From the Narrow Desert: Creation

Showing posts with label Creation. Show all posts

Thursday, July 7, 2022

The logic of Gnosticism and where it leads

Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God; and this is that spirit of Antichrist.

-- 1 John 4:2-3

That's a somewhat surprising litmus test, isn't it? The belief that separates those who are of God from those who are of Antichrist is not that Jesus is God, but that Jesus is a Man -- a real, physical Man, "come in the flesh." Today, with the exception of a few atheist cranks (a bit cranky even by atheist standards), just about everyone accepts that there was a real flesh-and-blood man named Jesus. The author of the epistle wasn't thinking of atheist cranks, though; his test was designed to exclude the Gnostics.

I think of the Gnostics as kindred spirits, not because I believe many Gnostic ideas but because of their method: Start with an assumption you feel confident about and unflinchingly work out its ramifications. I've tried to do that in such posts as "The Supergod delusion," "From the Resurrection to Kolob," and "On the origin of agents by means of -- agency." In the case of the Gnostics, the starting assumption is simple: Spirit is good, and matter is bad.

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It's not an obviously ridiculous position, and one can find apparent support for it even in such mainstream Christian texts as Paul's Epistle to the Galatians.

This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.

But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.

Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.

And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts (Gal. 5:16-24).

Taken at face value, this says that there is an irreconcilable conflict between the body and the spirit; that everything that comes from the body is bad, and everything that comes from the spirit is good; and that the Christian way is to "crucify the flesh" -- that is, to reject the body as utterly and mercilessly as the Roman occupiers rejected a condemned criminal.

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Let's go Gnostic and carry this evaluation to its logical conclusion.

Paul's specific allusion is of course to the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, held up here as a symbol of the utter rejection of the body. But after the Crucifixion came the Resurrection: Jesus took back the body he had supposedly rejected, bound himself to it permanently, and ascended into Heaven with it! What is to be made of that?

Well, the Gnostic conclusion is that Jesus obviously wasn't really resurrected, not physically. The true Jesus is a being of pure spirit. He did appear to some of his disciples in human form -- just as God appeared to Abraham as three men and to Moses as a burning bush -- but this was a concession to their limited understanding and should not be interpreted as proof of his true nature. God is not really a burning bush, and the risen Jesus is not really a man with flesh and bones. And don't some of the anecdotes in the canonical gospels back this up? The risen Jesus could apparently appear and disappear at will; his features were mutable; he sometimes looked like himself and sometimes like a stranger; and in the end, he rose up into the sky and vanished, later to appear to Saul as a disembodied voice and a light. Isn't it obvious that we're not dealing with a physical man here, but with a spiritual entity that can appear as a man when he so wishes?

But what of the empty tomb? What happened to the body if Jesus didn't come back to reanimate it? Easy: The body disappeared because it had never been real to begin with. If Jesus' post-resurrection body was only an appearance, not a physical reality, what is to stop us from saying the same about his original body? And the Gnostics did say it, or at least some of them did. Hence John's reference to those that "confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh." Come in the flesh? What doctrine could be more blasphemous than that to those who have equated the flesh with adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, and so on? Jesus was never really a man; he merely appeared in human form.

(When I was a Mormon missionary back in the late 1990s, I met someone who maintained something similar about Moses. He had told me he didn't believe God had messengers, and I said, "What about Moses? Wouldn't you say Moses was a messenger of God?" His reply has stuck with me all these years, more for its strangeness than anything else: "I used to believe that, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Moses was never really a man at all but a projection of God himself.")

Once the assumption has been made that both the Incarnation and the Resurrection were illusions, all sorts of facts rearrange themselves in support of what has been assumed. Didn't Jesus appear suddenly at the age of 30, saying that he had come down from heaven and denying that his mother and brothers were really his mother and brothers? Isn't his youth a blank and his infancy a handful of mutually contradictory legends? Didn't he have a way of suddenly appearing in places, with no one knowing when or how he got there? Didn't he once go 40 days without food or water? Didn't he walk on water for God's sake? Obviously a spirit appearing in human form, not an actual man.

Together with the Incarnation and the Resurrection falls the Passion. While what has become mainstream Christian tradition places great emphasis on the enormous suffering of Christ -- the sweat of blood, the scourge, the crown of thorns, the spikes driven into living flesh -- Gnostic texts treat the whole thing as a joke. The body was not real, the suffering was not real, and -- we are told in one of the Gnostic gospels -- while his enemies were gloating and his disciples mourning, the true Jesus, an impassible spirit, surveyed the scene of "his" Crucifixion from high above and laughed.

As Elaine Pagels has pointed out, one consequence of this view was that the Gnostics never embraced or glorified martyrdom the way their Catholic cousins did. The Catholic Christ willingly submitted to torture, indignity, and death because "to this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth" (John 18:37). The Gnostic Christ, in stark contrast, successfully tricked those who wanted to torture and kill him. Each sect emulated the Christ they knew. This was one of the causes of conflict between the two groups -- the Gnostics saw the Catholics as troublemakers, and the Catholics saw the Gnostics as cowards -- and, if the blood of the martyrs truly is the seed of the church, it may have been one of the reasons for Catholicism's eventual ascendancy over its onetime rival.

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The ultimate consequence of Gnosticism, though, has to do with the Creation. If matter is evil, what is to be made of the God of Genesis, who created the earth and all that is on it, and saw that it was all very good? Did they dare to go there? They did. This Creator, they reasoned was obviously not the true God but a mere demiurge, and they gave him the name Samael -- interpreted by them as "the blind god," and more traditionally a name used in Judaism for the "chief of all the satans." Basically, the Creator was the devil, the "prince of this world" mentioned in the New Testament.

The Creator's antagonist, then -- the serpent of Eden, bringer of forbidden knowledge -- must have been a good guy, and was sometimes identified with Christ himself (who said "be wise as serpents" and "the truth shall make you free").

So this is where the original Gnostic assumption, that matter is evil, leads us: to borrow a distinction introduced by Waite in Devil Worship in France, if not to "Satanism" (the worship of evil as evil), certainly to "Luciferianism" (the belief that being most call the Devil is actually good).

That mainstream Christians and Gnostics, with their nearly opposite worldviews, could both make a plausible claim to be followers of Jesus Christ and to derive their doctrine from him is nothing short of astonishing, and it highlights the vital importance of metaphysical assumptions.

Monday, February 28, 2022

What if there was no beginning?

If you could hie to Kolob in the twinkling of an eye
And then continue onward with that same speed to fly,
Do you think that you could ever, through all eternity,
Find out the generation where Gods began to be?

Or see the grand beginning, where space did not extend?
Or view the last creation, where Gods and matter end?
Methinks the Spirit whispers, "No man has found 'pure space,'
Nor seen the outside curtains, where nothing has a place."

-- W. W. Phelps

When did that thinking thing begin to be? If it did never begin to be, then have you always been a thinking thing from eternity; the absurdity whereof I need not confute, till I meet with one who is so void of understanding as to own it.

-- John Locke

In comments to my recent post "Why does God exist?" Bruce Charlton and Francis Berger have both expressed the opinion that beings of some sort have always existed -- not atemporally like Allah, but temporally, with their existence extending back over an infinite expanse of time. Bruce Charlton wrote:

I find it very strange that (apparently) some people find it inconceivable that there should be infinite 'time' in the past leading up to now. I find the opposite impossible to imagine - i.e. that there was ever a beginning before which there was nothing.

I think I have always been like this, since I was a child. Even when I accepted the recent (and constantly changing) scientific theories about the Big Bang as a certain truth, at the back of my mind I always wondered what happened before it - and assumed some kind of eternally expanding and contracting and re-exploding cyclical universe.

