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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Sat Jun 28, 2003 1:13 pm
Subject: Reply to "Pantheism & Christianity"

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=65078

Reply to "Pantheism and Christianity" (see below for excerpts from
post)

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=58816

Reader response:

Dear Sitaram:

Well, I haven't digested your entire 3 emails. It is a bit daunting a
task! However, in brief, I don't believe that things like thoughts,
ideas, the mind, consciousness, spirit, the soul, etc.,
actually "exist." They don't exist at all in the same way that the
physical universe (time, space, matter, energy) exists. For example,
in the case of "mind", I would say there certainly is the brain,
neurons, pattern of connections between neurons, electrochemical
activity, synapses, neurotransmitters, and all that. Memories
are "stored" physically by the brain on a cellular or biochemical
level. That's all. They are mere patterns of physical things. If the
brain is damaged in some way, then memories and powers of thought are
lost commensurate with the damaged. If the brain is dead, decays,
decomposes, etc., then all brain function ceases with it. There is no
longer any functioning mind at all. There is, therefore, nothing
to "survive the death of the body." There is no immortal soul, in
other words. This, I firmly believe. In a way, Pantheism, to me, is
the position that there is nothing "metaphysical", but if we wish to
deify something, there is no better candidate that the physical
universe itself. The physical universe is thus the beginning and the
end of our invention of gods. The universe IS god, IS divine. There
is no need for any "god" BEYOND the mere physical universe.
Therefore, your emails touching upon what seems to be something
BEYOND merely the brain, as regards the mind, and such things, or
something BEYOND the physical universe, as regards divinity, simply
seems to me to be against the whole point of Pantheism, and besides
runs contrary to my person convictions. But maybe I'm wrong. What do
you think?

========================

Sitaram replies:

I am so delighted that you have taken the time to read all that
material on pantheism and write this thought-provoking response.
Thank you.

Here are some of my thoughts in response, though by no means do I
have any real answers to offer. Nor should anyone presume to think
that I DISAGREE with you or that we are arguing. Ours is a dialogue,
not an argument.

An erotic image is simply an illusion, a gestalt of countless
colored pixels upon our senses. The individual pixels have reality
and existence. The woman in the image has no real existence. And yet
we are aroused by the woman and are not conscious of the individual
pixels. And yet we can respond to this non-existent image because it
is an outer reflection of something which is actually within us and
which RESONATES with that inner woman just as the two arms of a
tuning fork resonate and produce tone.

Should some, but not all of the pixels fade, yet the image of the
woman persists. Cells in our body, and possibly even our brain, are
dying, and yet our individuality and continuity of memory persist.
Lockes and Jeffersons and Lincolns die, yet constitutional democracy
persists. Democracy, a gestalt and illusion of countless pixels of
generations of anonymous humanity which arouses in us noble feelings
of justice and inalienable human rights, persists. Stars explode in
supar nova, yet the starry night sky which fills Kant with wonder and
fills Van Gogh's canvas with intoxicating imagery, persists. And
should this very planet of ours die and grow cold, extinct, is there
not something which yet persists, somewhere, elsewhere in the ever-
collapsing kalaidoscopic telescope of being and reality?

Democracy is our erotic woman, our Statue of Liberty in provocative
pose, a gestalt formed by the myriad pixels of suffering throngs of
humanity which come and go like mist and spray as waves crash upon
the rocky coast. And our libertine lady, provocatively posed, this
non-existent idea of Justice and Truth, is like Dante's Beatrice,
enticing us up a ladder of Divine Ascent, like Socrates' school
mistress Diotema and her teaching on the ladder of love in
Plato's "Symposium".

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/classic/wilson/core/sympos4.htm

Eros is offspring of Poros (Resource) and Penia (poverty) Eros is in
love with what is beautiful; wisdom is very beautiful; therefore is
Eros is a lover of wisdom (a philosopher).

Thus she turns the lover from a purveyor into a pursuer of wisdom
Love is wanting to possess the good forever (206A)

Socrates' ethics, namely, that he has no concept of humans knowingly
loving, pursuing, or doing evil, since for him, to know good is to
love good and therefore will always lead to doing good.

