vol 6:
Essay 24: God is dead: long live god
[Submitted for the Horne Prize, 29 October 2018]I: The dark night of the soul
I am a “lapsed" Catholic”. Not just lapsed, but somewhat hostile. I am convinced that the Church worships a false God, a political construct dating back to the time of “Moses” and beyond. Many of the problems of Western society may be traced to this error. It needs to be corrected with the realistic assumption that “God” and the Universe are identical. It has taken me seventy years to reach this position. Here is my story, and a snapshot of its consequences. Exodus
I grew up in Mount Gambier where the Catholic establishment was predominantly Irish: nuns, brothers, priests, and Monsignor Redden. I was thoroughly indoctrinated and no rod was spared. We sang and prayed, made our first communions, were confirmed by Matthew Beovich, Archbishop of Adelaide, fought with the protestant kids and accepted that we were sinners entitled, nevertheless, to salvation if we were good. Joseph Laffin: Beovich, Matthew (1896-1980)
We like to think religion is above politics. Above all that spinning, character assassination and straight out lies. It is not. Moses set the tone. The route to political power is to get God on your side. Historically it has not mattered whether this is reality or fantasy, but hopefully reality is gaining ground. In God we trust. In God we must trust. Not the imaginary gods of ancient religions, but the real god that we live with. The god of evidence and justice. Divine right of kings - Wikipedia
We moved to Adelaide when I was fourteen. I was upgraded from a somewhat country bumpkin to a city boy. I found myself at Blackfriars College, a Catholic school run by Dominican priests. The Headmaster was Lawrence Peter Fitzgerald, a Doctor of Theology. Blackfriars Priory School
Somehow God, working in its mysterious way, got me into the Dominican order. Monastic life wasn’t too bad. Up before dawn into a freezing Melbourne church. Meditate for half an hour. Sing a chunk of the divine office. Mass, porridge in silence, morning classes, more singing, lunch. Afternoon rest and recreation, study, more office, dinner, office, study and ten o’clock bed. Dominican Order - Wikipedia
For me the best part of it all was Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor. In the thirteenth century Thomas rebuilt Catholic theology on an Aristotelian foundation. He is the Order’s intellectual treasure, the only theologian specifically endorsed by Canon Law. He writes simple limpid Latin, his arguments are designed for beginners and I still love him, although we have parted in principle.
Aquinas begins his Summary of Theology with “proofs” for existence of God. More precisely, he argues that God is not the Universe. At first his arguments looked good to me. Then I read Bernard Lonergan’s book, Insight, A study of human understanding. Lonergan wanted to bring Thomas into the twentieth century but for me he ran off. Instead of differentiating God and the world, Lonergan suggested to me that they are identical. Lonergan
A wonderful idea. At last theology could become a real science. The ecclesiastical springtime ignited by the Vatican II tempted me to say this out loud. Heresy, and I lost my place. My solemn vows were annulled by the Holy See. I was out of the Order into civilian life. A real shock. Second Vatican Council - Wikipedia
The dark night of my soul was very Australian and straightforward. I am no Saint John of the Cross. Losing the promise of heaven was very painful. Twenty years later I had cheered up and was able to see the whole Catholic story as a historical drama with no foundation in reality. Everything I had been taught was wrong. All the meditation and singing and getting up early and eating in silence had really done nothing for me but revealed my life’s work. Dark Night of the Soul - Wikipedia
Why do people run off into some desert to be monks? I did it because I was deluded. But it led me see that the Church is clearly wrong. Its careful cover-up of crimes against children made this conclusion easier to accept. I was not sexually molested, but I was well beaten and did receive a head full of religious crap. Fortunately I was also taught mathematics and science. Desert Fathers - Wikipedia
II: Back to the light
The theology I was taught is wrong. The error is not theology's fault any more than we can blame chemistry for phlogiston theory. It is a step along the way. My mission became to build a new theology. My starting point is the heresy that got me thrown out of the Order. Let us identify God and the Universe. Phlogiston theory - Wikipedia
If theology is to get anywhere it must be scientific. If it is to be scientific, god must be visible. So I ditched all the cloud of unknowing and mystical jargon and set out to understand the concrete divine universe in front of my eyes. If the universe is divine, all science is part of theology. Cooking up a new theology turned out to be a long job, but now I am beginning to see some outlines emerging from the mist. I have a few things to say which might meet the specification of this essay. Theology - Wikipedia
The traditional Christian God, described by Aquinas using the work of Aristotle, is pure action, the fulfilment of all possibility. From this Aquinas argues that God is absolutely simple. This is the mystical view of God, without any parts or features that the human mind can grasp. The view from outside God.
