The “Cartesian Split” Is a Hallucination; Ergo, We Should Get Rid of It

The “Cartesian Split” Is a Hallucination; Ergo, We Should Get Rid of It
by Jean F. Drew

The Ancient Heritage of Western Science
The history of science goes back at least two and a half millennia, to the pre-Socratics of ancient Greece. Democritus and Leucippus were the fathers of atomic theory — at least they were the first thinkers ever to formulate one. Heraclitus was the first thinker to consider what in the modern age developed as the laws of thermodynamics. Likewise Plato’s Chora, in the myth of the Demiurge (see Timaeus), may have been the very first anticipation of what later would be referred to as the quantum world. Plato’s great student Aristotle was the first thinker to put science, or “natural philosophy” as it was then called — and ever after was called, until the 17th century, when philosophical positivism became influential — on an empirical, experimental basis.

Thus science was born in the ancient world of the classical Greeks. What motivated the great thinkers of this yet-unsurpassed era of human intellectual achievement was the irrepressible, inexhaustible eros, or desire, to understand the Universe, and thereby to understand man’s place in it. In this process the Greeks confronted a two-fold problem which Plato spent a lifetime elaborating. On the one hand, the original “pull” that drew these thinkers into their quest for knowledge of the Universe — or Cosmos as the Greeks termed it — was ontological. On the other hand, in order for the quest to become intelligible to the thinking subject and thus communicable to others, the engagement of epistemological issues was totally unavoidable.

By ontology we mean “the science of being”: that is, the science of what “is” or what exists, how it came to be, and by what rules or laws it is organized. By epistemology we mean the “science of knowledge”: that is, what can the human mind know, how does it know it — and by what means can such knowledge be verified.

To the Greek mind, the Cosmos was a single, unified, living Whole that is ever so much more than the mere sum of its parts. Rather, all of its parts were thought to be ordered and ultimately harmonically, dynamically unified into a single universal body according to a single universal blueprint. Likewise the sum total of true knowledge, or episteme was thought to be an undivided whole.

Fast-Forward to the Sixteenth Century….
According to Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, “The most fundamental aspect of the Western intellectual tradition is the assumption that there is a fundamental division between the material and the immaterial world or between the realm of matter and the realm of pure mind or spirit. The metaphysical framework based on this assumption is known as ontological dualism. As the word dual implies, the framework is predicated on an ontology, or a conception of the nature of God or being, that assumes reality has two distinct and separable dimensions. The concept of Being as continuous, immutable, and having a prior or separate existence from the world of change dates from the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides. The same qualities were associated with the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and they were considerably amplified by the role played in theology by Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy….

“Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton were all inheritors of a cultural tradition in which ontological dualism was a primary article of faith. Hence the idealization of the mathematical ideal as a source of communication with God, which dates from Pythagoras, provided a metaphysical foundation for the emerging natural sciences…. [T]he creators of classical physics believed that doing physics was a form of communion with the geometrical and mathematical forms resident in the perfect mind of God.”¹

In the 16th century the great French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Rene Descartes still recognized an ontological dualism that distinguished between body and mind, matter and spirit. And as Wolfgang Smith points out, Descartes, like Galileo and Newton, “is sometimes willing to resolve philosophical difficulties by recourse to Deity.”²

Descartes was a passionate champion of the idea of universal mechanics. He strove to lay down the theoretical foundations for “a rigorous mechanical science, based upon mathematical principles which would be able to explain the workings of Nature, from the movements of planets to the fine motions associated with animal bodies.”³

Descartes’ world is a mechanical world, “…made up entirely of ‘res extensa’ (the later Newtonian ‘matter’), moving in space according to mechanical laws. All the rest is to be relegated to ‘res cogitans’ or thinking substance, which exists in its own right as a kind of spiritual entity.”⁴

On this point Wolfgang Smith observes, “It is noteworthy that Descartes came to this res cogitans at the outset of his meditations through the famous ‘cogito ergo sum.’ It appeared to him as the one and only immediate certainty, whereas the existence of a mechanical universe, external to the res cogitans, was to be arrived at later through a logical argument, in which the idea of God and His veracity plays the leading role.”⁵

As Wolfhart Pannenberg writes, Descartes maintained that the idea of God “is the prior condition in the human mind for the possibility of every other idea, even that of the ego itself.”⁶

Thus Smith exclaims, “It is indeed a remarkable irony that the basic premise of modern materialism should initially have been founded upon theology!”⁷

Descartes’ model of the universe as essentially mechanistic — constituted only by “matter in its motions” moving according to the physical laws — was taken up by Newton and, in due course, became the preeminent idea in all of modern science up to recent times.