The REAL object of love is not just the good, but giving birth in
beauty (206E), which is, at heart, a desire for immortality:

Men who are pregnant in body turn to women and give birth to children
(209A)

Men who are pregnant in soul turn to youths who are beautiful in body
and soul; when they come together, the lover gives birth to virtuous
acts (209 B-C)

The LADDER OF LOVE 210A (note progress from individual and specific
to general and transcendent):

start by loving one beautiful body (and begetting beautiful ideas):
What is this? Pederasty; on the lowest rung of the ladder; compare to
Pausanias.

generalize from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, and love
all beautiful bodies step up to loving the beauty of another's soul,
and, accordingly, regard the beauty of bodies as a thing of no
importance (note dualism of body and soul: leave behind love of one
to love the other)

love the beauty of a whole sea of knowledge

210E: all of a sudden you will catch sight of something wonderfully
beautiful in its nature, which is the reason for all the lower steps
on the ladder: gaze on the eternal and pure Form of Beauty.

http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Yeats/Rose/ToTheRose.htm

Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate,

I find under the boughs of love and hate,

In all poor foolish things that live a day,

Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

- Yeats

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gogh/starry-night/

http://www.dailycelebrations.com/060502.htm

"Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe... the
starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." ~ Immanuel Kant

The business of philosophy is not to give rules, but to analyze the
private judgments of common reason," said Kant. "Science is
organized. Wisdom is organized life." - Kant

http://www.philosophyslam.org/11_25.html

When Kant died at the age of 80, these words were inscribed on his
tomb: "Two things fill my mind with increasing wonder and awe, the
starry heaven above me and the moral law within me."

Kant believed that no one can say for certain what reality is. They
can only be certain of what reality appears to be to them, because
the human mind molds reality into a form that makes sense to it.
Space and time are "irremovable goggles" and aren't "things" to be
found out in the world. They are only part of the mind's organizing
system.

http://www.publicbookshelf.com/public_html/Outline_of_Great_Books_Volu
me_I/immortalit_bii.html

IMMANUEL KANT - FROM THE CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON

TWO things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder--the
starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me. I need not
search for them, and vaguely guess concerning them, as if they were
veiled in darkness or hidden in the infinite altitude. I see them
before me, and link them immediately with the consciousness of my
existence. The former begins from the spot I occupy in the outer
world of sense, and enlarges my connexion with it to a boundless
extent with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems.

The second begins with my invisible self, my personality, and places
me in a truly infinite world traceable only by the understanding,
with which I perceive I am in an universal and necessary connexion,
as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds.

This view infinitely elevates my value as an intelligence by my
personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent
of the animal and even the whole material world, and reaching by
destiny into the infinite.

But though admiration may stimulate inquiry, it cannot compensate for
the want of it. The contemplation of the world, beginning with the
most magnificent spectacle possible, ended in astrology; and
morality, beginning with the noblest attribute of human nature, ended
in superstition. But after reason was applied to careful examination
of the phenomena of nature a clear and unchangeable insight was
secured into the system of the world. We may entertain the hope of a
like good result in treating of the moral capacities of our nature by
the help of the moral judgement of reason.

(end of Kant excerpt)

========

(Sitaram continues)

Your reply brings to my mind the Platonic notion of the existence of
such mathematical ideas as circles.

In what sense does a circle exist, or beauty or truth or justice
for that matter?

We do know from physics that nothing can be lost, created or
destroyed, but the balance of matter and energy remains somehow
constant and inviolable. Could this inviolable law of physics
itself imply some notion of "salvation", that spirit/soul is neither
created nor destroyed, but simply translated and transmuted.

I am wondering if some "things" are subordinate to the "purpose" of
other things. Are pure mathematical ideas something subordinate to
physical reality, which somehow "arise" as some sort of by-product of
phenomena. Or, is the converse true? Are the events of the physical
world a penumbra of some mathematical eidetic world?

I have lagely been reading an essay on physics and philosophy by
Werner Heisenberg in which he makes a fascinating statement.

"Physics and Philosophy - The Revolution in Modern Science"
Werner Heisenberg

Harper Torchbooks

ISBN 0-06-130549-9

pg. 42

(regarding the Copenhagen theory of quantum)

"I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till
very late at night and ended almost in dispair. Afterwards, alone on
a walk in a nearby park, I repeated to myself again and again the
question, "Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seems to us in
these atomic experiments?"

The final solution was approached in two different ways. The one was
a turning around of the question. Instead of asking: How can one
know the mathematical scheme expressing a given experimental
situation? the other, and very different question was put: Is it true
perhaps, that ONLY such experimental situations can arise in nature
AS CAN BE EXPRESSED in the mathematical formalism.

Does a mathematical model flow forth from each physical phenomenon?
Are the events of the physical world a penumbra of some mathematical
eidetic world?

http://www.math.yorku.ca/Who/Faculty/Steprans/Courses/3500/GodelsTheor
em/lecture.shtml

