God-Imaging
'A God That Could Be Real' In The Scientific Universe (see below)
The Cosmic Plenum: God-Imaging, Models, and Science Theory
God-imaging has long been around, boasting a long history: through animism, matriarchy, hierarchical polytheism, tribal monotheism, universal monotheism to individuation.
So one has to ponder far beyond superficial thinking about *why* we have so long clung to this seemingly eternal habit of ours to conjure and develop images of That which we call "God." So let's look a little at this phenomenon we call "religion."
Freud considered religion to be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity--he stressed that humans projected their wishes, especially his great need for a protecting father, into an all-powerful divine Providence. Whereas Jung took the view that the libido was simply psychic energy, and that the material form in which psychic energy presents itself is fantasy.
As Jung's theories evolved, the transformer of libido became known as the archetype; the archetypes appear in dreams and fantasies as numinous images. Jung came to think of the archetypal image as the *instinct as image.*
Jung noticed that persons project their archetypal material on others, especially parents. Much of this material could be seen in its mythic features or godlike qualities. Jung refused to take a reductionist interpretation. He believed that he was actually dealing with a *transcendent center* of authority and value that resided within man and yet was beyond the parameters of ego consciousness. He believed that this situation implicated a transcendent center that could create the foundation for a religious attitude; for Jung this was the *numinosum.*
The noted mythologist Joseph Campbell complied that mythological symbolism has psychological significance, that myths originate from the "unconscious wells of fantasy." But there is a major difference between myths and dreams; and it is here that Campbell jumps from the individual to the cultural. Our myths are projections, patterns, but they are consciously controlled. Myths "serve as a powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom."
Campbell exclaimed that not only are mythological figures symptoms of the unconscious, but they are "intended statements of certain spiritual principals which have remained as a constant throughout the course of human history as the form and nervous structure of the human physique itself."
Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion, considered this kind of projection, or pattern, to be utterly necessary. Eliade noted that myths represented the eruption of the sacred into the world. The myth...the archetype...becomes a paradigmatic model for all human activities. Eliade believed that man's world has to be created; man symbolically has to transform his world into a cosmos. And every creation requires a paradigmatic model. For Eliade, religious man's desire to live in the sacred...the *numinosum*...allows him not to be paralyzed by subjective experiences.
Man connects with a sacred center which renders orientation possible; with this orientation, man has a sense of real existence that counters his terror of chaos and nothingness. Religious man, according to Eliade, makes himself by imitating the divine models.
The "divine model" that interests me greatly, and might relate later to some constructs in modern science theory is the classical philosophical consideration of the Logos!
Referring to the Logos merely in terms of the concept of "Word" is considered inadequate by serious scholars. The best way to get a grip on the Logos is by exploring how it was used, especially in Greek philosophy.
Taking account the Egyptian hermetic writings, "probably the earliest Greek antecedent to the idea of the Logos came from...Heraclitus." His conceptual universe was one that constantly changed, a universe in constant motion propelled by all-pervading Reason, which Heraclitus likened to divine fire or energy.
Following Heraclitus, the philosopher Anaxagoras considered a "Divine Mind" , which was immanent in the created order...
Aristotle believed that matter and form always existed together. Hence, for him, human beings had not only a material body, but also a soul in which there dwells a divine spark that the soul shares with God. "This spark of divinity in human nature is an element of the divine Logos--the shaping spiritual power and essence of God--is eternal and impersonal." [David Fideler, JESUS CHRIST SUN OF God: ANCIENT COSMOLOGY AND EARLY CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM, Quest Books, 1993, p 20.]
The concept of the Logos was most fully expressed by the Stoic philosophers. Stoicism believed the Universe to consist of two kinds of matter: a gross or coarse matter; and an extremely fine matter, which is virtually indistinguishable from the idea of spirit. The material, created order is thus pervaded with the spiritual substance, but it is also pervaded with a vital element--like the energetic fire of Heraclitus--that shaped, harmonized, and interpenetrated all things.
For the Stoics, this was nothing less than an intelligent, self- conscious world-soul, an indwelling Logos. Considering the Logos as God, and as the source of all life and all wisdom--then our 'human reason partakes of its nature, because this Logos dwells within us. For this reason we can follow the God within and refer to ourselves as the offspring of God." [Ibid, p.20]
The Logos Teaching in the Pythagorean and Platonic Schools (of Hellenistic Alexandria) was as follows:
*The Logos is not the First Cause...[rather] the Logos represents the first level of real manifestation or Being, for it encompasses within itself all the laws and relations which are later articulated in the phenomenal universe.
