Bruce Charlton comment (edited by me):
Kristor comments: "Because he is subultimate, the Mormon God is unnecessary, contingent, and dependent (like Zeus or Thor)".
This is interestingly wrong, in part; because it reveals several of the assumptions into which philosophy came to embed mainstream Christian theology.
Perhaps the key term is contingent - in that the desire of classical theology is to describe a state of affairs that could not be otherwise than it is.
If that was true then (by my understanding) there can be no real freedom. Freedom has been excluded by assumption.
"Unnecessary" is related to the desire to escape all contingency: to insist that things cannot be other than what they are, however this also also entails that nothing can really change.
But when there is life/ consciousness/ being - there is change, and change is directional and sequential - and this is something that everybody is born already knowing.
The Mormon concept of God (and IMO the real God!) is indeed "necessary" in the sense that God is the creator, and without God there would be no creation. So it is a case of God or Chaos.
But the philosophy (expressed by Kristor) that (IMO) captured Christian theology, wants it to be that there must be God, now and always, and nothing would be without God.
This is a case of God or Nothing.
Well, that idea of necessity is a very particular view of God. Most gods/Gods throughout history and the world (including some descriptions of the God of the Old Testament, it seems clear enough) do not conform to this idea of necessity.
Indeed extremely few people - now or ever - could even conceive of a God in that sense, and could not express it if they did. They would not want or see reason to posit such an entity.
What is strange to me is that so many Christian theologians (from very early in the Christian church) seem to have decided to make the assumption that only such an abstract entity is a "real" God, or deserves to be considered a God.
It is strange because of Jesus Christ. If Christianity had been a pure monotheism, this dogmatic assumption would be comprehensible; but given the incarnate nature of Jesus the Man, Son of God, who was born, grew, lived "in time", who died etc etc...
Well, it is just plain strange for Christians to make an insoluble problem from Jesus - just because of their pre-existing philosophical convictions.
And having made the nature of Jesus such a Big Problem, but not so strange to pretend that all questions have been answered but at a level of abstraction so remote that all contradictions dissolve into each other!
**
Francis Berger then wrote a post amplifying on some of the above concepts (edited):
In his comment, Dr. Charlton refers to two disparate cases concerning the nature of God and Creation—the first being the conventional conceptualization of God or nothing and the unconventional view of God or chaos.
The first case posits God as the ultimate creator of everything and argues that there would be nothing without God. The second case envisions God as a primary creator who shaped and formed Creation from pre-existing “material” (for lack of a better way of putting it) that was chaotic and purposeless.
God or nothing and God or chaos is another angle from which one can view the old creatio ex nihilo versus creatio ex materia debate.
The God or nothing approach insists upon the absolute necessity of God for the simple reason that without him, nothing could exist or be. God not only is—he absolutely must be, for without Him, there would be nothing but a void of nothingness.
In other words, I am must be because there is literally nothing on the other side of that thunderous I am.
Every being needs God, but God needs no other beings. No being is utterly necessary but God.
This absolute necessity of God relegates everything in existence or being to the state of contingency. Every being in existence is utterly dependent on God in every way imaginable, even when they exercise their God-given freedom to reject God altogether.
However, the God-given free rejection of the Divine Creator does not negate God’s thunderous I am declaration.
The creatures he created from nothing can never return to the nothing from whence they came. They either come to know and worship him or suffer the consequences of their free rejection, the capacity for which God created from nothing.
The God or chaos case envisages God as the primary creator. Without God, there is no Creation, only chaos. God can still say I am, but his necessity takes on an entirely different hue.
The creatures he shaped existed in some form before entering Creation, so he is not necessary for their core pre-existence as beings but crucial to their existence in Creation.
They come to know him and attempt to understand why they are Creation, or they may reject him and, perhaps, choose to return to the chaos from which they emerged.
Since God did not create the freedom driving such a choice, it remains authentically free.
**
Me, now:
Deriving the nature of God from a "God or Chaos" distinction, seems to be a useful shorthand of the the paired alternatives that arise from the metaphysical assumptions that I share with Francis Berger.
His comment stimulated a few further clarifications. God or Chaos could be re-framed as Love or Chaos - since creation derives from Love.
Furthermore, it is vitally important that God creates from "beings" and not from "materia" - by my understanding, God did not start with inert, unalive, "stuff" but already alive and conscious, purposive beings. That pre-creation reality was of beings is essential to the reality and nature of freedom.
If pre-creation reality was not already-alive and already-conscious - by their nature and from-eternity, then the problem of "where freedom comes from" remains unanswered. Because, ultimately, freedom just isn't something that can be made or gifted.
(And the same applies to life, or consciousness, or purpose - these are attributes of beings, and cannot be bestowed upon no-beings, "things" or "material".)
Therefore, Chaos should not be pictured scientistically as some kind of Brownian motion of dead-molecules. Instead, Chaos should be understood as a situation in which beings are self-centred in their purposes and methods, autonomous in their world view...
