The Whole Elephant: Finding a New Language for God

About the author

Mark Craig is a school teacher specialising in Religious Studies.

He has a keen interest in spirituality and the overlap between

religion and science in regard to describing and explaining

the nature of God in post-modern context.

The Whole Elephant

Finding a new language for God

Mark Craig

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to acknowledge my mother, Margaret Agnes Cavanagh, and dedicate this book to her memory.

Copyright © 2015 by Mark Craig

All rights reserved,

Including the right to reproduce this book or

Portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

The great I AM

Descartes said, I think therefore I am

Sartre said, I do therefore I am

The Buddha said, I am, while

Jesus said, I am the truth the way and the life

’I Am’ is life itself

All that ‘Is’, is a shimmering of life,

Vibrating consciousness into form

All who ‘Are’ are manifestations

Of this one life, formless and unseen

Patches of consciousness peppering the cosmos

Endowing it with self- awareness

The universe knows itself

Through you and me

Expressing the one consciousness

That is all in all

I am therefore I think

I think therefore I do

Divine being is my essence

Expressed in infinite forms within a universe

That is pure mystery itself

The sacred cloud of unknowing

Is born in time

‘I AM’

INTRODUCTION

There is restlessness within people, a feeling of incompleteness, of not yet having made it in the world, of not having enough. Augustine of Hippo experienced this restlessness and eventually it drew him to become one of the Christian Church’s greatest theologians and saints. It would appear that to be human is to be a work in progress and never the final product. Life, it would appear, is to be on a journey rather than arriving at a destination. Why is it that people want and desire to have things, be it material possessions, power, status or knowledge, and feel that life cannot be meaningful unless these desires are met? What is the nature and source of that inner quality of ‘wanting’, impelling humankind to explore and develop latent potentialities in order to achieve, in the physical realm or world of form, all that is within them to achieve?

Western religions like Judaism, Islam and Christianity, conjecture that the feeling of needing more is an indication of not having experienced at a profound, existential level of awareness the ‘God presence’ within. The deep seated feeling of incompleteness is consequential to not being connected with a deeper spiritual realm that is the source of ultimate fulfilment. Eastern religions, like Buddhism and Hinduism, would suggest that the very feeling of not being complete, the energy that is ‘wanting’ (whether this wanting is directed toward a material, intellectual or spiritual ‘thing’) is itself the problem. Only by overcoming wanting or desire can one ultimately find peace. Conversely, Atheists may assert it is purely human nature, devoid of any need for a deity, to want to improve one’s lot in life. The instinctual propensity toward survival compels one to uncover more efficient strategies enabling greater adaptation to the environment, and experience of increasingly superior forms of comfort. This world-view would argue that a need and desire for pleasure and personal satisfaction, rather than a desire to please some unknowable transcendent deity, drive humankind to develop technologies which improve the quality and quantity of life.

Karl Rahner, a Roman Catholic theologian whose thinking was prominent in the latter half of the twentieth century, developed a transcendental approach to theology. Rahner (1961) in his famous work, Theological Investigations, described a God who was the supreme mystery at the centre of human existence, and Jesus, the prototype, if you like, of what humanity was designed by this supreme mystery to become. In Jesus, one sees the end product of humanity’s moral, social and cultural evolution. The Supernatural Existential, which refers to humankind’s absolute obligation to achieve this supernatural goal, is that which drives a person to evolve accordingly. Thus, the desire, drive or wanting to be more is, essentially, a supra-natural energy setting in motion the sequence of events resulting in the realisation of true identity. This identity is mirrored in the person of Jesus, according to Rahner (1961).

The influence of Teilhard de Chardin (d.1955) and his basic premise that the whole of the cosmic order is moving toward an ultimate goal or Omega Point is evident within Rahner’s thought. However, unlike Rahner, Teilhard de Chardin broadened his focus beyond the sphere of humanity, identifying that the divine energy underlying materiality is propelling the whole universe toward full realisation and actualisation. In stark contrast to theistic interpretations of the human experience of feeling incomplete however, others, like the linguistic philosopher Phillip Nietzsche, proclaimed the death of God, asserting that only by accepting and even willing the death of God in which all previous conceptions of divinity needed to die, could humanity realise its full potential. Only the good news of God’s death would free humankind from enslavement to a tyrannical transcendent deity, whether real or imagined, which functioned primarily to limit human potential and self-realisation.