The infinite temporal existence of beings -- including God, man, and even the physical elements -- is also the Mormon position, expressed by Joseph Smith in the King Follett Sermon (part 1 part 2), and was my own position until fairly recently. I therefore thought I ought to devote a post to reasons for not believing it. Before doing so, let me state again my meta position that theologies are akin to map projections -- in order to get some things right, you have to omit or distort others; and which projection is "best" depends on what you most care about getting right.

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1. Infinite elapsed time

As discussed in my earlier post, the Kalām Cosmological Argument assumes that there can be only two kinds of beings: (1) beings that began to exist a finite amount of time ago; and (2) beings that are atemporal, or "exist outside of time." Everything we know, including the physical universe itself, belongs to the first category; it is therefore necessary to explain their existence by positing a being of the second type, and this is Allah.

The reason given for rejecting a third category -- beings that are temporal but never began to exist -- is that for those beings an infinite amount of time must already have elapsed. They must already be "infinity years old." However, it is impossible for anything to ever be "infinity years old," because time elapses finite step by finite step, and infinity can never be reached by adding up finite quantities.

With the caveat that it is notoriously difficult to think clearly about infinity, I think this argument is in error. It conflates "never began" with "began an infinitely long time ago." Consider by way of analogy the number line of integers. It is infinite, but it would be sloppy thinking to say it extends "from negative infinity, through zero, to positive infinity." There is no such number as "infinity" (negative or positive) on the number line. Of all the infinitely many integers on the line, not a single one of them is infinitely distant from zero.

The present moment corresponds to zero, the past to the negative integers, and the future to the positive ones. If I say that my existence (in one form or another) is infinite in both directions, in precisely the same way that the number line is infinite, does that make me "infinity years old"? No. The Kalām Argument assumes that an infinite amount of time must have elapsed from "the beginning" to the present -- missing the point that there was no beginning. A billion years ago, I existed; and a billion years have elapsed since then. A quadrillion years ago, I existed; and a quadrillion years have elapsed since then. The "infinity" lies in the fact that the statement will be true for absolutely any number I choose, no matter how astronomically large it may be; but every number, without exception, will be a finite distance from the present, and only a finite time will have elapsed since then. Just as you can get from any point on the infinite number line to any other by adding or subtracting a finite quantity, so any distance on the infinite timeline can be traversed without an infinite amount of time elapsing.

So I reject this argument against infinite temporal existence.

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2. Unrealized potential

Central to Christianity is the idea that we have the potential to become like God, but that at present we are obviously very, very far from having realized that potential.

How long will it take us to realize our divine potential? A billion years? But we have already existed for a billion billion billion years (or whatever other arbitrarily large number you choose) without realizing that potential. If something has never ever happened through all the countless kalpas of our existence, shouldn't it be pretty obvious by now that it's never going to happen? Thus the thesis that we have always existed would seem to lead to despair.

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3. Meaninglessness

If we have always existed, and our existence is not "necessary," then it seems to follow that we exist for absolutely no reason. Our existence has no inherent meaning or purpose but is just a brute fact, no less an "accident" then if we had originated when lightning randomly struck the primordial ooze.

I'm actually okay with this -- I spent a decade of hard atheism getting used to the idea -- but most Christians are obviously not. It is extremely common to hear that atheism makes life meaningless because it means you're an accident and exist for no inherent purpose. No, atheism makes life meaningless because it means you die, not because it means you were born. Meaning and purpose in life come only from our choices, not from the circumstances of our coming into existence.

Still, though, there's something deeply unsatisfying in the idea that existence is irreducibly "random," that we all just happen to exist for no reason at all.

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4. Agency is necessary anyway

The "no beginning" scenario would be most appealing to a determinist, who maintains that the state of the universe at any given point in time is determined by its state at the point immediately previous. An infinite past with no beginning would seem to be required by this "all dominoes and no fingers" theory.

If we accept agency, though, then some causal chains at least do not extend back infinitely into the past but terminate in a free choice, an uncaused cause -- and our metaphysics must accommodate that. Since we have this experience of things having a real beginning, and no experience of things having existed forever, it seems reasonable to assume, unless there is some strong reason to assume otherwise, that all things had a beginning, and that that beginning was a free act.

Saturday, February 26, 2022

Why does God exist?

Why does anything exist? Because God created it. Right, then -- why does God exist? This is considered a childish question, because it's one of the first things children think to ask about God -- if he created everything, who created him? -- but I don't consider that a point against it. Do we need to know why God exists? No. "I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things" (1 Ne. 11:17). But how we answer the question does have important metaphysical ramifications.

While "proofs of God" properly address the question of how we can know God exists, rather than why he does in fact exist, a few of them also suggest answers to that latter question.

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One of these is the Ontological Argument of Anselm, which runs as follows.

Let us give the name "God" to the greatest being we can conceive of.
A being which exists is greater than a being which does not exist.
If God did not exist, then we would be able to conceive of a being greater than this non-existent God -- namely, a God who did exist.
Therefore, "God does not exist" is logically self-contradictory and necessarily false. So God exists.

By Anselm's reasoning, asking why God exists would be like asking why circles are round. Circles are round because that's what the word circle means. If it weren't round, it wouldn't be a circle. "Some circles are not round" is self-contradictory and therefore necessarily false.

Of course, this is no proof that there actually are any circles. It only means that if there are any circles, all those circles are necessarily round. That necessity is conditional, not absolute.

In the Ontological Argument, though, the predicate in question is not roundness but existence itself, and the necessity is therefore presented as absolute. It isn't, though. Circles are by definition round; therefore, if there is a circle, that circle is necessarily round. God by definition exists; therefore, if there is a God, that God necessarily exists. Since "there is x" and "x exists" are two ways of saying the same thing, this is an uninteresting tautology which applies to everything, not only to God.

The illusion of absolute necessity is created by conflating "thinking of a being as existing" with "thinking of a being which in fact exists." The same sleight of hand can be used to prove that absolutely anything exists. If you think of the Loch Ness monster, you necessarily think of it as living in Loch Ness; therefore, the monster you are thinking of actually lives in Loch Ness. (Of course I believe in the Loch Ness monster; after all, it lives in Loch Ness by definition!) Or think of the scariest werewolf imaginable. Now what's scarier, a werewolf that's just imaginary or one that actually exists? Or, better yet, one that not only exists but is standing behind you right now! Every predicate presupposes existence, and sophistry can "prove" that any P exists by deriving from "P does not exist" the contradiction "P is not P."

If Anselm's argument fails, and it does, can we still maintain (as classical theology generally does) that God "exists necessarily," in contrast to other beings, whose existence is merely contingent? I don't see how. The necessity in question can only be logical necessity, since physical necessity would not apply to the being who created the physical universe itself -- and, well, how can the existence of anything be logically necessary?

I suppose people who reject Anselm's argument (as everyone should) but still insist that God exists necessarily, must think that his existence is logically necessary in some way that we don't yet understand, just as the necessary truth of, say, Euler's identity (e^iπ + 1 = 0) is not at all obvious to the layman. Perhaps some future theological Euler will succeed where Anselm failed and demonstrate the logical necessity of God's existence? Can we say with certainty that "God exists" is not true-by-logical-necessity?

Well, yes. Yes, we can say that. All necessity is conditional and relational. An equation, such as Euler's expression of a necessary relationship among five constants, is the sort of thing that can be logically necessary; and a flat existential statement, such as "There are butterflies in Madagascar" or "God exists" is the sort of thing that can't. I can say with complete confidence that no purely logical argument (with no existential or empirical premises at all) can ever prove the existence of God -- or of anything else for that matter.

So I consider this type of explanation for God's existence -- that he exists because it is impossible that he should not exist -- to be a dead hypothesis. It wouldn't voom if you put four million volts through it. What else is there, then?

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The other relevant "proof of God" is what is called the Kalām Cosmological Argument, Kalām being the Muslim counterpart to Scholasticism.

Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being.