By the eighteenth century, the idea of any metaphysical basis for “natural philosophy” had increasingly fallen into disrepute. The term itself disappeared from use, replaced by the word “science.” Mechanics was increasingly regarded as “an autonomous science,” leaving no role for God. The great French mathematician Pierre-Sinon Laplace was enormously influential in this transition. As Nadeau and Kafatos observe:

“Laplace is recognized for eliminating not only the theological component of classical physics but the ‘entire metaphysical component’ as well. The epistemology of science requires, he said, that we proceed by inductive generalizations from observed facts to hypotheses that are ‘tested by observed conformity of the phenomena.’ What was unique about Laplace’s view of hypotheses was his insistence that we cannot attribute reality to them. Although concepts like force, mass, motion, cause, and laws are obviously present in classical physics, they exist in Laplace’s view only as quantities. Physics is concerned, he argued, with quantities that we associate as a matter of convenience with concepts, and the truth about nature are only the quantities.”⁸

Thus the science of Nature is reduced to a quantitative mathematical description. This positivist vision of physical reality denies Nature any meaning other than the mathematical formalism of physical theory employed in its description.

The False “Cartesian Split”
Here we see the emergence of the full-blown body-mind, matter-spirit “Cartesian split,” as we have called it. The great success of the mathematically-describable “matter” side of the epistemological divide evidenced by a long series of brilliant scientific achievements utterly displaced the “spirit” side and eventually relegated it to virtual oblivion. Science was understood to be about the elucidation of quantities; questions of meaning were no longer relevant.

Thus the current orthodoxy of science reduces to four basis premises: “(1) The physical world is made up of inert and changeless matter, and this matter changes only in terms of location in space; (2) the behavior of matter mirrors physical theory and is inherently mathematical; (3) matter as the unchanging unit of physical reality can be exhaustively understood by mechanics, or by the applied mathematics of motion; and (4) the mind of the observer is separate from the observed system of matter, and the ontological bridge between the two is physical law and theory.”⁹

On this formalism, even “the mind of the observer” is reducible to the operations of physical-chemical laws: The modern-day scientific materialist insists that mind is only the epiphenomenon of the physical-chemical activity of the brain. This conclusion is seemingly inevitable, given the utter collapse of the “mind” or “spirit” side of the Cartesian divide, which historically has always connected man to a metaphysical, immaterial reality beyond the physical world. And yet notwithstanding (4) above, this scientific formalism evinces a paradox, a seeming self-contradiction: The formalism requires the observer to be not outside the material system he observes; for the observer himself is completely reducible to its rules. He is just another “cog” in the universal, physical machine. So how can the observer be “separate from the observed system of matter?”

I am not aware that this question has been much engaged in recent times. Suffice it to say that this formalism gives short shrift indeed to the problems of mind, consciousness, intelligence, free will, and even human existence per se. And these are the necessary qualities of “the observer,” in order for there to be an observer.

The grip this formalism has on the biological sciences seems particularly unfortunate. For example, consider a case from embryology:

“Geneticists appreciate that cell differentiation utterly depends on cells knowing how to differentiate early on and then somehow remembering that they are different and passing on this vital piece of information to subsequent generations of cells. At the moment, scientists shrug their shoulders as to how this may be accomplished, particularly at such a rapid pace…. As for the orchestration of cell processes, biochemists never actually ask the question.”¹⁰

Notwithstanding, as the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins freely admits, “Exactly how [cell division] eventually leads to the development of a baby is a story which will take decades, perhaps centuries, for embryologists to work out. But it is a fact that it does.”¹¹

It seems obvious that cells “knowing” and “remembering” are not processes that can be conveniently reduced to the comparatively simple operations of physics and chemistry. Nevertheless, this is precisely what Dawkins seems determined to do — which is why the needful explanations will take “decades, perhaps centuries” to work out. The possibility that the explanation cannot be given in terms of the force-field driven reactions of physics and chemistry alone is one that Dawkins seemingly refuses to entertain. But if this observation is valid, then maybe it wouldn’t just be decades or centuries, but maybe never, before an elucidation can be given on this basis. It seems a scientific materialist like Dawkins seemingly, simply refuses to entertain this possibility.