Now that I am inside God my viewpoint has changed. One of the biggest problems in Christianity theology was how to reconcile the simple unity God with a triplicity of persons, Father, Son and Spirit. A person is an independent source of action. Now the problem is how can we see that God is not just three persons, but the infinity of persons in the divine universe. The inhabitants of God are not only all the humans who have ever lived, but every independent source of action from atoms to galaxies. Trinity - Wikipedia
The simple mystical divine system remains within all this. God is one and many. Albert Einstein and his contemporaries showed us how this works. We can establish a new theology if we tune in to relativity and quantum mechanics, the keys to the kingdom of god, the roots of creation. General relativity - Wikipedia, Quantum mechanics - Wikipedia
III: A New theology
Traditional theology placed us outside God. It also claimed that God is absolutely simple and mysterious, nothing to be seen from the outside, the mystics’ cloud of unknowing. Inside we see that God is the world, infinite, infinitely complex, infinitely beautiful, but the ancient simplicity is still there within it.
Simple things are easy to understand. The key to life is knowing and loving God. The key to God is the physical world, God’s body. The key to God’s body is physics, the study of the simple foundations of the world. The names are a bit daunting, general relativity and quantum theory, but the ideas are simple, clues to world peace and prosperity. The physical world created its magnificent self from itself, so we should do well to imitate it.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that the universe began as timeless structureless initial singularity. Formally, this initial singularity is identical to the classical God. Initial singularity - Wikipedia
The theory begins with the experience of free fall that makes the astronautic life and extreme roller-coasters such sickening fun. Long before the space station, Einstein had “the happiest thought of my life”: that a person in free fall does not feel their own weight. Free fall became for Einstein the starting point for a description of the whole universe. Initial singularity - Wikipedia
Standing on Earth we feel our weight because we are not in free fall, we are attracted by the Earth’s gravitation, and our feet are on the ground. The Earth is round but nobody falls off. For us free fall is scary because we anticipate the smash when we hit the ground. In physics, however, it is the epitome of freedom. In free fall the laws of physics are everywhere identical.
Gravitation only sees energy. The step from energy to matter and everything made of matter, which includes us, is explained by quantum theory. This process is implied in the world’s most famous equation: E = mc2. Energy and matter are equivalent.
Quantum theory begins with fundamental particles, which are believed to have no size at all. It then describes how these are bound together to make larger and larger structures, from atoms to plants and animals, to planets, stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The whole process of cosmic evolution. Eric J Chaisson: Cosmic Evolution
Gravitation is intrinsically weak, so it has a negligible effect on individual atoms, but once things get bigger it begins to show. It is the Earth’s gravity that holds us on. It is also gravity that holds huge masses of gas together to form stars. Many of the spectacular pictures taken with astronomical telescopes depict huge masses colliding. They are wonderfully violent because so much energy is concentrated in one place, thermonuclear explosives the size of the sun.
Here we come to the role of gravitation and quantum mechanics in human affairs. In a divine world, these fundamental features of physics are the fundamental features of God. Evolution describes the construction of complex things from simple ones, but the simplicity is always there, as energy. We often burn beautiful complex things like trees to extract their energy.
In the human economic world we use markets break valuable things down to a number, money. Markets are bit like fire. An old and complex business might be broken up and sold to get the money out of it. On the other hand, we can use money to create things as the universe uses energy to make beautiful complex structures like children.
Some cosmologists think that the initial singularity contained all the energy in the universe compressed into an infinitesimally small object. When this went off, we had a big bang. But there is an alternative, more realistic view. Perhaps the energy of singularity was zero, and idea we owe to Richard Feynman.
Energy comes in two forms, potential and kinetic, and we can imagine one being the equal and opposite to the other, adding up to zero. We see their relationship in a pendulum. When the bob is high and still it has potential energy. When it is low and moving its potential energy is now kinetic energy. The universe too is both still and moving, fixed structure and change. Motion is annihilated to create potential. Potential is annihilated to create motion.
Money is a simple foundation of human economy, like energy. It is a measure of value that makes things happen. It is created out of nothing by debt and it comes in two forms: capital (analogous to potential energy, stationary value) and cashflow (analogous to kinetic energy, value on the move). Like energy, money is conserved, and obeys the simple arithmetic of accountancy.
When we look out into the Universe we see majestic catastrophes involving incredible amounts of energy. Large concentrations of energy can be very dangerous: high explosives, nuclear weapons and aeroplanes full of fuel. Large concentrations of money are also dangerous because money buys political power in the form of weapons, armies and votes.