If the cause-of-the-universe also had a beginning, then the same logic would apply to it. Therefore we must finally trace all causes back to something that did not have a beginning, and this is Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

This argument is what brought me back around to belief in God after nearly a decade of hard atheism -- but it did so indirectly. In fact, I thought of it not as a conclusive argument but as the Kalām Paradox, and it was the attempt to unravel the paradox that led me to belief first in agency and then in God. Let me retrace some of that thought.

Where Kalām parts ways with Anselm is in the assumption, implicit in the first premise, that God can just exist for no particular reason. Only changes -- comings-into-being -- require causes, and if God has always existed, there is no need to pretend he "exists necessarily" or to give any other reason for his existence. He just does exist, as a brute fact, and that's all there is to say.

But isn't the whole idea of a "Creator" based on the assumption that things don't just exist for no reason at all? Why can't we just say that the universe has always existed, for no particular reason, and leave it at that? That's where the second premise comes in: The universe began to exist. This is asserted not because of any empirical evidence for the Big Bang theory or anything like that, but because the universe is temporal, and time elapses finite interval by finite interval. No process of adding up finite quantities can ever reach an infinity, so it is impossible that an infinite amount of time has already elapsed. Therefore, only a finite amount of time has elapsed, and the universe had a beginning. This makes a lot of potentially debatable assumptions about the nature of time, but let's just accept it for now.

So the universe began to exist, which means it had a cause, God. And in order for this to explain anything, we must assume that God himself has always existed. But didn't we just argue that nothing can "have always existed," since it is impossible for an infinite amount of time to have already elapsed? Isn't that the whole basis of the first premise of the Kalām Argument? Why doesn't the same logic apply to God?

Well, the only way to make God a valid exception is to posit that he is not only everlasting but atemporal. Time does not elapse for God, and there is thus no need for an infinite amount of it to have already elapsed. God exists outside the time stream like, like -- well, no actual atemporal entities come to mind, but I guess he's supposed to be timeless in the way mathematical abstractions and such are, whatever that could possibly mean. Anyway, let's grant it. (For the record, I myself do not believe in atemporal entities, though I do believe in higher dimensions of temporality.)

Now here's the part that turns the Kalām Argument into the Kalām Paradox. God is supposed to be a sufficient cause for the existence of the universe, and God has always existed. How then to account for the fact (assumed in the second premise) that the universe has not always existed? How can a strictly timeless cause have a temporal effect? It can't, obviously.

How, according to the argument, do we escape this paradox? By assuming that God is personal and has free will. The existence of the universe must have been caused not by the existence of God but by a free act of God. As I wrote in my 2012 post "The Kalam Argument,"

I was very impressed with this part when I first read it, since it’s the first real argument I’ve found for the paradoxical idea of free will — of causation without determinism. If the rest of the kalam argument holds, then, yes, it would seem to follow that the universe must be the result of free will.

Thinking about it more deeply, though, I soon came to two conclusions: (1) It's impossible as it stands. If we take seriously the thesis that God is atemporal, then it is true in the very strictest of senses that he cannot change and therefore cannot act. Action just-is an inextricably temporal thing. A God who has already created the universe is different from a God who has not created the universe yet, and that distinction cannot exist without some sort of time. (2) All the explanatory work is done by the (inherently temporal) act, and none of it by the supposed timeless God behind the act. The correct conclusion is not that everything ultimately owes its existence to some incomprehensible timeless Allah, but that everything ultimately owes its existence to an act, or acts, of free will. Goethe's Faust wasn't just playing word games with his translation of John 1:1 but had it exactly right when, after considering and rejecting word, mind, and force, he finally arrived at this:

Mir hilft der Geist! Auf einmal seh' ich Rat
Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat!

The Spirit helps me. Boldly I proceed --
And write: "In the beginning was the deed."

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Agency has to be accepted as a primitive metaphysical concept, and as the ultimate origin of absolutely everything. Anselm tries to make logical necessity more fundamental than agency. The Kalām Argument tries to make the "randomness" of brute fact more fundamental. But I maintain that absolutely nothing is more fundamental. God exists for no other reason than that he chose to exist: Im Anfang war die Tat, und die Tat war bei Gott, und Gott war die Tat.

In principle, that one original creative act could be the ultimate cause of everything else. However, there is no reason to postulate only one such act and good reason to assume the opposite. We ourselves have free will, which means that our own ultimate origin might be like that of God.

Joseph Smith, the Prophet, wrote,

Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.

All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.

Behold, here is the agency of man (D&C 93:29-31).

The orthodox interpretation of this is that just as God has always existed, so man -- or the uncreated intelligence at the core of man -- has always existed. I would interpret it differently now. "In the beginning" does not after all imply a beginningless eternity. God was in the beginning. The beginning was an act, and God was in that act, and God was that act. Man, too, was in his own beginning. Man, too, is an agent, and acted himself into existence. Otherwise there is no existence.

Thursday, February 10, 2022

God and agency: A point-by-point response to Kristor

He called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken.

-- John 10:35

This is a response to Kristor's Orthosphere post "God is Not Like Other Creators Such as We," expanded from a comment I left there. Kristor defends the traditional Supergod thesis and maintains that it is consistent with real human agency ("free will").

Since this post will basically be a sustained attack on the sort of Christian orthodoxy Kristor represents, let me make it clear at the outset that, while I obviously consider metaphysical and theological questions to be of great importance, I do not believe that they define Christianity. Being a true Christian is essentially a matter of love, loyalty, and taking the side of God and his Christ. It is something of which Christ said little children are not only capable but particularly capable, and therefore it has nothing to do with being a competent theologian or metaphysical philosopher. I believe that there have been not only true Christians but saints with a wide variety of metaphysical and theological beliefs -- which is emphatically not to say that all such beliefs are "equally true," but rather that erroneous beliefs and misconceptions are part and parcel of the human condition and do not disqualify one as a Christian. We must be careful not to conflate the categories heretic and apostate. So I acknowledge Kristor as a true Christian. And while, at the object level, I obviously believe that my own theological beliefs are right and his are wrong -- that is what it means for them to be my beliefs -- at the meta level I recognize that we know in part, we prophesy in part. How dim, how confused, how partial and even ludicrous must be a sheep's conception of the nature, origin, and inner life of its shepherd -- and yet his sheep know his voice, and that is what matters: not to know all the facts about God, but to know God; not to have true beliefs about him, but to be true to him.

Now, on with the sustained attack! The indented words are Kristor's, interspersed with my non-indented responses.

To think that God is limited to the same sort of creation that is possible to us stems from a category error about God, that treats him as a being like us.

To put God and Man in two utterly different and irreconcilable categories is to challenge an absolutely central Christian belief: that Jesus Christ is both Man and God. Jesus also taught that God is our Father, that we, too, are children of God -- "and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ" (Rom. 8:17). As I have written elsewhere, if God and Man are utterly different categories, then to say that a particular man is God -- not God disguised as a man, but really a man and really God -- is just as nonsensical as saying that a particular zebra is time.

We creatures can’t create free agents. To think that we can do so is the conceit at the root of strong AI. So, none of our creations can have a jot of freedom. They all express and do only our will, and not their own – however recalcitrant they might appear now and then.

On this we are agreed. Our machines do, ideally, only what we design them to do, and the occasional "recalcitrance" mentioned by Kristor is a result of the fact that we are not the sole cause of the machine's nature and functioning. We make it from pre-existing materials whose nature we can modify only within limits, and it operates in the context of a pre-existing world which provides many influences and inputs that are beyond our control. If it were possible to create a machine from nothing -- and to create not only the machine but the entire world in which it exists and operates -- then that machine would necessarily express and do only the will of its creator.

Now, it is not unusual to hear from critics of Christianity, from the New Atheists, and from apostates of various sorts, that if God created us ex nihilo, as Christians all – following Genesis 1 and John 1 – agree, then we are to him as our tools are to us: what seem to us then like our own acts are really just his acts, that we carry out the way that a computer program performs calculations we would and could perform ourselves, given time; so we have no real agency, no true freedom.

