Article 14 of 14

Subject:      Re: Difficulties with "Miracles" - no quantum mechanics
From:         Andrew Rilstone <andrew@aslan.demon.co.uk>
Date:         1997/02/05
Message-Id:   <p8WcwBA+uR+yEwWt@aslan.demon.co.uk>

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I have come across some theologians who say that "God" is the code-word
in our culture for 'the ultimate reality, whatever that might be'. They
will say "The Mind is God" or "The Universe is God" and mean, not "The
Mind is the thing which walked in Eden" but "The Mind is the One Real
Thing". I do not agree with this usage, but one can see where they are
coming from. (Is this what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said that
the final human understanding of the cosmos -- that which you could not
get beyond -- would be "the mind of God"?) Joseph Campbell, more
promisingly, says that God is one of a number of *metaphors* for the
final irreducible Thing. The Universe, the Unconscious and Space have
all served as metaphors for this "X" at one time or another. Campbell is
basing his argument on Kant, who I have never read but Lewis
(presumably) had, so I wonder if what Lewis is giving us is muddled
Kant? The claim "Everyone will see that, if the Christian God exists, He
would be the Final Thing that I am here postulating" would be a much
less drastic claim. 

>Lewis makes
>no attempt to demonstrate this and it is, in fact, not true. Platonism
>(or at least a certain type of Platonism) is one possible counter-
>example: the relation between our world and the World of Forms is
>exactly that of the Natural and the Supernatural, but the World of Forms
>is not the same thing as a god or gods. Since Lewis was undoutedly
>familiar with Plato, this passage is probably best read as a rhetorical
>trick - but it's one that leaves a distinctly false impression of what
>Lewis is about to attempt to prove.

It's clear from Lewis's arguments that the Greek Gods, if they literally
existed, would not be the Supernatural Thing since they are part of the
total process of the universe. The Gods have origins, and when their
story begins, the Universe is already a going concern. Plato's "world of
Forms" is as you say, exactly what Lewis has in mind when talking about
the supernatural, but then Lewis would take it as read that "the form of
the Good" -- Plato's final, irreducible reality -- was God. I think that
anything which we could postulate that is final and irreducible and
genuinely outside the universe could usefully be referred to as "God"
and would have a good deal in common with the Christian conception. The
rhetorical fallacy that Lewis falls into is, that, from his lips (in the
context of a Christian book) we naturally assume that by God he means
'Jehovah' or at any rate "an ethical being more like a human mind than
anything else we have experience of." It is striking that in the
'Abolition' he specifically avoids this by referring to the Tao.

There is an interesting point here about the usage of the term "God."
The Greek gods were not what Lewis means by "God" even though they had
cults and rituals and a religion associated with them; The Form of the
Good is a closer candidate, although it didn't. I seem to recall that
Lewis remarked that he had know people completely convinced that the
ontological proof established the existence of a necessary perfect
Being, but that this belief had no *religious* significance whatsoever. 

More later, maybe. 


-- 
Andrew Rilstone  andrew@aslan.demon.co.uk   http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/
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             "The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
              Are full of passionate intensity"
                                               Yeats 
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