*Underlying the source of all reality, the Logos is related to the principle of *Nous* or Universal Intellect, the "repository" of all the cosmic Forms and principles on which creation is based. [Ibid, p. 42]
The "Logos is in the *arche,* the Beginning, Source, or Fount of experience. As the underlying harmonic pattern of creation, all things were made through the Logos! [Ibid, p. 45]
To my mind this *arche*, this ensuing Logos, is beyond just our own fledgling god-imaging. I suspect through our religious and philosophical efforts in the past and through our scientific efforts currently, we are groping towards explaining a deep-set intuition of a Foundation--a Cosmic Plenum!
Now whether we believe through faith, or via an insightful intuition (the Logos, Sophia, Pneuma), or by a manifested inner imago--there has been down through the ages this sense of a Ground of Being, this sense of a Foundation and Central Attractor of the Cosmos, the Alpha and the Omega that holds all together, that beckons and guides the Universe. This is a contemplative concept that has long been with us.
Now let us move to the Macrocosmos, to some selected scientific considerations. Let's start with the Big Bang. Some science theorists are at least intuiting that our universe was *informed* at the first microseconds of the Big Bang.
Early in 1992 scientists officially announced their discoveries of the oldest and largest cosmic structures known. By using the millions of measurements taken by COBE--NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite--these scientists were able to analyze the oldest snapshot of the ancient events that ultimately led to today's Universe.
Scientists were able actually to make direct measurements of "ripples" that were born in the explosion of the Big Bang. In a sense COBE had discovered the fossils of Creation.
In 1964 scientists had confirmed the afterglow of the Big Bang, which fills the Universe. And COBE made it possible for scientists to measure this glow--located in the long-wavelength microwave portion of the spectrum--to an accuracy of one part per million.
These measurements, these tiny one hundred-thousandth-of-a degree temperature variations are the imprints of the ripples in the fabric of space-time that were caused by the Big Bang. And through the billions of years these ripples have formed the galaxies, the galaxy clusters, and the voids of space.
This first cosmic snapshot by COBE allowed scientists to see the *forces* that would ultimately determine the future shape of the Universe. COBE had permitted scientists a glimpse of those early seeds of Creation that were laid the first billionth of a second of the Big Bang...We have come to realize that *information* propels the cosmic process of unfoldment.
As for the Microcosmos, as interpreted by quantum theory, the *foundation* of outer reality rests upon a mysterious, subatomic milieu--a milieu where little can be predicted precisely. It is a milieu where one has to work with probabilities rather than certainties. It is a milieu that meshes, that is grainy. Electromagnetic energy--such as heat or light--does not form as a continuous wave. Rather, light has a dual character. In some circumstances light may display wavelike aspects; and, other times, light may have the characteristics of particles. Electromagnetic energy, elementary particles that undergird the world, can be transferred only in quantum packages.
SO! Could it be that our ancient religious and classical philosophical concepts (such as the Logos) might be conveyed scientifically as a *Foundational Presence* that underlies all Cosmic Being.? For the late quantum theorist David Bohm, it is a Presence within cosmic energy.
Bohm's cosmic model suggests that this Presence has existed since the foundation of the cosmos. It is present in the cyclical process of the universe. It is pure, active intelligence from which all that is manifest in the cosmos comes. It acts through an inwardness in consciousness. It enfolds information into the many levels of consciousness, into all of life. It is the Implicate Order which is the Ground of All Existence.
And one has to wonder, too, that we live in a Cosmos that scientists now consider to be a Web of Relationship through and through--as derived from systems theory and the philosophical paradigm of Deep Ecology. Indeed, John Wheeler--one of the world's leading physicists--sees the "world as a self-synthesizing system of existences." It is a world of "intercommunicating existences, one based on quantum-plus-information theory." According to Wheeler, "the quantum teaches that *the world at bottom has an information- theoretic character." [John Wheeler, "The World as a Self-Synthesizing System of Existences," IBM J. Res. Develop., 32.1 (January 1988), pp. 4-15.]
Now let us return to depth psychology (where we began this multi-posting with Freud and Jung) and god-imaging. The late premier Jungian scholar, Edward F. Edinger, put it thus: " The whole evolutionary history of life gives us a picture of higher and higher syntheses of biological existence being created out of the evolutionary process...For that reason we have to assume some kind of *latent, creative intentionality* to account for the phenomenon of the historical evolution of life as we see it, not to speak of the higher and higher syntheses on the psychological level..." [Edward F. Edinger, THE NEW GOD-IMAGE: A STUDY OF JUNG'S KEY LETTERS CONCERNING THE EVOLUTION OF THE WESTERN GOD-IMAGE, Chiron Publications, 1996, p. 67.]
So just maybe our god-imaging, our philosophical pondering of such concepts as the Logos might be, in the end, appropriate intuitive efforts towards comprehending this *Foundational Presence* within our Cosmos. Thus, rather than negating these previous efforts outright, perhaps it would be more fruitful to integrate such with our contemporary scientific quest towards trying to reach the same understanding.
