Selections: Nth God Name Sequence

The confusion of Darwinism springs in part from the use of the argument by design as a Trojan horse for religious advocacy. Adherents of these tactics will find no sustenance here. However, the current Intelligent Design movement shows a more sophisticated version of this issue of design, if only as a cover for Bible Belt shenanigans. If natural selection taken as an answer to Paley is an impostor, a sense of design is no proof of the argument by design. In general, the context of the obsessive Western theism/atheism dialectic makes real evolutionary discourse almost impossible. The world has been held hostage to this closed debate long enough. Now the dialectical complement is arising in the promotion of atheism on a Darwinian foundation.

Atheist ideology: Richard Dawkins in his The God Delusion, along with Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell, have produced the symmetrical antithesis to the exploitation of the design argument in what comes close to claims for the legitimation of atheism in the assumptions of Darwinian natural selection. We can suggest that this is a mood, more than a philosophy, as the derailed freight-train of mechanized religion proceeds with dead momentum past all the implications of Enlightenment critique, threatening the attempted cultural renewal of modernity. But Darwinism is a poor candidate for meeting this trend. Religionists should take note of the inexorable dialectical reaction to stale theologisms in the ferocity of ‘New Age’ passages beyond the religions of antiquity, and the Axial Age. These ‘New Atheists’ are fighting the suffocation of stale theologisms.[i]

The end of faith Sam Harris in The End of Faith proposes a powerful challenge to the confusions of faith. There can be no doubt that the question of faith has frozen the thinking of religionists in a kind of limbo where simple feedback from historical fact has arrested the process of secularization. But history already records the challenge to faith in a figure such as Kant, who also recreated the domain of faith in the discourse of the postulates of reason in his moral theory. His insight is profound, if it is also true that his use of the term ‘faith’ puts new wine into old bottles. Our stance here is simple: we can arrive at no simple resolution to the questions of divinity, soul, and free will, yet are open to considerations of ‘operational as-if’s’ on these issues. If the question of divinity is altogether obscure, those of ‘soul’ and ‘free will’ require our double dialectical consideration, yes and no, this being ‘faith’ enough.[ii]

In fairness to Darwinian thinking, it must be said that it was crippled at the start by the social context of secularization and traditionalism, and the inability of human thought to find plausible understandings of complexity in fields rendered over dogmatically to the transcendental. A secular view of man and history was actually developing more cogently prior to Darwin, whose theory handed resurgent fundamentalists an obvious way to challenge the scientific worldview.

Modern thought, even if secular, tends to assume that, in the ambiguity of the term ‘design’, the non-random is evidence of a ‘designer’, in the concealed anthropomorphism of divinized projections of the ‘human will’. But there can be no such assumption of anything, for the term ‘will’ is another creature betwixt the one and the two. The sense of design is ancient, and one whose context, and primordial beauty, has been lost, because its impulse is that of wonder and its real form that of a question, now turned into a hidden assumption, that the nouns of divinity are already defined. In fact they swiftly became historical dogmas bound in dangerous social or political contexts, and mean desperately different things to different people using rival nouns, all assumed to share a common denominator. The question is, if there is evidence of natural or historical design, what does it mean? The Israelites were remarkable for seeing the evidence for Big History in their ‘little history’, a sense of design. We must move to recast their insights as ‘eonic data’, bound up in the ‘general sequence’ effect of ‘eonic evolution’.

