theology for freaks, pt II
In the previous part of this series, I asserted the following.
my god dwells in the film on my eyes
The meaning of this is obvious and barely requires elucidation, but for completeness I shall expound on it here.
Elsewhere, I've vaguely described my working theory of divinity as "[some] kind of sociocognitive emergent theology/theogeny" and "[K]antian transcendental idealism with transsexual characteristics". Before I develop these small bowls of word salad into something worth savoring, I want to place my stake in the freshly wet earth: I believe in a god. This is unambiguously true. God is as real to me as blue, or pain, or any other percept. Return to this stake as often as you need to throughout the following discussion, as I suspect you may come to doubt this assertion by the end.
Let's start with "theology/theogeny". By theology, we mean theory/speculation on the nature and properties of the divine, and by theogeny, we mean the origin or creation or birth of the divine. I don't only have a conception of what divinity is, but how it arises.
This brings us directly to "emergent", which is a word I use far too much because I was poisoned with cognitive science for almost a decade. When we describe a phenomenon as emergent, we generally mean at least the following:
- causally, the phenomenon arises from the behaviors or activities of entities (and especially interactions between entities) at some lower level of description, e.g. how cognition arises from neural activity or how climate patterns arise from molecular (thermo)dynamics
- nevertheless, the behavior of the higher-level, emergent system isn't easily or meaningfully described in terms of the behaviors of its lower level parts and may exhibit properties that categorically cannot apply at the lower level of description; this is often used to justify expanding our ontology to include emergent entities/phenomena as Things in their own right (e.g. minds, beliefs, cyclones) and not mere byproducts of the lower causal level
In this case, my opaque use of the modifier "sociocognitive" with "emergent" suggests that, whatever the divine is, we should think of it as resulting from activity at cognitive and sociological levels of description, as emerging from the interactions of people, perception, community, and identity, among other things.
Even at this point, I've only circumscribed my god in the broadest of terms, but hopefully you've at least got a flavor of what I have in mind. This god doesn't require, I don't know, adding the Divine Grace to the list of fundamental forces alongside gravity and the nuclear forces and shit; if you could track every degree of freedom in the universe to infinite precision, your formal description of the universe would include, at some sufficiently abstract level of analysis, a simulation of God. It's not "supernatural", for you physicalist sickos out there, although I find that term nearly incoherent anyway.
Nevertheless, whatever I've managed to describe here (if anything at all), you should probably find it difficult at this point to accept it as anything worth being called "divine", derived as it all is from entirely (seemingly) mundane mechanisms and dynamics. I'll conclude by trying to convince you otherwise by expanding on my shitposty "transcendental idealism" comment.
I am not, in any significant way, a Kant-knower, or indeed a continental-philosophy-of-any-kind-knower, but my understanding of transcendental idealism (particularly as it relates to the nature of God and faith) includes the following. First is the transcendental nature of True Objective Reality: Everything that we experience comes to us through our fallible and distorting sense perception and through our biased and insufficient conceptual structures. Everything that we think we know about the world is caked in the fingerprints of our subjectivity, the unique history of circumstances that led to our bodies and brains interacting with their environments in the specific way that they do. If we still accept that there does, indeed, exist an objective reality, then that reality is necessarily entirely inaccessible to us.
Further, then, in defence of the reality of God against the apparent necessary descent into atheistic empirical physicalism that everybody's misreadings of Spinoza lead them to fear, Kant maintains that the divine resides in this transcendental objective reality beyond the reach of our senses. No measurements that me make, no experiences we undergo, not even any deduction from necessary ideal principles can give us access to this transcendentally Real divinity, and so a purely rational mind limited only to these inherently subjective ways of knowing about the world will indeed conclude that their reality is devoid of the divine. For Kant, then, we require a radical, seemingly irrational leap of faith to recover God, even if we are doomed to eternal transcendental alienation from God.
My theology, however, rejects this last paragraph. God does not exist in the unknowable reality beyond our reality. Humans touch God, breathe God, inhabit divine thought and experience. Divinity is as visceral and experiential as hunger. Thus, I have no choice but to place God on our side, the subjective, perceptual side, of the transcendental divide. Our cognitive machinery takes stimuli from the unknowable world as input, integrates it into our existing interior state, and by that very process, within that process, divinity is generated and sustained. The world that I perceive has God in it because there's a me that's doing the perceiving.