And Mormons! And Romantic Christians! But Kristor presumably classifies us as non-Christian apostates, since he states that all Christians believe that God created us ex nihilo. This doctrine is of course not in the Bible in any unambiguous form, as the proof-texts he cites demonstrate. The verb translated as create in Genesis 1 means primarily to fashion something out of existing materials, and the opening verse may also be translated, "When God began to create the heaven and the earth, the earth was without form and void" -- meaning that he created from chaos, not from nothing at all. John 1 is even more poetic and ambiguous, and it explains "all things were made by him" by adding "without him was not anything made that was made" -- leaving open the possibility that some things were never "made" at all. Of course these passages are consistent with ex nihilo creation as well, and I am not trying to use them as proof-texts of my own. My point is that the ex nihilo theory is just that, a metaphysical theory, and is very far from being a central and undeniable Christian teaching.

They point out, rightly, that the notion we are not free contradicts all our experience; and, furthermore, makes both sin and the sinner’s choice of repentance and his turn to the Lord the motions of a robot – which renders Christianity radically incoherent.

Agreed.

It is a telling argument, which has motivated many minds to depart from faith. But it fails, because it extrapolates the scope of our powers – in particular, our incompetence to create free agents – to God.

No. Extrapolation is empirical and inductive: We observe that no known being is able to create a free agent, and therefore in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we assume that all unknown beings have a similar inability. No one is making that kind of argument. The argument that no one, not even God, can create a free agent is not an extrapolation from empirical observations but rather a metaphysical argument from first principles. In fact, free will is not empirically observable, except arguably in oneself, and is therefore not susceptible to the sort of extrapolative reasoning Kristor imputes to people like me. We don't observe that none of the machines we create have free will (perhaps my computer freely chooses to do what it is programmed to do, except when it instead chooses to malfunction); we assume it on metaphysical grounds. And those grounds are not dependent on the premise that the machine was created by a finite and contingent being.

That extrapolation doesn’t work. If God is as men have always construed him – is not, i.e., a mere contingent being, thus himself caused by some other(s), at most a god like Apollo – then he is in an utterly different category of being than any other.

No, this does not follow. From the idea that God is an unmoved mover it does not follow that he is the only unmoved mover and thus "in an utterly different category of being." To have free will just is to be an unmoved mover, the terminus of chains of causation, one who acts without being caused to do so by anything or anyone else.

Classical theology essentially argues that agency must exist, because otherwise nothing would ever happen since no chain of causation would ever get started (the world would be "all dominoes and no fingers"), and concludes that there must be a First Cause to set everything in motion. Combining this insight with the reality of human free will, though, we can postulate that God is (in this respect) the same sort of being as we are -- namely, a free agent with the ability to initiate causal chains.

(Of course there is still an obvious sense in which God is, from our perspective, "in a class of his own," making it foolish to extrapolate the details of his nature from those of our own -- but, as I have said, extrapolation is not actually what we are doing in this case.)

Then from the creative limitations of such beings as we, we may not infer *anything at all* about his creative power. And there is no reason whatever to think that a being who (unlike contingent beings such as we) is necessary – and as necessary thus also eternal and the ultimate, first, unmoved mover and cause of all other things, ergo infinitely greater than we, with powers categorically different from and greater than ours – could not create free agents like us, the angels, gods, and demons. Nothing we might infer from our own powers as contingent and thus limited causal agents could possibly warrant such a conclusion about a causal agent who is unlimited.

Again, it is not an inference based on the assumption that God has similar limitations to our own. I doubt whether anyone would really reason in that way, assuming that if we mortals are unable to do a particular thing, then God -- a being vastly more powerful than ourselves -- is likely also unable to do it. Even those like myself who do not presuppose an "omnipotent" Supergod would never confidently assert that any particular thing is impossible for God unless it is logically impossible, impossible even in principle. Extrapolating from our own empirically observed limitations would be silly.

Here's why I believe that God cannot create free agents from nothing. If I am a free agent, then my actions at least are not caused by God and do not come from God. If they were caused by God, they would be his actions, not mine, and I would not be an agent. Therefore, if I am a free agent (or if anyone is), it follows that God is not, as Kristor calls him the "cause of all other things." He didn't create absolutely everything out of absolutely nothing, because at least some things (my free actions) are not his work. They come from somewhere else -- and obviously, if they are truly my actions, what they come from is me. Therefore, however true it may be to say that God is my Father and Creator, he didn't create everything about me, and he didn't create me from nothing. Some aspect of myself comes from outside God and God's creation, is an unmoved mover in its own right -- and is, in that way, like God, a god -- very much "with a small g" for the time being, but potentially a joint-heir with Christ.

None of this is comprehensible within Kristor's metaphysics, with its assumption that God is "necessary" and everything else is "contingent." I reject that whole system of classifying beings, since necessity just-is inherently relative and contingent. Everything which is necessarily true has the form of an if-then: If a is part of b, then b is necessarily greater than a; if P is true, then the negation of P is necessarily false; and so on. Absolute necessity, where the word absolute is used literally, is nonsense. The only explanation of God's supposed "necessary existence" that I have ever seen is Anselm's tautological observation that if God didn't exist, God wouldn't be God -- an example of contingent necessity (for all x, if x is God then x exists) fallaciously presented as absolute, and equally applicable to everything, since every predicate presupposes existence. I attribute the existence of God, and other agents, not to "necessity" but to agency. At bottom, each agent -- each source of free acts, the irreducible core at the heart of each Self or Soul -- exists because it chooses to. (Once an agent exists, it is impossible for it to choose not to exist, so in that sense agents do have a sort of "necessary existence." For more on all this, see my post "On the origin of agents by means of -- agency.") To refuse to accept agency as the ultimate reason for anything, to insist that it be explicable in terms or chance and necessity, is to accept metaphysical premises whose logical conclusion is that agency does not exist.

Which is fortunate, because from that conclusion much incoherence follows. To take just one of them: if our creator is a being like us, then we are beings like him, and so are Moloch, Ahriman, and Azazel. In that case, there are no categorically authoritative moral laws: reality is then rather a moral chaos, or at best a mobocracy, in which the choices and preferences of Lucifer, Adam, and Stalin are just as legitimate as those of YHWH.

If God is "a being like us" in the Osbornean sense of being "just a slob like one of us," just another being with nothing in particular to distinguish him from any other, then of course it does follow that he has no particular moral authority. But no one is making any such claim; if God does not mean, at minimum, "a being vastly greater than any of us," the word has no meaning. Kristor is actually talking about God being "like us" in one very specific sense: that he cannot create a free agent, and neither can we. Is that what makes God a source of "categorically authoritative moral laws" -- his ability to create free agents out of nothing? If there is any logical relationship at all between those two things, it is not exactly an obvious one.

What does make God a source of categorically authoritative moral laws? Well, that's a question to be answered by those who share Kristor's basic metaphysical framework. My own has no more use for "categorically authoritative moral laws" than it has for necessary vs. contingent beings. Morality, like existence, is not about absolute necessity but about agency.

Kristor apparently believes that everyone has an absolute moral duty to serve God because God has characteristics x, y, and z (including, I gather, the ability to create free agents). My own understanding of morality is that of Joshua: "And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve" (Josh. 24:15). I love, serve, and align myself with God not because I feel myself bound by some categorical moral duty -- some absolute ought magicked up out of is-statements about God by the same logical legerdemain that pretends to derive God's very existence from the law of non-contradiction -- but because I choose to do so.