At the beginning of the twentieth century the world's leading
mathematician, David Hilbert, had proposed a project which, if
successful, would have lead to the complete automation of
mathematics. By this time it had already been established that there
are simple, formal languages in which all of mathematics could be
expressed. (The language of set theory is one example.) Moreover,
there had also been established list of axioms for these formal
systems from which it seemed reasonable that all theorems could be
derived by applying the rules of logic in a sufficiently clever
manner. Observing that statements in a formal language are just
strings of symbols that satisfy certain rules of syntax and that
proofs are just sequences of these strings of symbols that also
satisfy formal rules, the rules of logic, Hilbert argued that the
entire system of mathematical statements and proofs could be analyzed
as a mathematical object itself. Once the behaviour of this object
was sufficiently well understood, it would be possible to develop an
algorithm which, when applied to any statement, would completely
automatically determine its truth. Mathematics would reduce to
nothing more than calculation. The truth of any mathematical
statement, no matter how complicated, could be established by simply
following a set of rules, much like the derivative of any simple
function can be calculated using the rules you learn in calculus.
(Sitaram interjects: Does this mechanical process for arriving at
Truth remind you at all of the cut and dried notion of following some
Ten Commandents or Theocratic laws and automatically acheiving
morality and salvation?)

Is every true statement proveable? Another way of asking the same
question is: Is proof the only tool we need in order to determine the
truth of mathematical statements? Hilbert must certainly have thought
so, since his project was predicted upon the assumption that if an
algorithm for producing proofs could be found, all the true theorems
of mathematics would be established. But the answer supplied by Godel
to the questions just posed is: No! In light of the preceding
discussion, this should seem quite strange. After all, we have not
yet even defined "truth" and we have no way of establishing truth
except for proofs. the startling fact is that in order to put an end
to Hilbert's project, Godel actually exhibited a true mathematical
statement which can not be proved.

One of the key ideas in Godel's proof is closely connected to The
Liar Paradox which can trace its origins the middle of the 4th
century BCE. The paradox arises from the following self referential
sentence: This sentence is false. The problem with the sentence is
that it appears to be neither true nor false since, if it is true it
is false and, if it is false it is true. The idea at the heart of
this paradox was used in the late medieval period by Buridan to
provide a proof of the existence of God. He uses the following pair
of sentences:

God exists.

None of the sentences in this pair is true.

The only consistent way to assign truth values, that is, to have
these two sentence be either true or false, requires making "God
exists" be true. Buridan concluded that God does exist. You might
also ponder the truth value of the sentence: This sentence is true.
It is not as simple as it appears at first glance! The dialogue
Contrapuncticus by D. Hofstadter provides yet another point of view
on this phenomenon.

Is every true statement proveable? This was Hilbert's assumption.
Godel seems to have proved Hilbert wrong.

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/hilbert.html

Hilbert's view on the foundations of geometry is summarized in his
famous statement at the Berlin railway station: "One must be able to
say at all times -- instead of points, straight lines, and planes --
tables, beer mugs, and chairs."

According to rumors from Hilbert's assistant, Hilbert was furious
when he learned of Godel's work. Ian Stewart summarizes the content
of Godel's work as follows: "Godel showed that there are true
statements in arithmetic that can never be proved, and that if anyone
finds a proof that arithmetic is consistent, then it isn't!"

==================

------

Pantheism and Christianity

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=58816

(excerpts):

We often ignore the fact that ideas themselves are as palpably
existent as matter and sense perception. We must bear in mind that
the very IDEA of Christ's life as described in the Gospels, the very
IDEA, notion concept that God should take human birth and lead such a
life of humility, obedience, subjugation and surrender, that very
IDEA ITSELF is potentially sanctifying and transformational for those
who embrace it and internalize it and imitate it and become confirmed
in it, quite APART from the issue of the truth or falsehood of the
Gospel accounts or the actual historical Jesus. 

Several passages in the Book of Revelation depict time and space
itself passing away... and all dwell WITHIN God... within the "fabric
of God" so to speak. And we do see. in the parable of Lazarus and the
rich man. that Lazarus is "in the bosom of Abraham" which is
metaphorical, but supports the notion of what is described in the
Book of Revelation.

What is interesting is that while Christianity condemns notions of
Pantheism, i.e. the notion "that God IS the universe"; yet in the
final analysis, based on what the book of Revelation describes, God
literally BECOMES the Universe for all the jivas or souls, once the
Universe passes away. Now I think that this observation is a PROFOUND
observation.

In light of the above understanding of Revelation, it would seem that
the "many mansions" are WITHIN God Himself.

These various theological theories of the various religions
portray the entire process of Creation, Existence, Destruction,
Judgment, Heaven as ONE history or sequence of events for ONE
UNIVERSE. This is a very limited outlook when we consider that if God
is TRULY infinite, and omnipotent, then there are very likely MANY
UNIVERSES, SIMULTANEOUSLY COEXISTING, each at some different stage of
Creation, Preservation, Destruction, and each populated by sentient
beings, with God manifesting in EACH, simultaneously. If a circus
juggler is clever enough to juggle many balls at once, then certainly
God is clever enough to juggle many realities simultaneously. Surely
only one creation, one universe, one history, one birth, one life,
one death, one resurrection, one judgment, one heaven, one hell is
very boring. Even television series offer multiple storylines, and
movie theaters offer double features. 