Reconciling Biology to the Insights of Quantum Theory
One gets the very strong impression that, today, scientific materialists working in the field of biology, and the Neodarwinists in particular, are extraordinarily resistant to the idea that quantum theory has anything at all to do with their discipline.

And yet everything that we observe in our 4-dimensional (S₁ + S₂ + S₃ + T₁) reality rests upon, depends on, what is going on in the “microworld” of quantum activity.

Quantum theory — and also relativity theory for that matter — places the observer squarely into the game of reality, in such a way that one is tempted to say that it is the observer himself who “constructs” the reality he observes.

Moreover, the microworld of quantum theory speaks the language of universal fields, of quantum indeterminacy, of non-local action, of superposition (“quantum entanglement”), of superluminal velocities, of the primacy of the observer — that is, of all sorts of “bizarre” phenomena which are not at all observable in the macroworld of four-dimensional reality.

Analogically speaking, it’s as if many present-day biologists wish to look only at that part of the iceberg that surfaces above the waterline, considering that the submerged yet immense depths supporting the iceberg’s visible tip are irrelevant to their concerns. And then they think they can arrive at an explanation of life and evolution by remaining blind to the deep structure of reality on which everything in the Universe is ultimately based.

-- In the 1920s, the Russian scientist Alexander Gurwitsch postulated that “a field, rather than chemicals alone, was probably responsible for the structural formation of the body.”¹²

-- Italian physicist Renato Nobili amassed experimental proof that [field-borne] electromagnetic frequencies occur in animal tissues.¹³

-- Russian Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Gyorgyi postulated that protein cells act as semiconductors, preserving and passing along the energy of electrons as information.¹⁴

-- F.-A. Popp postulated a field of electromagnetic radiation as the “mechanism” that somehow guides the growth of the cellular body.¹⁵

And then there is British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who argues that biochemical processes associated with “gene activation and proteins no more explain the development of form than delivering building materials to a building site explains the construction of the house built there.”¹⁶

“…Sheldrake argues … Current genetic theory … doesn’t explain … how a developing [living] system can self-regulate, or grow normally in the course of development if a part of the system is added or removed, and doesn’t explain how an organism regenerates — replacing missing or damaged structures…. Sheldrake worked out his hypothesis of formative causation, which states that the forms of self-organizing living things — everything from molecules and organisms to societies and even entire galaxies — are shaped by morphic fields. These fields have a morphic resonance — a cumulative memory — of similar systems through cultures and time. So that species of animals and plants ‘remember’ not only how to look but also how to act. Rupert Sheldrake uses the term ‘morphic fields’ …to describe the self-organizing properties of biological systems, from molecules to bodies to societies. ‘Morphic resonance’ is, in his view, ‘the influence of like upon like through space and time.’ He believes these fields (and he thinks there are many of them) are different from electromagnetic fields because they reverberate across generations with an inherent memory of the correct shape and form. The more we learn, the easier it is for others to follow in our footsteps.”¹⁷

“One fact which led to the development of this theory is the remarkable ability organisms have to repair damage. If you cut an oak tree into little pieces, each little piece, properly treated, can grow into a new tree. So from a tiny fragment, you can get a whole. Machines do not do that; they do not have this power of remaining whole if you remove parts of them. Chop a computer up into small pieces and all you get is a broken computer. It does not regenerate into lots of little computers. But if you chop a flatworm into small pieces, each piece can grow into a new flatworm. Another analogy is a magnet. If you chop a magnet into small pieces, you do have lots of small magnets, each with a complete magnetic field. This is a wholistic property that fields have that mechanical systems do not have unless they are associated with fields. Still another example is the hologram, any part of which contains the whole. A hologram is based on interference patterns within the electromagnetic field. Fields thus have a wholistic property which was very attractive to the biologists who developed this concept of morphogenetic fields.”¹⁸

Hello, can we say “field-mediated collective consciousness,” anyone? At least as a scientific hypothesis worth pursuing?