But, but, but -- isn't that moral chaos? Doesn't that mean that Satan's choices are just as legitimate as God's? Well -- yes. That's why God allows Satan to be Satan and allows us to choose to serve Satan rather than God if we wish. In human society, of course, enforcing a moral consensus is often politically necessary or expedient -- but, as Kristor himself has observed, it would be the height of folly to assume that these same human necessities apply to God. Ultimately, from God's point of view, everyone -- even Satan -- has an absolute "right" to do whatever he wishes. Ultimately, morality really is relative -- relative to one's chosen goal or end. If your goal is Heaven, you should follow Jesus Christ. If your goal is the cessation of all suffering, you should follow the Buddha. If your goal is hell, you should follow the devil. There's no arguing with those ultimate choices; God respects them, and so do I. The only absolutely wrong moral choices are the refusals to choose, the self-defeating attempts to have one's cake and eat it: "Eat, drink, and be merry; nevertheless, fear God . . . yea, lie a little, take the advantage of one because of his words, dig a pit for thy neighbor; there is no harm in this; . . . and at last we shall be saved in the kingdom of God" (2 Ne. 28:8).

To think that God is the same sort of being as we – as the king is the same sort of being as his subjects, or as the father is the same sort of being as his son – is to reduce him to our sort of being; and that is to dethrone him qua God, and make him a thing among other things. And that ruins Christianity – ruins all other religions whatever, indeed ruins religion per se; for, it is to suppose that there is no being ultimately worthy of worship, but rather only this or that godling or daimon, whose wrath we must somehow contrive to appease.

As I have already said, "that God is the same sort of being as we . . . as the father is the same sort of being as his son" -- an idea which Kristor rejects because it "ruins Christianity" -- actually is Christianity. The whole point of Christianity is that Jesus Christ, a man, is the Son of God and is the same sort of Being as his Father. There is a religion that teaches that God is utterly and categorically different from man and that to call any man the Son of God is a blasphemy at which "the heavens almost rupture therefrom and the earth splits open and the mountains collapse in devastation" (Sura 19), but that religion is not Christianity.

As for the whole business of "worship" -- and the underlying metaphysical distinctions between dulia and latria and all that -- this is yet another thing that belongs to Kristor's metaphysical world and not my own. I cannot provide my own reasons for why God alone is "ultimately worthy of worship" any more than I can give my own account of "categorically imperative moral laws"; that is to be argued about by people who accept the assumptions that give the question meaning. I will say, though, that to equate all veneration of anyone other than Supergod with "contriving to appease the wrath of a daimon" is offensive and silly and makes no sense even within Kristor's framework. Would he say that the Virgin Mary, say, is capable of creating free agents? And since she is not, does it follow that she can be described as "a thing among another things," or a "daimon, whose wrath we must somehow contrive to appease"? The whole thing is a non sequitur.

Although this whole post is framed as a response to Kristor's, it should be clear by now that my disagreement with him really comes down to having an entirely different set of metaphysical assumptions, and that any engagement or "debate" between people who inhabit such different philosophical universes is basically impossible. I don't expect him to respond to my points or anything like that. I found his post stimulating because it made me think about why I disagree and helped me clarify some of my own metaphysical beliefs to myself. Perhaps my own post will be similarly useful to someone else.

Saturday, November 20, 2021

"No coincidences" implies a single-author creation

For every house is builded by some man; but he that built all things is God.

-- Hebrews 3:4

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players

-- Shakespeare, As You Like It

According to the Epistle to the Hebrews, every house is built by a human builder or builders, and every house is also built by God. Everything that exists and everything that happens, even when it seems to be (and is, at one level) the work of human actors or blind natural forces, is also something for which we can and should thank God. In my 2018 post "Shining Buddha problems" (written before I was a Christian), I make various attempts at understanding this idea, arriving in the end at what I call the "literary approach."

In trying to come up with some way of conceptualizing such an idea, I keep coming back to the metaphor of a book, which is why I’ve dubbed this the "literary approach." Everything that happens in a work of narrative fiction can be explained on two different levels. Assuming the story makes sense, every event therein will have a cause within the world of the story and can be fully explained on that level without reference to the author -- but from a "higher" point of view, that of the larger world within which the story-world is contained, every detail of the story is without exception the work of the author.

I go on to discuss how this metaphor can be used to conceptualize the idea of a "meaningful coincidence" -- or the coincidence which at another level is no coincidence at all.

Take, for example, the storm on the heath in the third act of King Lear -- a perfect example of a meaningful coincidence. Viewed from within the story, the raging storm is a natural meteorological event caused by the mechanical unfolding of the mindless laws of physics, and the fact that it coincides so nicely with Lear’s psychological rage, and with the impending descent of Britain into political chaos, is just that: a coincidence. There is no within-story causal connection between the storm and what it mirrors -- and if there were -- if, say, Shakespeare had portrayed the gods specially arranging the storm for the purpose of providing a meteorological counterpoint to Lear’s psychological state -- that would be aesthetically objectionable . . . . But from a point of view that transcends the story itself, we can see that Shakespeare clearly arranged the coincidence on purpose and that we are therefore justified in considering it meaningful.

Even in King Lear, though, it seems that there are real coincidences -- truly meaningless coincidences, intended neither by the characters nor by the author. When Kent says, "the poor distressed Lear's i' the town; who sometime, in his better tune, remembers," only a person with a particularly strange way of thinking would notice the name Israel spelled backwards and connect it with Judges 2, where Israel is "greatly distressed" because, while they do sometimes in their better tune remember the Lord and serve him, they keep backsliding into idolatry. Surely no such message was intended either by Kent or by the Bard -- nor, if I may presume so to speculate, by God himself -- and yet there it is. There are so very many possible connections one could notice, it seems impossible that they could all be intended, all meaningful, all not-really-coincidental.

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In a comment on my post "No escape from coincidence," Bruce Charlton also proposes a literary analogy, even choosing the same author as an illustration.

Since this world is being-created by God, it is coherent at a spiritual level. Some of this coherence is important for salvation or theosis, which is the purpose of creation. These are the synchronicities.
But some of the coherence is an unintended by-product of the sheer fact of coherence of creation.
An analogy might be a good Shakespeare play - which has that coherence to it which is a product of deliberate authorial intention (coming via the author's mind); but there are other coherences (or 'symbolisms') which may be discovered by the scholar - and which are unintended products of the fact that this is a play, written by one Man, and was written so that it held-together.
If we look, there are many cross-correlated aspects of a play that are secondary to the nature of the thing, the fact of its coherence as a work of art.

I don't think this quite gets us to "no coincidences." There are just so many different things that could be connected, and so many different ways of connecting them, that it just seems inevitable that connections should arise "by chance," without reflecting either intention or "the sheer fact of coherence." Of course, this is a bit of a metaphysical assumption, and it's not as if there's any control group to compare things to. I mean, the world created by God is all we know, so we can't exactly look at an incoherent world that wasn't created and see if it differs from the real world in terms of the presence or absence of coincidences.

Using the literary analogy, though, let us look at what I would consider to be a truly meaningless coincidence in a coherent literary work by a single author. Our earlier "Lear's i' the town" example will not serve, because it is a coincidence between something in the text and something outside of it. If the text represents the created world, though, all coincidences must be within the text, without reference to anything outside it. (Obviously, any apparent coincidences we can observe in this world will be between various features of this created world, not between the world and something outside of it.) No Shakespearean example comes to mind, so let's take one from the Book of Mormon instead.

Remember, to be carnally-minded is death, and to be spiritually-minded is life eternal. . . . I know that the words of truth are hard against all uncleanness; but the righteous fear them not, for they love the truth and are not shaken (2 Nephi 9:39-40).

It is an old Sunday-school standby among Mormons that "spiritually-minded is life eternal" (a slight modification of a phrase from Romans 8:6) forms the acronym SMILE -- and this is juxtaposed in the text with the implication that the words of truth would make the unclean frown but the righteous smile. (A biblical equivalent would be Matthew 7:7, where the first letters of the three clauses spell out ASK.) The word smile is also found in the BoM, so this counts as a proper within-"world" coincidence.