So, this debate is not a re-run of creatio ex nihilo versus creatio ex materia - because the starting point is an already-alive ("animated") universe, but one in which living beings are "uncoordinated" - each pulling in a different direction, all with with different motivations.
Creation is therefore understood as the incremental and progressive harmonization and direction of a multitude of already-existing living beings by Love: that is, by Love of God (which provides ultimate coherence), and of each-other (without which creation would break-down).
In other words; the "Two Great Commandments": first to love God, then to love our "neighbour", fellow Men (and by extension all other beings).
Chaos is a collection of unharmoniuous beings, each "doing his own thing", wholly self-motivated, un-loving and indifferent to other beings (and perhaps unaware of them). It is this kind of situation, upon-which God initiates the process of creation.
But, this was only the beginning of creation - because it led to a mixed world of continuing chaos and ("within" this) an expanding divine creation. Creation exists insofar as love motivates; but love is (at best) incomplete in any being.
So far this is monotheism, not Christianity. The completion and "perfection" of creation, into a wholly good world - i.e. Heaven - required the later intervention of Jesus Christ. This is therefore The Second Creation.
11 comments:
Sorry to be obtuse, but don't we then need to posit a "higher" god who created this chaos and the "beings" within it?
@j - It depends whether you mean "need" psychologically, or metaphysically, Psychologically it seems that some people feel this need with respect to beings that aren't God; but metaphysically there is always and necessarily a point at which causes cease and the situation Just Is Eternally.
For orthodox/ classical Christian theologians they are happy to posit that God Just Is and eternally, but will not allow this for anything else.
For me, God Just Is and so are the vast numbers of other beings that are not God.
That is what I regard as the starting point.
(A complicating factor for Orthodox-Classical theologians is that they regard God as outside Time, not part of Time etc. This means that there is no ultimate before and after, and that for God everything is Now. This makes it paradoxical for them to locate Jesus Christ in Time, in history - and to talk of a BC and an AD - because for them Time is a kind of delusion.
I regard Time as an inextricable part of beings - so there is always a past and present and future. Therefore (for me) reality after Jesus are ultimately and everywhere different from things before Jesus.
This goes a long way toward explaining why the Bible presents “God is love” in the way it does, that is not as a logical consequence of “God made everything” but as it’s own primary assertion.
@Mia - It seems to fit together surprisingly well!
Or maybe not surprising, since this pretty much corresponds to the innate "knowledge" with which we enter the world. If we assume that God pre-equipped people with the assumptions and basic knowledge they need for salvation and to live and learn (theosis) - then it probably should really be what we would expect.
Of course, since early in church history (it seems) the official theological assumptions are - on the contrary - extremely abstract and (on the face of it) incoherent; only understandable (if at all... if such understanding is really-real) by highly intelligent and educated experts.
Thanks for expounding on this, Bruce. The point about creating from beings rather than unalive stuff is key. A trivial addendum to that -- if memory serves me well, some of the Greeks and early Christians who subscribed to ex materia did not consider materia to be inert stuff but spirit or essence. Translation makes it difficult to ascertain precisely what they meant, but most believed the materia was alive in some way. Perhaps a new Latin term like "creatio ex praeexistente entia" is needed?
That aside, love is, of course, the overriding purpose of Creation, and love as an overriding purpose makes much more sense to me within the God or chaos framework.
@Frank - The Barfield/ Steiner line about this (which convinces me!) is that ancient Greeks could not conceive of dead-matter in the way that modern Man regards as self-evidently true.
On the other hand, they were already *somewhat* detached from the assumptions that everything was alive and purposive. The Greeks had begun to abstract, use symbols, create schemas etc - but these were (we might say) automatically infused with life. We tend to notice that the Greeks were (obviously and for the first time in history) systematic and abstract thinkers, but we tend to miss that they were much less so, than we are.
The idea is that this was an intermediate and mixed stage (the Intellectual Soul) - coming between immersive, unconscious Original Participation and the alienated detachment of the modern Consciousness Soul) that continued, gradually changing, right through the middle ages.
Thus detached abstraction was increasing, and the "animism" was decreasing into almost-nothing, up to modern times.
This interchange has been very useful to me, so far - let's see how far we can take it?