The point is, given its presuppositions, Darwinist evolutionary theory has absolutely no use for such a hypothesis: The doctrine calls for random mutation plus natural selection — premised on the purely physico-chemical “behavior” of matter — which supposedly explains everything about the evolution of the biota. Forget about fields, forget about information: It’s a “billiard ball,” mechanistic, purely material universe governed by chance unfolding under the exclusive influence of the physical laws. And that’s that. End of story.

Which is deliberately to turn one’s back to what Niels Bohr recognized as “the very nature of quantum theory,” which

“… forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealizations of observation and definition respectively. Just as … relativity theory has taught us that the convenience of distinguishing sharply between space and time rests solely on the smallness of the velocities ordinarily met with compared to the speed of light, we learn from the quantum theory that the appropriateness of our visual space-time descriptions depends entirely on the small value of the quantum of action compared to the actions involved in ordinary sense perception. Indeed, in the description of atomic phenomena, the quantum postulate presents us with the task of developing a ‘complementary’ theory the consistency of which can be judged only by weighing the possibilities of definition and observation.”¹⁹

Classical physics — which arguably deals only with “the tip of the iceberg” of reality — is a workable approximation of the doings of Nature that seems precise only because the largeness of the speed of light and the smallness of the quantum of action give rise to negligible effects. In other words, classical physics and chemistry work just fine at the level of the macroworld.

But the effects produced in the microworld (i.e., the quantum world) and the world described by relativity theory are there nonetheless. It’s just that the quantum of action is so small as compared with macroscopic values that obtaining reliable results respecting the behavior of macro-objects is not affected by it. And the speed of light is so great that we need not take it into consideration in most of the “macroworld” problems that we wish to solve.

Bohr, father of the Copenhagen Intrepretation of quantum mechanics — a world-class epistemologist as well as world-class scientist — concluded that “quantum mechanics [and not classical mechanics, which Bohr regarded as a “subset” or special case of quantum mechanics] … is the complete description, and the measuring instruments in quantum mechanical experiments obey this description. Although we can safely ignore quantum mechanical effects in dealing with macro-level phenomena in most cases because those effects are small enough for practical purposes, we cannot ignore the implications of quantum mechanics on the macro level for the obvious reason that they are there. Bohr argued that since the quantum of action is always present [and always subject to Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle and likewise Cantor’s incompleteness principle] on the macro level, this requires ‘a final renunciation of the classical ideal of causality and a radical revision of our attitude toward the problem of physical reality.’”²⁰

The problems of Life, its origin, and laws; and of consciousness, informative communication, intelligence, so far have been devilishly resistant to explanation by the “rules” of the macroscopic world — that is, by the physical and chemical laws alone. Studying the behavior of a classical gas cannot give us much insight into the “mysteries” of biological self-organization, or explain the ability of living systems to be self-mobilizing, “choosing” systems. For gases and lifeforms are entirely different “orders of being.”

The “Cartesian Split” Is a Hallucination; Ergo, We Should Get Rid of It
It seems that if ever there is to be an explanation of “the tricky machinery of Life,” it will not be found in classical physics. Quantum physics is what opens up the vast new vistas needed to engage the problem of the emergence of Life, and to explain its behavior.

That, in the opinion of the present writer, is sufficient reason to recognize the so-called Cartesian Split — which attempts to divide natural science from the “spiritual sciences” — as a total illusion that we’d best be rid of, for two main reasons that presently come to mind.

(1) Quantum theory (and also relativity theory) places preeminent emphasis on the role of the “observer.” This observer is an intelligent agent. That being the case, he is firmly planted on the Geisteswissenschaften side — that is, on the “spiritual side” — and not the Naturwissenschaften side — that is the “natural sciences side” —of the Cartesian divide. It seems science needs a better method to re-integrate the observer into its formulations than it now has. It is a profound fallacy to regard the observer as the mere product of physico-chemical actions. The “problem of the observer” simply cannot be comprehensively, logically understood in such terms.

(2) Each and every one of the eminent, world-class scientists cited in this article was also a world-class philosopher, consciously or unconsciously. Not a single one of them failed to touch on the most fundamental problems of ontology and epistemology. And the insights of each of these great thinkers shaped the evolutionary course of human knowledge — of the total episteme or, in the German, the Wissenschaft — in the most profound ways.

