Are Atheists and Theists talking past each other?(Part 2)

God not as distant creator but as immanent ground of Being

This is a follow up to last week’s post, so if you have not read that one yet I recommend reading it first. (https://recontextualize.substack.com/p/are-atheists-and-theists-talking) That being said, I do think much of this post could stand on its own as an interpretation of the nature of God.

I will start by laying my cards on the table: the conception of God I gestured towards in last week’s piece and will elaborate on here is a mystical conception of God, not the God of your average religious folk. An exoteric theology that speaks to a larger group of people must find a place for God in a world in which linear time and fixed objects are fundamentally real because this is the world that most people inhabit; thus we get the image of God as a transcendent entity that created the world long ago and from time to time interacts with that world. An esoteric or mystical theology however does not need to fit God into this metaphysical framework, as it does not have to make the notion of God accessible to the average person’s worldview. In the last post, I suggested that the traditional notion that God is incomparable can be taken literally to mean that He cannot be known by our usual intellectual faculty that produces knowledge of objects through contrasting them with other objects. If this is true, that also means that God must be eternal, not in the sense that he persists over a long period of time, but in the sense that he is eternally present. Time requires contrast. For me to move from point A to point B in time, there needs to either be an object separate from me in space that I am moving towards or a notion of an event separate from me in time that I am moving towards. If this contrast between me and an object or a desired future that I am moving towards collapses, there is no more friction between poles to generate a sense of time and change. This mystical non-contrastive conception of God I am suggesting is not a God that began the universe millions of years ago, but rather the eternal present from which the dimension of time itself arises.

  I would also claim this mystical conception of God is not limited to a few contemplatives or to the esoteric practice of Eastern traditions, but is the God of many mystics and theologians in the Abrahamic traditions. (For example, the entire Sufi and Kabbalah tradition have a similar conception of God that I am articulating here). In this short post, I will gesture towards the centrality of this notion of God to religion by providing a reading of Genesis from this perspective. In the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve eat from the tree of good and evil and commit the "original sin" thus exiling themselves from paradise. I read this not as something that happened in the distant past, but as something that happens every moment. "Good and evil" is the knowledge of separation, or the act of separating our experience into things we like (good) and things we don't like (evil) and moving towards the things we like and away from what we don't like. If we look closely, we find this is the structure of most of our experiences; there is a sense of separation between ourselves and our environment that brings with it the sense that we need to change or alter that environment in some way by either adding something “good” to it or pushing something “evil” out of it. This is why this eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is referred to as a fall from grace, by dividing the world up into good and evil we fall from a paradisal state of unity and wholeness into a constant sense of lack and separation. 

In his memoir Confessions, St. Augustine, considered one of the fathers of the Catholic Church, describes a mystical vision of God that seems to corroborate this reading. St. Augustine describing his own mystical vision of God writes,

“And thus by degrees, I was led upward from bodies to the soul which perceives them by means of the bodily senses, and from there on to the soul’s inward faculty…--and thence on up to the reasoning power… Then, without any doubt, it cried out that the unchangeable was better than the changeable. From this it follows that the mind somehow knew the unchangeable, for, unless it had known it in some fashion, it could have had no sure ground for preferring it to the changeable. And thus with the flash of a trembling glance, it arrived at that which is.”

St. Augustine describes a journey that progresses through the different faculties of human perception until he ultimately transcends human perception and arrives at God or “that which is.” We could understand Augustine’s journey as a journey from separation to unity. The first level of the body is the most prominent level of separation, a level of perception where any physical body is understood to be separate from every other physical body. The next two levels are what he calls the “soul,” (I think by this he simply means the sense of a “me” that has these bodily perceptions) and the intellectual faculty produce a bit more unification as they generate the ability to reflect on and group together different physical particulars into unified concepts. For example, many different peoples’ physical bodies can all fall under the singular category of “human being.” However, Augustine writes that even the world as perceived through the intellect is “changeable;” and that even the intellect perceives separation and therefore a world of time and change. To find that which is truly “unchangeable” Augustine has to progress beyond the usual human faculties and arrive at what he simply calls “that which is,” which is not in the realm of time and change. We could see Augustine’s mystical vision as an ascent from the realm of original sin back into the paradise of the Garden of Eden. Since this “is-ness” is the source from which time, change, and conceptual cognition arise, Augustine cannot define it with a conceptual category and simply refers to it as “that which is.” (A note: In the Confessions, Augustine does think this knowing is incomplete, because it does not include Jesus Christ. However, he never says that it does not show him the truth of God, but rather that he needs the support of Jesus Christ to move beyond a mere glimpse of God. This is because Jesus Christ illustrates the possibility of embodying this knowing of God within the human faculties.)  

I think we can find a similar account in other traditions as well; even traditions that describe themselves as non-theistic. The Buddha of the Pali Canon refused to comment on speculative metaphysical questions, one of which was whether or not there was a creator of the universe. However, he did articulate a process similar to what we see in Genesis by pointing out how the processual nature of mind and matter arises out of craving. The Buddha claimed that “the fall,” the entrance into what the Buddha referred to as the cycle of Samsara, starts with ignorance and craving. We are ignorant of the primordial unity, because of craving. The act of craving itself divides the world into discrete subjects and objects. For the Buddha, craving a particular object, our sense of being a separate self, and the existence of the particular objects we are craving are not independent entities, they all “co-dependently arise” in the act of craving. There is not a pre-existing “me” that perceives or craves pre-existing “objects,” according to the Buddha. Instead, the very process of craving, the sense of lack, simultaneously generates and continually mutually reinforces the sense of a “me” and the existence of an object or outside world that this “me” craves or wants to change. This process of mutual reinforcement then gains so much momentum that we become stuck in a continual feedback loop of craving that gives us a sense that there actually is a stable me and a stable world of objects. However, the Buddha would say that if we look closely we would realize this stability has to be constantly reinforced by the act of craving, or wanting to alter experience in some way. 

In the context of this interpretation, God, Buddha Nature, or whatever we want to call it, can only be known and verified by direct experience. The claim of these religious traditions is that if we can locate this movement of craving that simultaneously creates both self and world and trace it back to its source, we will find the stillness and the wholeness out of which this processual and dynamic quality of experience arises. This is how I understand the Christian psalm which says “Be still and know that I am God.” This is also why contemplative traditions advocate practices that have us sit in silence like prayer or meditation, stilling the body and the external environment aids in stilling the mind. At a philosophical level, this is also why I have no issues with the claim that the existence of God cannot be verified using intellectual arguments or the experimental method of modern science. And at the same time, this to me, does not negate the existence of God or Buddha Nature. Both the intellect and the natural sciences are particular tools meant to study particular domains of human experience, and what counts as evidence from their point of view only confirms the existence or nonexistence of the types of objects and entities that fall under the purview of their domain.

These disciplines look outside from the eyes of the subject to study the objects in the world and the laws that govern them. A mystical understanding of the divine does not invalidate the findings of this outward investigation in any way but rather just asks us to also turn our investigation in the other direction, i.e., inward, asking what it is that looks out of these eyes and sees a world of objects. As the Upanishads say of Brahman (the divine reality in this tradition) “I am not that which you see, but that by which you see, I am not that which you hear, but that by which you hear.” Of course, we may dismiss this project and say that there is nothing to discover, but a long history of contemplatives and mystics would encourage us to have the same spirit of discovery and curiosity we have when we look inward as when we look outward, and not assume what we will find in there before we investigate deeply and systematically for ourselves. 

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Please feel free to leave a comment if you have clarification questions, feedback, critiques, or anything to add. Philosophy is all about dialogue! I will do my best to respond to all questions and concerns.