The real issue is not so much divinity but ‘will’, the intangible issue of agency, both human—or other. This term leads to its own confusions and is perhaps even more problematical than ‘design’, but its consideration can be more illuminating. Having cited Kant, we may note that the cousin philosopher Schopenhauer was an ‘intellectually fulfilled atheist’, to use the phrase of Richard Dawkins, who saw what would amount to clear ‘design’ as will in historical and evolutionary terms. Schopenhauer’s views are idiosyncratic and crypto-metaphysical in their own way, with a view of ‘will’ we won’t use (nor any others), but his streamlined Kantianism gives an implicit idea of evolution that is non-theistic. Coming a generation after Kant, newly cognizant of the emerging thinking on evolution in such a figure as Lamarck, he seems to have sensed at once the arising dilemma, despite the problems with his unhistorical viewpoint.[iii]

We should note that the term ‘will’ is acutely ambiguous. Man is confronted with the inability to observe his own ‘self’, yet the idea of will is part of his nature. To formulate a theory of natural selection for this latent aspect of man requires explaining how something latent that does not normally interact with the environment can arise at all. But the point here is simply that we can proceed, not on the basis of what we think we know, but on the basis of what we do not. May we suspect that theories of evolution default on the mysteries of the noumenal and attempt the unknowable as phenomenal illusion? We must, yet cannot, extrapolate, or even define, an element of ‘will’. It is possibly the case that complete theories of evolution are not possible for the human mind, the successes of physics being a special case. The problem is that man is a tadpole on a shore, still evolving as a passive organism to a creature worthy of the title homo sapiens sapiens. Thus, it would seem, there is as yet no such species as ‘man’.

Nth-god name sequence The terms ‘God, soul, mind, life, will, design, providence, consciousness, sacred, spiritual, transcendence’ prowl like semantic wild beasts near any discussion of history. The term ‘secular’ might soon join them. If you detect historical directionality the bingo button of ‘providence’ is pushed, and discourse effectively terminated. But terms of divinity especially create a great confusion in the study of history and evolution, because they are never defined, and are close matches by verbal association for a spectrum of unconscious archetypes and doctrines enjoined as a duty to believe, mixed with rituals of prayer whose assumptions are legitimated by histories known to be bogus. The term ‘god’ is a dangerous instrument, the more so as it is given the license of the ‘sacred’. Its exploitation is rife. If we specify a noun of divinity, we must demand the same constructivist demonstration as that asked of any other historical generalization. This stance is itself traditional, pointing to the quest for ‘real god’ beyond ‘god talk’, or the search for the ninety-ninth name of ‘god’.

The abuse of the terms of divinity by monotheists is so slovenly that their use becomes impossible, full stop, and we must simply terminate the use of a term like ‘god’ for our discussion. Human culture is essentially deprived of the honest use of such terms as ‘god’. We should be wary of any negation of such an incoherent discourse as ‘atheism’. Spiritual empires claim exclusive rights over the usage of such terms, and manipulate credulity for purposes of social domination.

We cannot arbitrarily exclude arguments by design, but we can demand new terminology, and precise definitions. We will make this our one inviolable rule. Thus, it is almost impossible to use the term ‘god’ without prejudice in relation to differing religions and our study will completely disallow it in any (theoretical) context. This is not an atheistic stance since the discussion is mostly meaningless, and it does allow fresh terms and definitions. Our position here is neither theistic, atheistic, or agnostic. These terms buttonhole all discussion.

To see your linguistic hypnosis, try an exercise. Create some new term, and this for strictly evidentiary arguments. We can invent new historical terms of reference for the sequence of ‘god’ names, the nth-god name sequence, as a token of the fact that most god-language never specifies which part of this historical sequence is being referred to. And then we can demand formal reference to divinity declare an explicit neologism in this sequence, and define its terms clearly.

The local evolution of the nth-god name sequence in ancient

Israel

is very remarkable, but highly difficult to reconstruct, as it proceeded from the Ugaritic Baal, and the early Yahwistic movement toward the blending with Zoroastrian ideas, with a vestigial goddess in the mix. The Old Testament does not properly recount that history, as it backdates a later stage onto an earlier. In any case, it is not true that the modern term ‘god’ refers to, or shows a relation of identical semantics with this early, almost unknown, usage as it emerged from the Phoenician/Canaanite world of polytheism.