At the end of the day, it seems profitless to split the “knower” from “the known.” For the knower — the observer — is on the one hand a part and participant of the system that he observes; and on the other, his observation constitutes — or has profound implications for the further development of — the system he observes.

Yet effecting such a division is exactly the program of the “Cartesian Split.” Thus the present writer considers the split to be false, and ultimately tending to divide a man against himself — as well as dividing man from Nature itself, of which man is plainly, ineluctibly “part and participant.”

¹Nadeau, Robert and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, p. 83f.
²Smith, Wolfgang, Cosmos and Transcendence, p. 29.
³Smith, op. cit., p. 28.
⁴Smith, op. cit., p. 29.
⁵Smith, ibid., p. 29.
⁶Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Toward a Theology of Nature, p. 42. ⁷Smith, op. cit., p. 29.
⁸Nadeau/Kafatos, op. cit., p. 85.
⁹Nadeau/Kafatos, op. cit., p. 84.
¹⁰McTaggert, Lynne, The Field, p. 46.
¹¹McTaggert, Lynne, op. cit., p. 46.
¹²McTaggert, Lynne, op. cit., p. 47.
¹³McTaggert, Lynne, op. cit., p. 49.
¹⁴McTaggert, Lynne, ibid., p. 49.
¹⁵McTaggert, Lynne, op. cit., p. 47.
¹⁶McTaggert, Lynne, op. cit., p. 46f.
¹⁷McTaggert, Lynne, ibid., p. 46f.
¹⁸Sheldrake, Rupert, http://www.sheldrake.org/papers/Morphic/morphic1_paper.html
¹⁹Nadeau/Kafatos, op. cit., p. 91.
²⁰Nadeau/Kafatos, ibid., p. 91.

Designers are usually female, talkative, vegetarian and live in lofts. Developers are always male, eat only fast food, live at work and don't speak at all except to say, You're wrong about that.

LOLOL monkey! This is like the observation, "I'm from Venus, you're from Mars." We do see this sort of thing here at FR from time to time.... But it takes all kinds to make a Universe! :^)

You wrote: "Conscious thought, however, seems different [from brain processing which, as you observe, consists of deconstruction of sensory inputs and reconstruction as perception]. People love to deconstruct (splitting problems into smaller pieces, division of labor), but we seem to be very bad at the constructive part."

Oh, I do agree with you there, monkey! We see this especially in science today, where specialities propagate a seemingly endless line of subspecialities; and so the joke goes: "We know more and more about less and less. At the present rate, sooner or later we will know absolutely everything about nothing at all." The loss of the sense of relatedness between the main scientific branches, together with their specialities does not appear to advance the interests of science. It's getting to be a case of "the right hand not knowing what the left is doing." IMO.

You observed: "despite all the analysis we do of human affairs, we can't answer a simple question like what will be the state of the world in 100 years? What are we moving towards? ... What do you think about that?"

The fact is, not only can we not predict what the state of the world will be in 100 years, but it seems to me we cannot even predict what its state will be tomorrow, or even, say, one minute from now. The fact is human existence is contingent, depending on an astronomical number of variables that are entirely outside of our own control. That is why I think it's so important to get the "big picture" view if at all possible. It provides the context in which individual contingent events unfold, and thus helps us to understand what is going on in the world and in our lives. FWIW

Thanks so much for writing, monkey!

He’s not that far afield of the quantum world. Most of us probably think of particles as “real” or “substantive” when of a truth, the surest statements we can make are concerning the fields themselves – and that illusive “carrier” mechanism remains yet undetected – the Higgs boson/field which would account for ordinary matter. The smallest portion of matter in the universe is “ordinary” – the largest, dark energy, is even more illusive – as is dark matter.

IOW, Whitehead would be underscoring the importance of the fields over the particles. But this is where we start parting company, because Whitehead puts the burden on the process itself whereas I put the burden on the geometry. It's as if he would rather subordinate the geometry (space/time) to the process.

Whitehead’s “prehensions” and “actual occasions” are part of his construing “reality” as a exercise of free-will (on steroids in my view). It has been suggested on prior threads that man is a “co-creator” – but Whitehead seems to take this further, as if God could not exist without man’s free will. On that point I sharply disagree.