In the bad old days (and now), the richer a nation became, the more money it spent on weapons and military forces. As soon as it felt powerful enough, it began raping and pillaging its neighbours in the hope of increasing its wealth even further. This cycle continued around the world, growing as economies grew. The first world war, using the industrial strength weapons made possible by heavy engineering and fossil fuel, was though to be the war to end all wars, but it was not. More money and more weapons brought us the Second World War, a true world war, immensely destructive.
Then peace broke out and the world calmed down a bit. Wealth and economic growth have accelerated, but we are facing a new crisis. The liberal order that grew after the Second War is breaking down. As Robert Kagan writes, the jungle is creeping back.
This is happening because we have lost control of money and the power that it brings. In the United States, billions of dollars are poured into elections because there is no legal control of political expenditure. Democracy is being prostituted to wealth. Most of the money in the world is controlled by a tiny tribe of plutocrats.
The theological view of money suggests that we must accept that it is a public good, a communication medium that belongs to us all like roads and energy grids. Consequently all cashflows should become transparent and subject to communal control.
The wealthy, of course, want to keep their money a secret. Because they think they own it they think that they can do whatever they like with it. This is a mistake. Think of the road network. It also is public property. Of course greedy governments have sold off toll roads, but this is just one of the many abuses of reality resulting from uncontrolled concentrations of money.
The movement of money is a simple abstract representation of the the activity of society as a whole, just as the flow of energy in space-time is an abstract representation of the physical universe. The analogy with energy suggests that proper understanding and political control of public cashflows is necessary and possibly sufficient to obtain peaceful civilisation. Money must be subject to law.
Geoffrey Walker wrote:
One of the chief currents that can be observed in the history of government is the antinomy between two conflicting forces, power and law. In their pure form, power and law are polar opposites, the former standing for arbitrary might, the latter for a system in which power is checked by institutions or individual rights and channelled in such a way as to conform with a people's values and established patterns of expectation. Neither of these two forces, by itself, can found a stable system of government; one because it is capricious, coercive and unpredictable, the other because, in practice, it can become inflexible and may adapt only with difficulty to changing conditions. Both tend to lead to the buildup of pressures that produce their downfall.The rule of law (sometimes capitalised as the Rule of Law to distinguish it from legal rules in other contexts) is a legal and constitutional doctrine which reconciles these two antagonistic drives.
IV: Theology, religion and politics
The ancient gods backed warlords, conquest and enslavement. The general trend in the universe, on the other hand, is from high energy and violence to low energy and gentleness. This does not please power engineers, who see it as increasing entropy and the path to heat death, but we need not worry about that just yet. There is five billion years of fuel in the Sun.
Since the birth of heat engines, these same engineers have managed to brand increasing entropy as a bad thing, but now that we are entering the age of information, we can see it another way. Entropy, they say represents uncertainty and chaos. Information, on the other hand, measures certainty and order. Consequently entropy has become the measure of information. We learn more when we learn the truth about a great uncertainty than a small one.
Energy is conserved, but entropy is not. It has a general tendency to increase. Information is a physical entity. This means that as things become more complex, the amount of energy needed to represent an item of information decreases and things become more peaceful. In a polite society, where asking someone to leave actually works, it is no longer necessary to throw them out. Violence is thereby reduced. As entropy increases, signalling becomes subtler and the consumption of resources to achieve the same result decreases. Compare your phone to the kilowatts of power consumed by the first colossal computers.
Evolution is a universal process. Wherever there is variation and selection we find evolution, nowhere more than in business. Going into business is always something of a gamble, so the law is designed to allow us to fail without too much pain. We no longer need to die in debtor’s prison if things don’t work out. But there are a few rules. Fundamentally, income must exceed expenditure. Once you have burnt all your capital you are finished. In the business of life on Earth, we are effectively trading while insolvent..
At the roughest of estimates, we have cut down about half the forests, paved over about half the productive soil, extinguished about half the species and destroyed about half the mass of life on Earth. We have destroyed about half the ecological capital of the Earth. If we kill our life support system, we are dead.
The enormous social and economic progress of the last few centuries has been totally dependent on fossil solar energy. This cannot go on if we wish to survive. We have to start paying our way. The only adequate source of real income available to us is the solar energy that built the living Earth in the first place.
Many people are scared of science because it reveals how things really are. They would prefer the snug cocoon of a paternal divinity guiding our every move with promises eternal bliss. This is a comforting story. I know my dear Catholic mother was looking forward to meeting her dead children again.
The promises of heaven (and hell) have been powerful tools to control us, like Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny on steroids, but they are false promises. Heaven and hell are here among us, and to a very large extent life is what we make it. We cannot do it alone. The lap of luxury in which we now live is a collective product, designed with science, that is knowledge of God. In the Universe where God is visible our best hope is to watch God closely and act on what we learn.