Now I am reasonably certain that this is not an intentionally created feature of the text. Obviously the Nephite authors writing in Egyptian could not have had English acronyms in mind, and while Joseph Smith could in principle have chosen this particular wording for its acronym potential, I see no evidence of that in the text. (Wouldn't he have paired it with something like "the flesh-regarding ones will never see life"?)

Here's another sentence, taken from a BBC article (qv), that coincidentally includes a series of words that form the acronym SMILE: "Although they had a tough time, none of our volunteers had to put up with the wide range of lethal microbes that killed so many in London's East End in the mid-Victorian period."

I would say that this differs from the 2 Nephi SMILE in that the coincidence does not seem in any way appropriate, intelligible, or meaningful. No one would say, "What a coincidence!" if you pointed it out. It doesn't even really count as a coincidence -- by which I mean it's not what people have in mind when they say "There are no coincidences."

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Anthony Hopkins has a name that resembles ant-honey and thus suggests hymenopterid insects, and the poster for the movie he is most famous for, The Silence of the Lambs, also features an insect, though one of a different order. Note also how Mark Antony (source of the English name Anthony) fell in love with a woman whose name resembles Coleoptera, another non-hymenopterid order of insects, and was co-triumvir with Lepidus -- Lepidoptera, of course, being the very order of insects to appear on the movie poster for Silence of the Lambs! What are the odds? The movie is about someone called Buffalo Bill who skins people. Buffalo is by far the biggest city in New York that ends with the letter O, and Anthony Hopkins's first name ends with ONY. Buffalo is called the Nickel City. and both Nickel and Hob (whence Hopkins) were formerly used as names for goblins. Hob, is a diminutive in which the initial letter of the original name (Robert) changes, and one of the few other English diminutives with this property is Bill, so Hob suggests both Buffalo and Bill. After the Hob element comes kins, which is just an anagram of skin -- so "Buffalo Bill skins" is right there in his name. We might also note that only two of the characters in this movie bear the title "doctor," and that both of them are played by actors named Philip Anthony H. who go by Anthony rather than Philip: Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins, and Philip Anthony Mair Heald. Sir and Mair are also equivalent because of the similar meanings of the Latin roots (senior, "the elder," and maior, "the greater") from which they derive. I could go on and on like this, and I've never even seen the damn movie! I picked Hopkins at random and just started writing.

These are junk coincidences, pseudo-coincidences, the kind of thing you'd find in "King-Kill/33" or Finnegans Wake (Downard and Joyce, sad James and happy James). Is anyone really prepared to maintain that they are all meaningful, all not-really-coincidences, all put there by God on purpose?

Anything as complex as the universe -- or even just as complex as Finnegans Wake -- is inevitably going to include billions and billions of coincidences above and beyond those intended by its creator -- yes, even by an omnipotent and omniscient Creator. It's statistically inevitable.

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But this literary analogy has led us astray. Who noticed that "Lear's i' the town" contains the name Israel spelled backwards? I did -- I, one of the readers of King Lear. But if all the world is a stage -- if the "literary work" we are considering is the universe itself -- then we are not readers or spectators but characters -- all the men and women merely players.

As someone who exists outside the world of King Lear, I can notice coincidental patterns in it that were never intended by the author -- truly coincidental patterns which must inevitably exist as a matter of statistical necessity. If a character in the play is made to notice a "coincidence" within the world of that play, though -- well that noticing was deliberately written into the script by the author, and we can therefore be absolutely certain that it is not really a coincidence at all but an intentionally designed and potentially meaningful feature of the text. If this universe was truly created by a divine Author, and all that happens in it was scripted by him -- if we poor players are not in any sense co-creators but simply follow a preordained script as we strut and fret our hour upon the stage -- then there would still be coincidences in the universe, but we characters could never notice any of them. "There are no coincidences," while technically false, would still be practically true for us. Noticing something and wondering if it was "just a coincidence," we could confidently reason, "No, nothing we notice is ever a coincidence, for we are characters in a play. Everything we notice, we notice by the grace of the author, and that means that it is not a coincidence but an intentional and meaningful feature of the play."

This is what I mean by the title of this post: "No coincidences" implies a single-author creation. It implies that everything in this universe, including everything we ourselves do and say and think, is fated, "scripted" by God. It means we have no free will but only a simulation thereof -- just as Hamlet seems to deliberate and vacillate and finally make a decision, but in fact every detail of everything he says and does is really decided by Shakespeare.

But we do have free will, and this means that coincidences -- true coincidences -- are inevitable. If I write a novel in which Bob and Alice meet by chance in a coffee shop, the meeting does not really happen by chance at all, because "Bob's decision" and "Alice's decision" are in fact made by me, the author, and I deliberately made them to coincide. In a world with real free will, though, Bob can freely choose to go to the coffee shop at a particular time, Alice can independently make a similar decision -- and these two decisions, being the work of two different free agents, would be causally unconnected in deepest possible sense and as true a coincidence as it is possible to imagine.

I think this is perhaps the metaphysical foundation of my delight in coincidences, my insistence that they are coincidences, and my resistance to the idea that "there are no coincidences." A coincidence as such may be meaningless, but in a deeper sense it is an indicator that we live in a world that has coincidences -- an open-ended world, co-created by many truly independent free agents. It is a reminder that free will is real, and as such its very meaninglessness reveals the meaningfulness of our existence.

Monday, August 2, 2021

If Heaven is reabsorption, then Creation had no point

In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Uriel"

The return to the Father, by resurrection, is like reabsorption into one's source. Just as you are not consciously awake while sleeping, so you will have no conscious recognition of this ultimate glorification. . . . Imagine for a moment that God is a pond of clear water, so still and smooth that it is not visible; one cannot see the still clear water, but can only see through it. It seems invisible. But when conflict is introduced the surface of the pond is violated and waves run counter to each other and there is splashing and chaos, a scene of violence, making the pond very visible. . . . Ultimately, the redemption of the world will be a cessation of the splashing, of such changing, and there will only be the nature of God left.

-- Roger Hathaway, The Mystic Passion

God's gonna trouble the water

-- Negro spiritual

It is a very common idea among mystics, including Christian mystics like Roger Hathaway, that salvation ultimately means losing one's individuality and being reabsorbed into God. In Heaven, Hathaway says, "There is no longer a self, nor even a history of one . . . . The conscious individual self doesn't exist, even in memory. There is only 'Godness.'"

This is basically the Indian idea of nirvana, expressed in theistic terms. The ideal of nirvana arises from the recognition of the futility of the merely cyclical. Samsara -- the endless cycle of birth and death, birth and death -- is intolerable. Why gain only to lose? Why grow into maturity only to decline into senility? Why be born only to die? The point, then, is to escape from the wheel of samsara and enter nirvana -- or re-enter it, rather, since it is from that state that we originally came. This of course implies the corollary that samsara-and-nirvana is just another pointless cycle like birth-and-death -- a sort of higher-order "meta-samsara." A Taiwanese Buddhist friend of mine once explained that we were all originally Buddhas but had fallen into the world of maya, and that Enlightenment and parinirvana were a return to that original state. "But if Buddhas can fall into maya," I said, "how is becoming a Buddha a permanent escape from maya and samsara?" The answer of course is that it isn't and can't be. If state X led to state Y, then a return to state X is obviously no guarantee against Y. In vain produced, all rays return.

Returning to the Christian version of this doctrine, as expressed by Roger Hathaway (but certainly not only by him!), if there is "no longer a self, nor even a history of one," then the reabsorption -- the return to a former state -- is complete; and whatever it was that caused our "fall" from that former state to this present one, it can be expected to happen again. This is the myth of Sisyphus -- generally understood to be an encapsulation of hell, not of Heaven.