Great analysis, Alamo-Girl! As to Whitehead’s suggestion that God could not exist without man’s free will, I also disagree sharply. To me, this is an inversion of the true state of affairs. I think regarding this point Whitehead's conception of a “dualist God” may have forced him into an untenable position.

As to why Whitehead should propose a “dualist God,” I suspect this has everything to do with his insight that Nature and the Universe itself emerge from the tension between that which changes, and that which is unchangeable. Whitehead is, after all, regarded as a “philosopher of flux and permanence,” and in this I think he is following Heraclitus. Heraclitus observed that all things change, but that in order for there to be change, something must remain constant, unchanging. Or to put it another way, in order for a living system to remain what it is, it must change. The most concrete example of this phenomenon is the human body’s complete recycling of all its cells every seven years; for the body to persist as what it is, it must do this.

Thus the way I'm understanding Whitehead’s “dualist God”: The unchanging principle is “the primordial nature of God” – the Realm of Eternal Objects…. The change principle is embodied (sort of like a work in progress, or process) in the Universe as God’s “Consequent Nature.” Whitehead says the former is “unconscious”; the latter is “fully conscious” – God suffering and rejoicing with humankind.

Now this Realm of Eternal Objects actually strikes me as pointing to an underlying universal geometry. For such objects are “eternal,” universal, unchanging. What changes are events, occurrences: but such events, though seemingly random, are actually not really random at all; for ultimately they are contingent on and constrained by the contents of the Realm of Eternal Objects. Though this realm is the source of all fecundity and novelty in the Universe, it is not “random” (which is why it looks geometrical to me). Events and occurrences themselves are only apparently random.

There are infinite possibilities or potentialities in the Universe; but not all are realizable in the Universe. For their actual outcomes are constrained by “the underlying geometry” of the eternal objects. Plus they are also further “conditioned” by all other events past and present. The sum total -- the "Consequent God" or "all that there is" -- has effectively been subjected to constraint by the Eternal Objects by virtue of the fact that the Eternal Objects have conditioned each of its parts. At any given “point” in the evolution of the world, God’s Consequent Nature “records” the progress attained, which signifies the movement of God from the state of unconsciousness (i.e., the eternal objects), to full consciousness of the present state of the Universe. Reality is “real” because it is a process of which God is (or has become) conscious.

Well, my interpretation anyway, FWIW. It's a pretty reduced concept of God to be sure. For one thing, it seems to identify God with the Universe (the Eastern view). But if one will not countenance the possibility of a creator God, then it seems there's no place else to "put God" but in the world. I wonder about how there can be "eternal objects" that are eternally valid when God himself is thought to be not omnipotent. Anyhoot, this is pretty wild stuff and fun to wrestle with....

I loved your observation: The trend I am gathering from various sources is that some will entertain the concept of a whole willfulness which is greater than the sum of the wills of its parts. In that view, the will, mind, consciousness, autonomy, object or form of the man actually exists as a "thing" although it transcends to all of the component wills of his body. Thus, there is no Cartesian Split as the whole exists in the parts, and is also greater than the sum.

I wanted to do a comparison of Whitehead's and Pannenberg's respective theologies. But I realized that the sources I want to use for this are at home. :^(

Soooooooooo...hopefully I'll have a chance to work on this tonight! Thank you ever so much, Alamo-Girl, for your excellent post/essay!

Who knows, perhaps Whitehead would have endorsed that concept [i.e., the "methodologically naturalist" conjecture]....

Perhaps he would, Alamo-Girl; but the question why he would choose to account for the Universe that way would still (apparently) be insoluable for us today.

Got home from work, instantly got distracted; and then when I had a chance, went digging for the source I particularly needed to give an account of Pannenberg's trinitarian theology of nature. [I was looking for something Voegelin wrote about the three Persons of the One God, after Aquinas. But I haven't found it yet. :^( ]

But then I realized: I don't need that particular cite. Pannenberg's theology directly follows the theology of -- surprise! surprise! -- Sir Isaac Newton, founder of modern mechanics, the very mind that conceived and specified the great physical laws of motion.

So I have had to "rethink" the piece. :^)

Still working on it, hope to be back on that topic soon....