Aside from the weight of tradition and the longstanding established assumption of a creation ex nihilo God, I perceive at least two mental impediments that prevent mainstream Christianity (including The Orthosphere people) from entertaining the thesis that Bruce and Francis are putting forth:
1. Particularly in the West, both Catholic and Protestant, there is a tendency to want to explain and systematize everything, and there is discomfort with leaving mysteries or unexplained points on the table, as well as some arrogance that Reason can explain everything that God has bequeathed us. The creation ex nihilo more satisfies that logical, systematizing cast of mind: Either it treats ex nihilo as a logically-required and consistent premise that explains the whole system, or it says (with Wittgenstein “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” and treats that as the answer to the question of “Well, what was there before God?” Thus, the attitude of certainty or effectively ignoring mysteries precludes such people from conjecturing about other possible explanations. (And when I say this is more characteristic of the Western mind, I am obviously not implying that the Eastern Orthodox would accept Bruce and Francis’ perspective; just that the overall logical, systematizing mindset is more characteristic of the West generally.) Also, the creation from chaos theory obviously is also an attempt to explain things, but it seems to me to be a theory that still accepts and is comfortable with a fair amount of mystery and unexplained facts concerning origins compared with the creation ex nihilo approach.
2. In all of the dialogues between Bruce and Francis, on the one hand, and The Orthosphere crowd, on the other, I cannot escape the sense that the Orthosphere people are not _getting_, seeing, the problem that a creation ex nihilo God implies for the question of freedom. “Well, if God is all powerful, then he is powerful enough to create us free.” There is a blind spot in that way of thinking which fails to perceive that such freedom is, in a very fundamental way, not freedom. Thus, where they fail to perceive a problem, they likewise fail to see any need for any “solution” to that problem, which Bruce and Francis’ description provides. And in failing to see a need for it, they also deem is as wrong, and go back to the traditional solutions and formulations provided by "ex nihilo" or Wittgenstein.
Separately:
“Chaos is a collection of unharmoniuous beings, each "doing his own thing", wholly self-motivated, un-loving and indifferent to other beings (and perhaps unaware of them).”
This state of affairs has affinities with but is not identical with your “Luciferian evil”: i.e. selfishly-motivated behavior that may harm others because one does not care about their well-being. My understanding is that Luciferian evil is aware of other beings, is not (necessarily) seeking to harm them, but will harm them without qualms to satisfy one’s own selfish desires. The distinction with this new description of pre-creation chaos is that the beings may be _unaware_ of others, and therefore any “evil” they do is of a different character from Luciferian evil on that basis, or it not evil other than in a world where the idea of love exists (which it didn't at that point).
Despite this distinction, the similarity with Luciferian evil made me think about the Mormon idea of Lucifer and Christ as brothers from pre-eternity. Perhaps in this formulation, Christ was the first being to become aware of other beings, and to decide that _love_ was the proper mode of interacting them with. Lucifer, on the other hand, became aware of Christ’s awareness and response, and in turn he rejected that approach, and realized that his response to his awareness of other beings’ existence would be to view them merely as tools of his own desires.
This is just an off the cuff thought on reading Bruce’s post, but given his sympathy and predilection for Mormon theology, I thought it significant that there is this potential affinity between Mormon theology regarding Christ and Lucifer, and this latest description of creation ex chaos.
@Daniel - Thanks, very good comment.
wrt Lucifer as a personage - I'm just not sure about this. I mean, whether there was a specific demon about whom we know (e.g. by some combination of pre-mortal memory and revelation). But I think you are probably right that the first demonic leader would exemplify the simplest and earliest kind of "Luciferic" evil - that is, the attempt to *exploit* (newly discovered) creation for immediate personal (hedonic) benefit.
" I cannot escape the sense that the Orthosphere people are not _getting_, seeing, the problem that a creation ex nihilo God implies for the question of freedom."
I feel exactly the same, which is why the discussions/ debates invariably talk past each other. I have the advantage (so does Frank) of having previously known and accepted the orthodox-trad explanations, but having become dissatisfied by it (in my case, prompted by some probing comments and questions from William Tychonievich, who was a cradle active Mormon and later missionary).
I liked your formulation of the way that trad-orthodox discussion of fundamental issues such as freedom/ agency - or indeed Christology and the Trinity - oscillates frustratingly between detailed (and abstract) logical exposition of assumptions that are regarded as mandatory; and a mysticism (how could mere humans know?) that blocks all discussion.
To my mind, this rational-mystical oscillation prevents engagement with metaphysical assumptions, and "meta" problems in general. This rational-mystical combo has clearly been effective *within* Christianity, since it dates from the early centuries of the church and continues - but those who do not share the assumptions and abstract style of reasoning (especially straight monotheists, and nowadays atheists) find it bizarre and utterly unconvincing.
This was a very thought-provoking article. Perhaps I'm missing something but doesn't this 'creation ex materia' concept overlap with gnostic interpretations of the cosmos? Ie. an imperfect demiurge created this realm; the beings of this flawed 'pre-creation' tend toward chaos and ignorance, and that God, through Jesus Christ, attempted to purify or sanctify this fallen world?
@Michael - Gnosticism is a red herring here - it will only confuse you.
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2023/07/what-gnosticism-is-not.html
Of course, there are superficial similarities - but at root what I am saying is very nearly the opposite of gnosticism; and certainly less gnostic than mainstream (Catholic or Protestant) Christianity.
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