According to Nietzsche, human beings had projected onto a fictional deity their own unrealised potentialities. Hence, by jettisoning the notion of God, people would be freer to develop these potentialities. In the 1960s Thomas J. Alitzer claimed in, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (2002), that religion needed to look into the void that the death of God had left in its wake, and in that dark night of the soul experience, wait patiently for a new language to emerge – a language that would more effectively express how humankind’s ineluctable sense of incompleteness might be addressed. The modern mind required a language that would enable the idea of ‘God’ to, once again, become a meaningful notion in a world seeking answers to complex questions that previous responses no longer satisfied. The language of institutional religion was clearly failing to do this.

Central to modern thinking, particularly in western culture, is a belief that human ‘thought’ is capable of understanding all there is to know about the known universe. Consequently this has created an intellectual optimism of sorts, especially in the sphere of science, that answers to questions regarding how ‘all things’ came into being or were created will eventually be known, given sufficient time. The modern age was spawned in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when human knowledge became fragmented into a thousand pieces. The emergence of a host of academic disciplines, emerging out of Renaissance thinking and the Age of Enlightenment, is testament to this. Amidst these disciplines agreement was not always forthcoming. Of note, during this period emerged the conflict between the academic domains of religion and science. This conflict was drawn into sharp relief when Charles Darwin, in 1859, published his seminal work: The Origin of the Species (1979), which suggested various species, evolved and changed over time, developing specific characteristics in order to survive more successfully in their respective environments. Darwin argued that humanity itself had evolved from lower life forms over time, and shared a common ancestor with other primates.

Church authorities, particularly, became unhappy with the notion that humankind may have shared a common ancestry with monkeys and gorillas, evolving from amoebas into forms of marine life that later became amphibians. Finally, this process was said to culminate in bi-pedal land dwelling creatures. The inference made by some was, that God had now become redundant as human life, like all other life forms, was nothing special, the result of random processes rather than the intentional creative act of a deity. Science, unofficially, declared itself at the helm of the physical order regarding answers to the tricky questions of human existence. Questions to do with the mechanics of the universe, such as, ‘how’ phenomena occurred and ‘when’ events transpired became its domain. Religion, on the other hand, took the wheel of the metaphysical, becoming the unofficial expert in matters regarding meaning – the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of human existence.

A divorce of sorts occurred between the two, and the insights of French Philosopher, Rene Descartes, who, two centuries earlier had uttered the famous line: Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, helped seal the divorce (Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 2008). Human thought was equated with human being, thus humanity’s most fundamental and defining characteristic was deemed cognition rather than spirit. A person’s essence was deemed to be the intellect rather than the soul, and as science was all about the intellect, in contrast to religion which was all about the soul, then, humankind would be more likely to find answers to life’s deeper questions of origin and ultimate meaning in the former rather than the latter. While one may argue that in hindsight the emergence of science and religion and other fields of intellectual inquiry, such as anthropology and archaeology, were necessary for their proper development, historically, this has not been without its casualties.

Certainly, science, anthropology and sociology in order to develop appropriately, needed to establish independence from what was largely an ecclesio-centric society. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth century new scientific insights, such as Darwinian notions of evolution, were often quashed by Church authorities and dubbed atheistic in essence. The medieval concept of learning, whereby all forms of knowledge could be reconciled to a theistic worldview, became unworkable and change was necessary. This was due to increasing secularisation, industrialisation and the potential for science to vastly improve human well-being. The casualty of this dynamic however, has been that over time, particular knowledge systems, such as science, theology and anthropology, have grown up in isolation from each other. This has led to a sort of ghetto mentality within the world of academia.

The belief that secular disciplines, such as science and sociology, are more in tune with reality is a cultural assumption, and has led many, in post-modern context, to view religion as superstition with no empirical basis to support its world view. Quantum physics is suggesting otherwise, furnishing profound insights into the nature of reality that border on the fantastic, thus reintroducing the domain of the spiritual as legitimate and empirically defensible (Arntz et al, 2005). The insights of Saussure (1959) and Derrida (1982), in addition, provide a universal linguistic paradigm for better comprehending the respective language systems of academia. This paradigm reveals the inherent limitations of all language systems to articulate the nature of reality, conditioned as they are by particular socio-cultural and historical contexts.

Various religions of the world and particular secular academic disciplines, each possess a unique language (metalanguage) for addressing the deeper questions of human existence, such as the origin of the universe and humankind’s place within it. The major world religions utilise a peculiar theological framework for exploring the deeper questions, based upon a foundational experience, and a mythological framework consisting of sacred stories and texts. On the other hand, secular scientific disciplines, such as Physics and Biology, employ a very different linguistic framework, representing a varied response.

Each system of knowledge presents its own unique meta-narrative or grand story to explain human origin and purpose. The grand story of science may call it the Big-Bang or Inflation theory, while religion may speak of creation and a supreme deity or divine order to things. In isolation from each other, a particular knowledge