In general, the demonstration of periodized patterns in the data emerging from the development of historical knowledge presumes the access and vivid presentation of accurate, up-to-date, non-mythological, information in a large number of fields, a difficult requirement requiring new ways to organize historical knowledge and awareness. The terms of discussion must be ‘historical cash’, facts. On these terms the immense complexities of Biblical Criticism block our easy understanding of the historicity of the whole of the Old and New Testaments, and are a warning that no inference of cosmological design can be transferred to an historical one. And yet, ironically the era of the Prophets is of great interest in terms of our historical structure, and takes on new life in its naturalistic eonic context. We will see that this era fits better into quite a different sort of eonic design! But the first difficulty here is once again, what are the facts? [iv]

If we suspect a macrohistorical aspect to cultural evolution, then we suspect at once the perceptions of religion confused with perceptions of evolution by primitive men. This fact goes a long way toward explaining the religious conflicts surrounding evolutionary thinking. The first principles of religion were, perhaps, the tenets of the jungle theologian, as a response to auditory input in the silence of a great forest, ‘If it moves, it’s alive, whether creature, wind or spirit’. The rest follows from the differentiations of ‘winds’ and ‘spirits’, abutting in the reductions of science, as the mass and the force, beside the philosopher, with his first Idea. The forest philosopher, the wild man of

India

, is the bridge of this past and future, alert in the jungle of thought to No Idea.

Self and divinity This issue becomes still more complicated when we adjoin the issue of ‘divine’ self, to find a combination of terms of divinity mixed with Upanishadic terminology. As this ‘transgresses’ the boundary of Sanskrit (Atman, Brahman) to other linguistic media confusion can arise. And there is a homegrown version of this in the monotheistic West. Thus R. Tucker in Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx indicts Hegel, in fact the whole of German Classical Philosophy, for the sin of pride, or Faustian ambition, “The movement of thought from Kant to Hegel revolved in a fundamental sense around the idea of man’s self-realization of a god-like being, or alternatively, as God”.[v]

Such a stance is as reasonable to one quarter as it is biased to another, and here Tucker is applying psychoanalysis (Karen Horney) to a presumed neurotic strain of thought. The Upanishadic tradition never used Western terms, and produced a legacy of ‘godmen’ gurus, and in any case can thrive as well with a change of terminology, there being quite adequate substitutes for this sub-tradition in a greater tradition that is also noted for its Samkhya and its warnings about ‘spiritual titanism’, and the ‘atheism’ of the Jainism and Buddhism (which are not innocent of titanic wreckage). The appearance of a related theme in Hegel is certainly open to critique on the grounds that a kind of Spinozistic version of Upanishadic titanism lurks in a theology then collated with Protestant history. But Hegel was at least clear about his strategy, and evoked an essential theme lurking in monotheism, historically known. But his myth of Geist disgorges a fairly nasty Big Devil, and we should ask if this presumed penetration of the Kantian noumenon as absolute knowledge was worth the price. However, the X-ray of the concept of divinity is telling. We are so mesmerized by the ‘sacred’ that we never suspect bad theology, and its severe consequences. The dangerous ambiguity there is certainly problematic. We can make no statements about such entities without contradictions. The idea of some special category of ‘godmen’ borders on fraud, but has reached California in the invasion of gurus, attempting to pull rank on everyone, and complete with the apparatus of exploitation implicit in such thinking. One may as well pronounce all men to be godmen and put it in the Constitution, to be done with this resurgent mafia.[vi]

