versus All That Stuff... How can "I" possibly make a significant difference?
It is so hard to believe, because it is so hard to understand - we can't make sense of it, with such a world-model we can't think of a plausible mechanism of action.
Thus, the context of a prior and predominant unalive universe; makes it very hard to grasp how "the individual spirit", - for example my own current conscious aspirations and commitments - really can and does make an ultimate difference to reality-as-a-whole...
Yet surely that is what Jesus taught as the truth? That what you or I think or want, here and now, can make an eternal and universal difference?
It seems to me that we need to drop the assumption of an unalive universe, and to return to that assumption with which we entered the world; the assumption of all reality being alive and conscious (to various degrees).
We need, therefore, to discard the "physics, biology, humanity" sequence of creation - whether that model comes from from the Old Testament, or from "science".
If we can then (and it is difficult indeed! Or, at least, I find it so) develop the original and true habit of regarding reality as alive, conscious, purposive etc - then Theism and Christianity begin to make understandable sense, we can grasp how the assertions may actually "work".
If we can recognize and discard the unlife assumption; can re-learn to think of everything as alive; and thereby relegate physics to the realm of more, or less, expedient models, but never "real-reality"...
Then I think we will find that claims and promises of Christianity can make a kind of obvious, "common sense".
After which clarity and grasp of understanding is attained; salvation becomes a simple matter of whether or not we personally want what Jesus offers.
Note: The above is a different and somewhat novel way of describing the "metaphysics of beings" that I have been propounding on this blog and elsewhere, for the past several years.)
It took me a long time to get back to the reality of the aliveness of everything (metaphysics of beings). Like most people, I sensed this innately as a child, lost sense of it as an adult, and have only recently (past six-seven years) re-accepted it as fundamental to reality.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, viewing some of Van Gogh's paintings -- The Starry Night, Wheatfield with Crows, etc. -- was what provided part of the "epiphany" that allowed for the reacceptance.
Of course, I'm not saying that those paintings consciously communicate a metaphysics of beings -- they simply resonated with something I felt internally.
I was actually writing about this issue ("animism") originally from an academic perspective (evolutionary psychology) for quite a long time before I recognized it as a major metaphysical question. I can only rarely and for shortish periods actually experience reality and think in this kind of way - but at least I now have it to hand as an ultimate explanation, when needed.
ReplyDeleteThis is another of those "necessary but not sufficient" changes that are so difficult to argue-for - what I mean is that embracing the fact that the creation is alive is necessary, but if done on its own then it does not make a qualitative difference. so, quite a few neo-pagans regard the universe as alive, but their pseudo-paganism undoes the good. Conversely, most Christians chose to inhabit an unalive universe, which negates most of their Christianity and opens them up to subversion/ inversion by totalitarian strategies like "AI".
You are right to point out that experiencing reality as alive, however consistently, does not in and of itself make much of a qualititative difference; however, within the framework of Christian assumptions that accepts a metaphysics of beings, it can make an immense difference, particularly when it comes to conventional "sticking points" like true agency and freedom. For starters, such assumptions would at least make one aware of the spiritual dangers of impersonalization and objectification, of reducing parts of Creation to the level of unalive forces, things, and laws. On the flipside, it would also draw one closer to the reality of ubiquitous consciousness as a fundamental "property" of reality (contained within the beings that comprise it).
Delete@Frank - The trouble is that this abstracting/ unalive universe tendency goes back to before Christianity - and indeed probably to the beginnings of civilization.
ReplyDeleteALiveness held on for many centuries, gradually dwindling. e.g. The medieval world view described by CS Lewis has a kind of intermediate-phase understanding between full livingness and materialism, with the heavenly bodies (stars and planets - astrology) sort-of moved and inhabited by angels - but with an implicit separation of the matter and spirit.
Later on, the angelic spirits were removed and we got materialist astronomy.