But suppose that what originally caused our "fall" from Heaven was God's free choice to create us as separate beings -- and that upon our return God will choose never to do so again. The Sisyphean cycle is thus avoided, but we are left with the question -- What was the point? Why create in the first place beings whose only purpose is to return to their pre-created state? It seems to reduce God to the level of the G.O.D. of York -- who, you will recall, marched his ten thousand men up a hill and then marched them down again.

There is certainly a sense in which Heaven is a "return" to God, but it cannot be entirely that. Nothing makes sense or has any point unless Heaven is a fundamentally new state.

Monday, April 19, 2021

Satan divided against himself

Disclaimer: My terms are borrowed (by way of Terry Boardman and Bruce Charlton) from Rudolf Steiner, but I cannot claim to be using them in anything like a strictly Steinerian sense. In fact I have read only a tiny fraction of Steiner's voluminous output and assimilated only a tiny fraction of that. However, his demonology has long since taken on a life of its own.

These are just some tentative notes. I neither pretend nor aspire to be an expert on evil.

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Sorath

MEPHISTO:

I am the spirit that negates.

And rightly so, for all that comes to be

Deserves to perish wretchedly;

'Twere better nothing would begin.

Thus everything that your terms, sin,

Destruction, evil represent—

That is my proper element.

-- Goethe's Faust (Walter Kaufmann's translation)

By Sorath I mean the principle of evil at its purest, the devil of all devils, Goethe's "spirit that negates." God is the love-motivated Creator, and Sorath is the hate-motivated anti-Creator, who opposes all creation -- who thinks it "better nothing would begin" and that all that has begun "deserves to perish wretchedly."

Sorath's ultimate goal is that nothing at all exist, including Sorath himself. Does Sorath exist, then? Perhaps not. Perhaps it is not possible that he should. It may be possible to be God, even to be Lucifer, but not to be Sorath. After all, who can fail to see the self-contradictory nature of the statement, "I am the spirit that negates"? Sorath should probably not be thought of as a person at all, but as the hypothetical limit to which evil converges. Appropriately, Sorath is not a name from folklore, not a demon people are actually said to have interacted with, but an artificial creation of Steiner's, made from the Hebrew numerals for 666.

God is, ultimately, a Person -- and, pace Yeats, there is no Deus Inversus, no equal and opposite God of Evil, no Angra Mainyu ("Ahriman" in the original Zoroastrian, non-Steiner sense of that name). Devils who are persons certainly exist, but the devil of all devils is an abstraction, a mathematical limit which none of them can quite reach. And the name we give to this limit, this outer darkness, is also mathematical: Sorath.

We may nevertheless speak, and not altogether figuratively, of "what Sorath wants" and what it means to "serve Sorath."

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What Sorath is up against

Sorath is against creation and against Creator -- that is, against existence, against being as such -- so any understanding of Sorath's battle plan must begin with answering that ever-popular question, Why is there something rather than nothing? (And, yes, I intend to answer that little question en passant and then forge ahead with my demonology. This attitude is, incidentally, why there is something rather than nothing posted on this blog.)

Descartes, meet Berkeley. Berkeley, Descartes. Let's have each of you chuck your most famous Latin catchphrase into this here crucible and see what comes out, shall we? And . . . splendid: Esse est cogitari aut cogitare. "To be is to be thought, or to think." Sorath's enemies are thinkers -- God, the gods, and such humbler beings as ourselves -- and the combined harmonious thought of these thinkers, which is the creative Logos.

New thinkers think themselves into existence, oh, probably all the time -- beginning as "minor presences, riffraff of consciousness" (Iris Murdoch's phrase) and then, some of them, developing from there, some even to the threshold of Godhood itself.

But this is likely a one-way street. Thinkers don't ever think themselves out of existence -- how could they? How could you cease, by an act of will, to have an active will? To say, or think, "I will my own annihilation," you have to say I will. Existence cannot be undone.

Thinkers -- excepting perhaps those dragons and titans and hecatoncheires who came into being before there was a Logos -- have a natural tendency to think and act in harmony with the Logos. At first, at the most rudimentary levels of development, this tendency is almost wholly passive and unconscious. "For behold, the dust of the earth moveth hither and thither . . . at the command of our great and everlasting God" (Hel. 12:8) and "even the wind and the sea obey him" (Mark 4:41).

As a thinker develops, though, and becomes increasingly active and conscious, the possibility of deliberately rebelling against the Logos begins to emerge. Sorath wants to persuade as many as possible to choose that path, with the ultimate goal of undoing creation, reducing the cosmos, if not to nothing at all, at least to chaos.

The problem, though, is how to persuade anyone to join you when you have quite literally nothing to offer. The devil of all devils wants everyone "to choose captivity and death, . . . that all men might be miserable like unto himself" (2 Ne. 2:27). Uh, what's the selling point again?

Ultimately, many can and will choose just that -- will say, "Evil, be thou my good!" and walk willingly into hell -- but they must be brought to that point by a circuitous route. That's where Lucifer and Ahriman come in.

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Lucifer

In The Song of the Strange Ascetic (which I discuss here), G. K. Chesterton imagines how he would have lived if he "had been a Heathen" and expresses bafflement at the choice of an actual heathen called Higgins -- a sort of Caspar Milquetoast of heathenism -- not to live that life. Heathenism, we are to infer, is as much wasted on the heathens as youth is on the young.

A heathen Chesterton would have filled his life with wine, love affairs, dancing girls, and glorious military campaigns against the Chieftains of the North. He would have served Lucifer, in other words -- pursued forbidden pleasures -- and doesn't quite get this Ahriman fellow whom the prissy bourgeois Higgins chooses to serve instead.

Lucifer is all about wine, women, and song. Those who follow Lucifer are motivated by pleasure rather than the avoidance of pain, and are willing to embrace risk, danger, adventure, even a sort of heroism, in its pursuit. They do not shy away from violence and may even revel in it. Alcibiades, Casanova, Blackbeard -- Falstaff, even. (Not Epicurus, who, despite the modern connotation of his name, was a consummate Higgins.) This is the most relatable and accessible form of evil, the sort a good man like Chesterton could easily fantasize about embracing. "Gateway drug" is the term, I believe.

Why call this aspect of evil Lucifer? Well, because Steiner did, obviously, but we can also invent an ex post facto etymology for it. Lucifer, "light-bearer," is from the Latin lux, "light," but we can imagine that it derives instead from luxus, "luxury, debauchery." Also, Lucifer was originally a name for the planet Venus -- whose other name is that of the ancient Roman goddess of sex, drugs, and rock-'n'-roll.

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Ahriman

How did Satan become Satan? Joseph Smith, the Prophet, proposes a somewhat novel origin story for this supervillain: One of the angels comes before the Lord and proposes, "send me, . . . and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost." And it is for this offer of universal salvation -- because, that is, he "sought to destroy the agency of man" -- that he is cast out of heaven and becomes the devil (see Moses 4:1-4).

If Lucifer seeks pleasure, Ahriman seeks control. Note that this is not necessarily the same thing as seeking power. Those who serve Ahriman may seek to be in control themselves, but more often their goal may simply be that everything be under control. Hierarchy is of Ahriman, because even those who are far from the top have no objection to it. Even an Ahrimanist who has the ability to control things personally will generally defer these personal decisions to a system or algorithm, personal responsibility being unpleasantly risky. A near-perfect example of Ahrimanic man is the 2020s birdemicist, happy to submit to house arrest, universal surveillance and censorship, and forced medical procedures -- rather than take a chance of catching the flu. "Non serviam" is Lucifer's motto, not Ahriman's; if Ahrimanism were condensed into a two-word motto, it would be, "Safety first" -- or, if more than two words are needed, "None are safe until all are safe" ("that one soul shall not be lost").