As to whether Whitehead was an adherent of the "steady state" cosmological model -- I don't know how we could really find out. He's been dead now for some 58 years so we can't exactly ask him. And people can read a whole lot into him that maybe he didn't exactly intend.

What I am especially grateful to him for is that he evidently believed that no exhaustive description of the Universe could be made without the helps of philosophy and theology. Certainly Whitehead's was in no way a "doctrinal" theology. It seems to me Whitehead had a sort of primitive intuition of the nature of the "Unknown God" referenced in the Acts of the Apostles. This god it seems was the very god to which Plato referred as the "Beyond," the Epikeina. I think Whitehead was trying to "update the ancients" in the way he decided to present his theology.... But only the Greek ones; not Israel's.

Ruminations before calling it a day. Thank you as always, my dear sister in Christ, for your ever excellent correspondence and companionship.

I look forward to your comparison of Whitehead and Pannenberg.

Dear Alamo-Girl, finally.... I have a bias I should disclose: Pannenberg's theology "makes more sense" to me than Whitehead's. As Pannenberg points out [in Toward a Theology of Nature, 1993], he takes his cues from Sir Isaac Newton’s theology. The great elucidator of the mechanical laws of the Universe also had definite ideas about such abstract -- i.e., non-material -- concepts as space (which Newton regarded as absolute and empty); this seems to have been an early anticipation of modern field theory.

Newton was a deeply committed Christian, though it has appeared to many that he was not a strictly doctrinaire or completely orthodox one. (He thought that the mechanical laws would tend to increase disorder in the world, so that it would be necessary for God to "step in and set things right" from time to time....)

I have mixed feelings about undertaking this essay. On the one hand, it deals with a scientific cosmology, which is not a problem. On the other, it deals with God – we are discussing theology after all, and its implications, if any, for other branches of human knowledge. The great difficulty is to not reduce God to humanly-accessible categories in the process....

The divine nature transcends any description of it that the human mind can conceive. St. Anselm of Canterbury makes this crystal clear in Proslogion XV: “O Lord, you are not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but you are also greater than what can be conceived.” We “reduce” God to human conceptual frameworks only at the risk of falsifying divine Reality, and everything in the Universe that depends, or is contingent on it. Which is “All that there is.”

Christianity recognizes that God does not belong to physical reality, except for the one single occasion in human history that He chose to become physically incarnate, in a fully human, physical man, Jesus; and then only for a time (about 32 years). God utterly transcends the Universe, and yet paradoxically He is also eternally “immanent in it.”

The doctrine of the immanence of God is pronounced in Eastern metaphysics: God is not “outside” the Universe, but is effectively co-extensive with, or even embedded in, an eternal, uncreated Universe. [To a Christian thinker, this makes God an “accident” of the Universe – something that Christianity does not and cannot accept.] On the Eastern mystical account, God is preeminently recognizable as the “world soul.”

I understand there are many accomplished scientists working today who are drawn to this notion. But Newton rejected it; for him, God was not some sort of esoteric “world soul.” For Newton, God is “God with His creatures.” That is, the sovereign Lord of creation which He Himself produced ex nihilo by His spoken Word “in the beginning,” thereafter eternally “keeping company” with what He has made.

If such statements strike the reader as inexplicable, then maybe we could try a “thought experiment.” Consider a question: Is Michelangelo “inside” (immanent) or “outside” (transcendent) his sublime sculpture, David? We concede that Michelangelo is the artist who created this work, according to intelligence and will (and probably also the copious shedding of blood, sweat, and tears). We’d also probably agree that Michelangelo personally is not “in” the marble out of which the David was “reified,” according to his astonishing creative genius and skill. But he is “in” the design, the concept, without which the marble would still be just a rough block of unworked stone in the back of his workshop. Michelangelo’s “presence” in the completed creation -- the glorious form of David, poised and balanced in his “wind-up” to sling the stone that would hit Goliath in between the eyes and so strike him dead – is eternally recorded. His mind, his vision, his hands fashioned such beauty in humble stone.

The “humble stone” has a complete physical description, once we know its initial and boundary conditions, according to the physico-chemical laws. But where do we find the physical description of the operations of mind, vision, or the work of hands? What initial or boundary conditions apply to such phenomena?