We see the plural "worlds" occurring in Christian and Muslim
scriptures. "Worlds" may be understood as many planets, or as many
galaxies, but also as MANY SEPARATE UNIVERSES.

The Greek word KOSMOS means both WORLD and also ADORNMENT or JEWEL.

The words Cosmology and Cosmetic derive from the same word KOSMOS.

Now, combine that with Ch. 7, verse 7 of the Bhagavad Gita, where
Lord Krsna says, "This entire Universe is strung upon ME like pearls
upon a string" , (and of course the word for string in Sanskrit is
SUTRA).

The Universe of universes is Indra's web, each crossing of the web
has an eye which sees all the other eyes.

Hence there are possibly many black holes, each with a big bang
universe inside, and inside that universe, other black holes, other
Universes. all tucked one inside the other worlds within worlds,
universes within universes.

There are traditions in which the material world is separate from,
other than, God..... in contradistinction to theologies in which God
is "immanent and transcendent"... and as Lord Krishna tell his
uncle/devotee Uddhava "You must see ME in all things, in all
creatures; do this and no other offering, prayer, or ascetical
discipline is necessary."

It is interesting that God's voice from the flaming bush tells Moses
that the "ground upon which he stands" is holy, and therefore to
remove his sandals. (we never again see the command for bare feet
during worship, though it is essential in Hinduism/Buddhism to this
day).

So ground can be holy, and the Mount Sinai is holy as well.

Now, the Greeks have an interesting, ancient prayer...

O pantachou paron kai ta panta pleeron
"O Thou who art everywhere present, and fillest all things"

O thesauveros ton agathon kai zoees horeegos
"Treasury of every good thing and giver of life"

Elthe kai skeenoson en eemeen

"Come and dwell within us"

Kai KATHAREESON eemas apo pasis keeleethos
"And CLEANSE us from every uncleaness... "

Kai SOSON AGATHE tas psychas eemon
"And Save , o Good one, our souls..... "

See how interesting this prayer is? If God is "EVERYWHERE PRESENT AND
FILLS ALL THINGS"... THEN why is it necessary to request that God
take a dwelling or residence within us.

If god is the SOURCE OF EVERY GOOD THING (what is the source of all
the bad things?)

AND GIVER OF LIFE (shall we infer that life is one of those GOOD
THINGS)...

NOW the prayer asks God to "come and dwell in us"... but THEN it
adds... AND CLEANSE US OF ALL UNCLEANNESS.... so obviously, when God
first enters this "dwelling" it is still dirty...

(hmmmm Martha scurrying around tyding up while Mary sits at Jesus
feet?)

CAN YOU SEE HOW THESE THINGS touch provocatively and poingnently upon
your questions regarding God, creation, matter, and evil? 

"Can Everything Come from Nothing?"

What might it mean, in a religious or philosophical sense, to say
that being does proceed from non-being or that all things come
from "nothing"?

The following dialogue at my website explores this question in terms
of the first chapter of Genesis. Tohu Va Bohu is the Hebrew phrase
denoting the "darkness and void" or "chaos" which was present when
God said "Let there be light". Rabbinical commentators point out that
the Tohu Bohu was not created but is somehow alread present prior to
creation.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Sitaram/message/597

You raise interesting questions about whether the soul is non-
different from God, whether God is non-different from the universe,
whether the souls ultimately dwell WITHIN God or whether the souls
merely approach very close to God yet always remaining separate and
different.

The Gaudiya Vaishnavs of the Chaitaniya Sampradaya (Math), which was
Prabhupad's disciplic succession, are very firm and rigid in their
interpretations of scripture, and are staunchly on the Dwaita side of
the issue. For Gaudiya Vaishnavs, the "worshipper" and
the "worshipped" (Lord Krishna) ALWAYS remain separate and distinct.

In the semi dualism of Ramanuja, the souls approach as close as one
pleases to God, yet always remaining separate and different. There
are Bramhavadins, such as the Vallabh lineage, for whom EVERYTHING is
made out of God. There are Mayavadins, strict Adwaitists, for whom
everything is made out of Maya (Illusion), and there is NO difference
between the Soul and God.

For the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God
is NEVER part of the material universe. The material universe comes
into being through an act of God's will, but then sets off on its
own, and God remains somehow outside it, as if somehow God might be
defiled, or the material reality might be ruined, if the two should
come into contact. Moses never gets to see God's face, but only God's
back as He passes by. Muhammad never hears the voice of Allah, but
only the message of Allah as narrated by the angel Gabreel.
Christians do have some unique notions implicit in their scriptures
which potentially run contrary to this strict separation
of God and Creation, and potentially lean towards the side of
Pantheism.

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