Lucifer's motivation is positive: the pursuit of pleasure. Ahriman's is negative: the elimination of risk. Lucifer's focus is personal; Ahriman's, universal. Thus Ahriman, though less obviously "evil" than Lucifer, is actually considerably closer than Lucifer to Sorath, to the pure and universal "spirit that negates."

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Evilution

Suicide has cause and stillbirth, logic; and cancer, simple as a flower, blooms.

-- Karl Shapiro

Conceptually, Sorath is primary, and I have discussed him first. Chronologically, in the evolutionary development of evil, he comes last. The natural progression is from Good to Luciferic, from Luciferic to Ahrimanic, and from Ahrimanic to Sorathic.

First, the good are tempted by forbidden pleasures, and by forbidden means of pursuing good ends, and embrace the ethos of Abbey of Thélème: Fay ce que vouldras, "Do what you want."

This Luciferic playing-with-fire leads to predictable results, people begin to feel that the world has become a chaotic and dangerous place, and they turn to Ahriman. We can see a clear example of this if we look back at the past half-century: As the flower children (those fleurs de mal) blossomed into flower fogeys, a movement that began with free speech, free love, and letting it all hang out evolved organically into the world of PC, sexual harassment prevention training, and a superstitious horror of the "inappropriate."

As Ahriman drains the world of its charm and turns everything into management and bureaucracy, as he extinguishes joy and the memory of joy, as everyone, to one degree or another, is assimilated into his soulless system, mutual respect becomes impossible, more and more people live in a state of barely suppressed rage, and the prospect of burning everything to the ground becomes increasingly attractive. Sorath has arrived.

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The Blood War

When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle,
And sails rejoicing in the flood of Death;
When souls are torn to everlasting fire,
And fiends of Hell rejoice upon the slain,
O who can stand?

-- William Blake

In the Dungeons and Dragons cosmology, one of the defining features of the "Lower Planes" (hell) is the Blood War -- the interminable conflict between the chaotic-evil (Luciferic) demons and the lawful-evil (Ahrimanic) devils, with a third class of neutral-evil (Sorathic?) fiends manipulatively playing each side against the other. So -- did the D&D guys get hell more or less right? Was old Gary Gygax privy to one or two of the deep things of Satan?

If the Blood War did not exist, Sorath would have to invent it. Remember what Sorath wants -- for men to hate the good as such and to pursue evil strictly for the evulz -- and how contrary to human nature that is. How to get us humans to sail against the wind of our own deepest nature? By tacking, of course.

Sorath's goal: Avoid good, pursue evil
Human nature: Pursue good, avoid evil
Lucifer tack: Sacrifice the avoidance of evil in order to pursue good (e.g. to seek pleasure)
Ahriman tack: Sacrifice the pursuit of good in order to avoid evil (e.g. to be "safe")

Clever little devil, right? But so far this is just tacking, and no one ever said tacking was hell. War is hell. That's the next step. Notice that the Lucifer tack and the Ahriman tack are polar opposites and are both evil. With just a bit of nudging, we get this:

Sorathized Lucifer: Sacrifice the avoidance of evil in order to destroy Ahriman!
Sorathized Ahriman: Sacrifice the pursuit of good in order to crush Lucifer!

Rage against the machine! Machinate against the rage! Behead those who insult Sorath -- who, for his part, claps his broad wings above the battle and sails rejoicing in the flood of Death. O who can stand?

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La fin de Satan?

And he called them unto him, and said unto them in parables, "How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end.

-- Mark 3:23-26

Given what we have discussed thus far, what are we to make of this statement attributed to Jesus?

Victor Hugo's unfinished poem does not really address the matter; I have pilfered the title because of its ambiguity. La fin de Satan could mean the annihilation of Satan, or it could mean Satan's objective, his telos (which is in fact the word used in Mark) -- and, wait, are those even two different things? Didn't we say that "Sorath's ultimate goal is that nothing at all exist, including Sorath himself"? La fin de Satan est la fin de Satan.

Jesus, in the passage quoted, is responding to the claim that "by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils." The implication is that devils obviously don't work that way, because if they did, the whole enterprise of devilry would have collapsed long ago, torn apart by infighting. The continued existence of Satan is proof that Satan is not in the habit of undermining himself, and thus that the whole idea of a power-of-Satan-compels-you exorcist is inherently implausible.

Everything I've written in this post thus far -- Lucifer vs. Ahriman, the Blood War, all that -- seems to be saying that the kingdom of Satan succeeds by being divided against itself, and thus that Jesus was wrong. Well, as a Christian, I obviously can't leave it at that!

The easy way out would be to point out that this quote from Jesus does not appear in the Fourth and most authoritative Gospel, that Mark consists of notes compiled by a non-witness, and that Jesus may well never have said anything like this. Honestly, though, it sounds quite Jesusy to me, and I believe he probably did say it or something like it.

Another possibility is that Jesus was speaking specifically about exorcism. Back when I still believed the mainstream idea that Mark's was the most trustworthy Gospel and was focusing my studies on it, I went so far as to read an entire book called Demonic Possession in the New Testament, by William Menzies Alexander. Alexander draws a distinction between possession by "demons" or "unclean spirits" (a condition cured by Jesus on many occasions) and possession by "Satan" (attributed only to Judas Iscariot). The latter (which also has the distinction of being the only "possession" mentioned in the Fourth Gospel) is clearly moral in nature and leads to damnation. In contrast, those troubled by "unclean spirits" are treated as victims who bear no moral responsibility for their condition. The other important point that Alexander makes is that the wave of demon-possession described in Mark was a unique phenomenon, localized in time and space. With a few ambiguous exceptions like the case of King Saul, there is scarcely a hint of demon-possession in the Old Testament, nor does demon-possession in the Marcan mold appear to happen much in the modern world. (Satan-possession, in contrast, seems to be at an all-time high.) The demoniacs of first-century Palestine, a bit like the Convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard centuries later, appear to have represented a sort of spiritual outbreak or epidemic which flared up, spread through the population, and then burnt itself out -- with this last process perhaps expedited by the activity of Jesus and his disciples. If this phenomenon was the "Satan" Jesus' accusers were referring to, it would appear that its kingdom didn't stand, and it did have an end.

Something else to keep in mind is that Jesus' responses to critics or those who tried to catch him in his words generally worked on two levels. At the level of mere repartee, their purpose was to pwn and silence his opponents; at a deeper level, they were "parables" -- riddles -- conveying more substantive truth. For example, Jesus' famous statement about the unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost was also a response to accusations that he used demonic power to cast out demons. As rhetoric, its message was, "Be very careful calling something demonic which may actually be from the Holy Ghost" -- but we can hardly conclude that mistakenly thinking a particular "miracle" may be demonic is the unforgivable sin! The deeper meaning of this statement is, well, deep, and a great deal has been thought and written about it -- almost all of which, rightly, departs from the statement's original rhetorical context.

So focusing too much on the conclusion "and therefore exorcisms are never performed by demonic power" may be much too narrow a constraint when it comes to understanding the deeper meaning of "How can Satan cast out Satan?" Rhetorically, it is supposed to work as a reductio ad absurbum: Satan obviously wouldn't undermine his own power; therefore, no exorcist is a servant of Satan. But those who think it out realize at that what it reduces to isn't absurd at all: Satan cannot stand, but hath an end. I mean, what's the alternative, really? That Satan and his works will endure forever? That Satan -- ce monstre délicat -- has eternal life?

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What if they gave a Blood War and nobody came?

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil.

-- Matt. 5:39

Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil, . . . durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, "The Lord rebuke thee."

-- Jude 9

Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight."

-- John 18:36

But Jesus said unto him, "Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead."

-- Matt. 8:22

We are not here to fight in the Blood War. We are not here to contend against Satan and those who serve him. The example of the Messiah conspicuously not overthrowing the Empire should have made that clear enough. We are here to learn, to serve God, and to follow Jesus to eternal life. Anything else is a distraction.