The above thought experiment generally presents the case of transcendence. But to acknowledge divine transcendence would not give the complete description of what Newton apparently had in mind respecting God’s role in the Universe. Newton’s God – the Trinitarian God of Christianity – is an immanent God also. Top extend our David analogy, this would mean that God would be viewed as constantly active in the microscopic activity of the particles comprising the stone, and/or the constant preservation of the idea embodied in the stone.

Newton held that space – “absolute, empty” – is the “form” of the omnipresence of God with His creatures, which he called the sensorium Dei. By sensorium he did not mean a physical organ of sense perception: God, being eternal, omnipresent, and omniscient, doesn’t need a medium for this. The sensorium in human perception, besides being the “route” through which sense data from the outside world is conveyed to our brains, is also the place where we create the “pictures” of the things we observe.

“Sir Isaac Newton considers the Brain and Organs of Sensation, as the Means by which those Pictures are formed, but not as the Means by which the Mind sees or perceives those pictures, when they are so formed.” [G. W. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (1875-90)]

As Pannenberg points out, Newton means the latter sense of the word sensorium: “God through space creates [not the pictures] but the things themselves. “God constitutes space and time though his eternity and omnipresence: ‘existendo semper et ubique, durationem et spatium constituit’ [Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3rd edition, (1726)].”

To me, here’s what the Trinitarian theological picture looks like: The God who constitutes space and time through his eternity and omnipresence is God the Father, Creator “with his creatures.” To me, the sensorium may represent (in the language of physics) the primary universal vacuum field. God “spoke” the creation into being by His Word – the Logos, or God the Son. The Word God spoke in the Beginning was of Light: “Let there be Light.” So in my picture (adverting yet again to the language of physics), the Singularity – God’s Word – is rather like a single photon (the incipient primary vacuum?) densely “informed” by the geometry (logos) of God’s creative Will and Mind. Thus were space and time created. This also accounts for why our universe is said to be “finite, yet unbounded”: finite because it has a beginning, and unbounded because the vacuum itself reaches to every point of space and time in our inflationary universe. And it is the source field for the propagation of all the other fields in natural reality, which develop in due course according to the “information” loaded into the singularity of the beginning.

Where Whitehead has a multiplicity of “eternal objects,” the Trinitarian view suggests there is only one “eternal object” in the world (immanence): the Logos/Word of the Beginning, which specifies, like a kind of cosmic blueprint, the order of the Universe and of all its "emergent" potentialities. Whitehead puts God “inside” the Universe; but for Newton/Pannenberg, God the Father is “outside,” transcendent; divine immanence comes by way of the Son (Logos) in the natural or physical Universe; and the Holy Spirit in the supernatural realm of mind and consciousness.

Sometimes Christians are accused of being “polytheistic” on the supposition that we believe there are “three gods.” This is a complete misunderstanding of the Christian concept of One God in three persons. For the Son and the Holy Spirit are consubstantial with the Father; none of the persons is the creation of any other. The Son is begotten of the Father, not made; and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son together. It’s just that one Person – the Father, the “Unknown God” of Acts, Plato’s “Beyond,” the Israelite tetragrammatical god (i.e., YHWH, the “I am That Am”) absolutely transcends the world; the Holy Spirit is God in His immanent “aspect” (if we can say God has “aspects,” which is doubtful; but we have to try to articulate these things in the language/modes of thought we have). The Son is the Way and the Life, Mediator between God and Man, of Whom it is said “No man comes to the Father but by Me.” He transcends creation; but is immanent in human souls. And also immanent in the timeless, ultimate, primary geometry of the Logos that is the foundation of the structure of the Universe and everything in it.

The single greatest event in human history was the incarnation of the Son of God in the flesh of a mortal man, Jesus Christ. The Word, already in the natural creation from the very beginning, enters into the realm of actual human history and eschatology – for our salvation, itself the purpose of a loving, willing God.

This is probably a really good time and place to stop. I am probably going to get my head handed to me here, by atheists and theists alike! Please folks, do remember this is only a speculative, meditative cosmology that just happens to take its inspiration from Genesis and the Gospel of John….

Anyhoot, this speculative cosmology has been on my mind for quite some time by now. I just had to “get it off my chest.” :^) Thank you so very much, Alamo-Girl, for your thoughts and your encouragements.

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