'A God That Could Be Real' In The Scientific Universe
April 23, 20154:15 AM ETNANCY ELLEN ABRAMS
The star in the center, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, is known as V1331 Cyg and is located in the dark cloud LDN 981.Karl Stapelfe/ESA/Hubble, NASA
Part One Of Two. (Read Part Two here.)
"God" is a word. If we define it, even subconsciously, as something that cannot exist in our universe, we banish the idea of God from our reality and throw away all possibility of incorporating a potent spiritual metaphor into a truly coherent big picture. But if we take seriously the reliable — and, thus, invaluable — scientific and historical knowledge we now possess, we can redefine God in a radically new and empowering way that expands our thinking and could help motivate and unite us in the dangerous era humanity is entering.
For more than 30 years, I have had a ringside seat to one of the most exciting scientific revolutions of our time, the revolution in cosmology. In the 1970s, the great cosmological mystery was this: If the Big Bang was symmetrical in all directions, why isn't the expanding universe today just a bigger soup of particles? Instead, beautiful spiral and elliptical galaxies are scattered throughout, but not randomly; they lie along invisible filaments, like glitter tossed on lines of glue. Where several big filaments intersect, great clusters of galaxies have formed. Why? What happened to the soup? Where did all this structure come from?
My husband, Joel R. Primack, is one of the creators of the theory of cold dark matter, which answers these questions by telling us that everything astronomers can see — including all the stars, planets and glowing gas clouds in our galaxy, and all the distant galaxies — is less than half of 1 percent of the contents of the universe. The universe turns out to be almost entirely made of two dynamic, invisible presences unknown and undreamed of until the 20th century: dark matter (invisible matter not made of atoms or the parts of atoms) and dark energy (the energy causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate). They have been in competition with each other for billions of years, with dark matter's gravity pulling ordinary (atomic) matter together and dark energy flinging space apart. Their cosmic interaction with ordinary matter has spun the visible galaxies into being and, thus, created the only possible homes for the evolution of planets and life.
Over the decades, as data confirming this story began to trickle — then pour — in from telescopes and satellites, I kept wondering: What does it mean for us humans that we're not living in the universe we thought we were in? Today, astronomers worldwide accept the double dark theory as the modern story of the universe, but they have not answered this question. Someone must.
Does God have to be part of our understanding of the universe? No. But if scientists tell the public that they have to choose between God and science, most people will choose God, which leads to denialism, hostility to science and the profoundly dangerous mental incoherence in modern society that fosters depression and conflict. Meanwhile, many of those who choose science find themselves without any way of thinking that can give them access to their own spiritual potential. What we need is a coherent big picture that is completely consistent with — and even inspired by — science, yet provides an empowering way of rethinking God that provides the human and social benefits without the fantasy. How can we get this?
Science can never tell us with certainty what's true, since there's always the possibility that some future discovery will rule it out. But science can often tell us with certainty what's not true. It can rule out the impossible. Galileo, for example, showed with his telescope that the medieval picture of earth as the center of heavenly crystal spheres could not be true, even though he could not prove that the earth moves around the sun. Whenever scientists produce the evidence that convincingly rules out the impossible, there's no point in arguing. It's over. Grace lies in accepting and recalculating. That's how science moves forward.
What if we thought this way about God? What if we took the evidence of a new cosmic reality seriously and became willing to rule out the impossible? What would be left?
We can have a real God if we let go of what makes it unreal. I am only interested in God if it's real. If it isn't real, there's nothing to talk about. But I don't mean real like a table, or a feeling, or a test score, or a star. Those are real in normal earthbound experience. I mean real in the full scientific picture of our double dark universe, our planet, our biology and our moment in history.
These are characteristics of a God that can't be real:God existed before the universe.
God created the universe.
God knows everything.
God intends everything that happens.
God can choose to violate the laws of nature.
I explain in my book, A God That Could Be Real, why physically each of these is impossible, but I don't think the scientific readers of this blog need that. The point I want to make here is that this list pretty much agrees with most atheists' reasons for dismissing the existence of God. But this is no place to stop. We've merely stated what God can't be. We haven't considered yet what God could be.
We've all grown up so steeped in some religious tradition or other, whether we've accepted it or rebelled against it, that it's hard to grasp that the chance to redefine God is actually in our hands. But it is, and the way we do it will play a leading role in shaping the future of our planet.
To me, this is the key question: Could anything actually exist in this universe that is worthy of being called God? My answer is yes, and in my next blog post I'll explain what I mean by "a God that could be real."
A New Way To Think About 'God'
NANCY ELLEN ABRAMS
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows a star known as R Sculptoris, located 1,500 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Sculptor. The black region at the centre of the image has been artificially masked.ESA/NASA
Part Two Of Two (Read Part One here.)