But surely this stance of Tucker’s misses the mark in one sense, although few have the audacity to point to the dangerous shoals lurking in a classic discourse, and he would be accused of Cold War propaganda. His attack on Kantian dualism, in the struggles to realize ethical perfection, misses the point that Kant and Hegel are quite different, and that such a dualism is completely transparent to those in traditions of meditation or religious realization, and completely forgotten in the ‘cooled out’ utilitarian cultures where therapeutic endeavors bury the ‘real’ self. To indict Kant for a Faustian attitude in attempting to bridge Pietism and Newton seems like wrong thinking. Man can demonstrate this dualism by the simple contrast between the power to focus attention, and his inability to control that state. Man is alienated from his own potential, effectively an historically ‘dual creature’, whatever he might become. Thus the question of ‘will’ is rightly posed in Kant, who straddles two worlds, trying to wrest the individual from the mechanization of culture under the regime of scientism. This theme of ‘will’ appears once again in Schopenhauer, and the destruction of this dualism by Nietzsche’s attack on Kant seems hardly an improvement if this gives us the ‘will to power’ and the now ‘scientific’ Freudian unconscious as decadent derivatives. Thus the ground of Tucker’s fascinating diagnosis is altogether shaky. We are to be good Nietzscheans, pay our psychiatry bills, and dismiss Kant as a Faust.

Nonetheless, Tucker’s attack unwittingly produces a glimpse of the shadow side to conceptions of divinity, normally assumed to be concepts of the sacred. Many revere divinities, others as soon dive in a foxhole, there to find Darwinians trying to use their theory to calm their nerves. Hegelian versions of divinity are highly dangerous abstractions that negate morality and then claim Protestant lineage. Good to be wary indeed. The ‘dialectic of aggrandizement’ in Hegel’s ‘Geist’, the Spinozistic god-monster bent on world conquest and feather in Napoleon’s cap, with its slaughterbench teleological indifference, whether a fair indictment or not, more like parody, is a reminder of the bloody history of theistic concepts, and the concealed ‘sacrifices of Moloch’ lurk at all times in the gray areas of theological thought. We must be altogether wary of the theme of sacrifice and its history, and the stratagems, still in existence, of ‘esoteric’ agents with horrific agendas. Last, but not least, the original case of this ambiguity is clearly visible in the Christological figure, who, cutting through mystifications, seems as close to the Upanishadic or godman as the monotheistic tradition, although given the state of the real evidence, it is difficult to determine the facts of the case. The emergence of Christianity is a tour de force that cleverly conceals its ‘founder’ behind a Pauline veil. By design (all too human) or accident, this scheme creates a permanent mystery, and we should be forced to wonder, who was this fellow? Cleverly concealed, this source of the brilliantly constructed, yet ad hoc, redemptive myth never suffers the problems in the evidence with the historical Mohammed. In fact, we have almost no reliable knowledge here.[vii]

[i] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006).

[ii] Sam Harris, The End Of Faith (New York: Norton, 2005).

[iii] Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover, 1969).

[iv] R. L. Fox, The Unauthorized Version (New York: Knopf, 1992), Burton Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament (NY: Harper Collins, 1995), Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: Summit Books, 1987), Robert Price, Deconstructing Jesus (Amherst, New York: Prometheus, 2000). Consider this piece of toxic speculation from Hegel: “The history of the world moves on a higher level than that proper to morality…The demands and accomplishments of the absolute and final aim of spirit, the working of Providence, lie above the obligations, responsibilities, and liabilities which are incumbent on the individuals in regard to their morality…The deeds of the great men who are the individual of world history thus appear justified not only in their intrinsic, unconscious significance but also from the point of view of world history. It is irrelevant and inappropriate from that point of view to raise moral claims against world historical acts and agents. They stand outside of morality…World history…could in principle altogether ignore the sphere of morality.” Cf. Galston, op. cit p. 265. Sämtliche Werke, W, XI:105-6. Where is proof or evidence for such a fantastic assertion? Such statements are pure metaphysical nonsense. The worst effect here is the way this kind of thinking lurks behind the ‘exoteric’ religious formulations, everything scrambled together with double meanings in the minds of the unwary. Why bother to invent such divinities? One thinks of Feuerbach, protesting Hegel, that man subjects himself to Rube Goldberg devices of his own invention.

[v] Robert Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967, p. 31).

[vi] William Galston, Kant and the Problem of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 265.

[vii] Nicolas Grier, Spiritual Titanism (Ithaca, New York: State University of New York Press, 2000).