There is no single meaning for the word "God." The idea of God and gods has been evolving and shape-shifting nonstop for millennia, and it's not over yet.
All traditional ideas of God are demonstrably inadequate to our time. They perpetuate conflict or fail to inspire us enough to rise to the existential challenges of our complex and dangerous world.
So let me propose a new way of thinking about God. Let me explain with an analogy.
Ants are very simple creatures. They can recognize a dozen or so pheromones (scent molecules) and can sense where those pheromones are more intense. They also can tell the difference between meeting two ants in a minute and 200 ants. That's about the extent of their individual communication abilities. But if we observe 10,000 of them in a colony, a "swarm logic" has emerged. The colony is continually adjusting the number of ants foraging for food, based on the number of mouths to feed, how much food is stored already in the nest, how much food is available in the vicinity, and whether other colonies are out there competing. Yet, no ant understands any of this.
The colony can engineer the construction of an ant hill as high as a man and as busy as a city, yet no one is in charge. Some ant hills can last a century. Over its lifetime, the colony will go through predictable stages of development, from aggressive youth to conservative maturity to death, yet no ant lives more than a tiny fraction of that time. What is going on? Where does swarm logic come from?
It emerges from the complexity of the interactions among the ants. An ant colony is self-organizing. Emergence is a powerful scientific concept that cuts across many fields — in fact, it happens throughout evolution. From the formation of galaxies to the evolution of life to the folding of proteins to the growth of cities to the disruption of the global climate, emergence creates utterly new phenomena out of interactions of simpler things.
Almost everything we humans do collectively spawns an emergent phenomenon. So, for example, people trading things has led to the global economy, an emergent phenomenon so complicated and unpredictable that not only does no one know the rules, but the professionals don't even agree on what the rules should be about. The never-ending effort to get people to behave decently toward one another has spawned governments. Our innate desire for gossip has spawned the media. Economies, governments and the media are all emergent phenomena — like an ant colony. They follow new and complicated rules that often cannot be derived from the behavior of the parts that make them up. They are real and have immense power over us, but they are not human or humanlike, even though they arise from human activities.
But we humans are not just traders, moralizers and gossips. Far beneath those behaviors, so deep it distinguishes us from the other primates, is this: We aspire. We aspire to different things, but we all aspire. Our aspirations are as real as we are. They are not the same as desires, like food, sex and security. Every animal has those desires from instinct alone. Aspirations reach beyond survival needs. Our aspirations are what shape each of us humans into the individual we are. Without aspirations, we are nothing but meat with habits. We humans are the aspiring species and may have been for hundreds of thousands of years.
Something new has to have emerged from the staggering complexity of all humanity's aspirations, interacting. What is that something — that emergent phenomenon both fed by and feeding the aspirations of every human being? It didn't exist before humans evolved, but it's here now, and every one of us is directly connected to it, simply by virtue of being human and having aspirations. It didn't create the universe, but it has created the meaning of the universe, which is what matters to us. Meaning, universe, spirit, God, creation and all other abstract concepts are themselves ideas that took form over countless generations, as people shared their aspirations to understand and express what may lie beyond the visible world. This emergent phenomenon has created the power of all our words and ideas, including ideals like truth, justice, and freedom, which took millennia to clarify in practice, and which no individual could ever have invented or even imagined without a rich cultural history that made it possible.
This infinitely complex phenomenon, which has emerged and continues to emerge from instant to instant, growing exponentially and shape-shifting, can accurately be said to exist in the modern universe. It's as real as the economy, as real as the government. It doesn't matter if you're Hindu or Christian or Jewish or atheist or agnostic, because I'm not proposing an alternative religious idea. I'm explaining an emergent phenomenon that actually exists in our scientific picture of reality. You don't have to call it God, but it's real. And when you search for a name for it, it may be the only thing that exists in the modern universe that is worthy of the name God.
We humans are entering an era of enormous danger. Chaos and injustice will inevitably accompany the changing global climate, and right now we humans don't have much to unify us in facing that. Our species needs every advantage we can possibly muster, and peace between science and God, peace between reason and spirit, would certainly be advantageous. For millions of thoughtful rational people to have no way to draw on their spiritual power is a tragedy.
The idea of an emerging God triggers as many taboos for atheists as for believers, but if you dare to try it out by moving in with all your furniture, the way scientists are willing to live inside a theory as if it's true — sometimes for many years in order to test it and discover its implications — I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it will transform your life. It has mine.
Nancy Ellen Abrams is an author, musician, lawyer and philosopher. Her latest book A God That Could Be Real, was released in March 2015. You can find her here and on Twitter: @cosmicsociety.
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