Toward a new Creation Story (VI)

Key Views of Theists, including My Own

(For you new folks, New Florence isn’t about religion, but it’s about the rich meaning of human experience and about reaching for excellence in our thinking and living about the things that matter most.

(The New Florence is primarily about living from a depth of awareness drawn from psychology and culture, but I’m focusing for just this one month of May on science and what excellence in our new Creation Stories could look like, and that leads inevitably to questions about ultimate reality and thus religion.)

— Mike

Nearly seven billion of the world’s eight billion people are people of faith. Among us are 2.4 billion Christians, 1.7 billion Muslims, 1.2 billion Hindus, and 400 million Buddhists.

By and large, being a person of faith includes believing in Deity. For billions of us, our beliefs and — when we’re at our best spiritually, our faith and our life — are centered in Deity.

To jog our memories, the billions of us who believe in Deity are called theists.

Here in my country — and I refer to surveys from years back that include the CUNY studies of 50,000 Americans — 95 percent of Americans believe in God, a universal intelligence, a higher power, or a cosmic force. 84 percent of us have imagined what God is like, and 43 percent of us have imagined a lot. Eighty percent of us believe that God created the universe. Eighty percent of us have tried to understand how the universe came into existence, and 43 percent of us have tried a lot.

Since the 1990s, we’ve been able to enrich our views of this area of our lives with scientific knowledge and the views of scientists that include both consciousness and the Zero Point Field.

However, very few of these scientists address the question of Deity and the Divine, and even if they did, their views would not necessarily be any more valid than our own.

At the same time, few thinkers in Christianity and other Western faiths — and not many more in the East — have put in the work to integrate the new views from science into their faiths’ views of Deity and the Divine.

So, without any real help from theologians or scientists, we people of faith who care about the science of consciousness and the Field have found ourselves, for three decades now, on our own.

In his 2006 book The God Theory, the great astrophysicist Bernard Haisch laid out his argument that God and the Zero Point Field are the same thing.

While I’ve reached a different conclusion, I highly esteem Haisch for his role in the development of our understanding of the Zero Point Field — and I think he’ll be remembered for it for centuries.

And I do think he’s raised the importance of the Field to a level that should be accorded to it in the 21st Century and beyond. Both in our worldview and in the quality of our daily thinking, awareness of the Field can make a real difference.

Once we’ve heard about the Zero Point Field, each of us has six choices regarding ultimate reality:

(1) We can accept the reality of the Zero Point Field and believe in Deity.

(2) We can believe in Deity and dismiss the Field.

(3) We can accept the reality of the Field but remain agnostic (undecided) about Deity.

(4) We can dismiss the Field and remain agnostic (undecided) about Deity.

(5) We can accept the reality of the Field but choose not to believe in Deity. Or

(6) We can dismiss the Field and choose not to believe in Deity.

In two prior posts, I shared the best nontheistic Creation Story that I’ve been able to come up with. If you believe any of these from (2) thru (6), we probably agree on much of the cosmic and planetary timeline and perhaps we agree about consciousness? And perhaps you’ll find some nuggets from what I wrote that you agree with.

If you believe in Deity and the Field, as I do, our adventure has just begun.

In the two posts that follow this one, later this week, I’ll be presenting the best theistic Creation Story that I’ve been able to come up with.

There’s no way to write a theistic Creation Story that speaks for all theists. If you are a theist, I invite you to take my theistic Creation Story, grab what you agree with, and change what you don’t agree with to match your version of theism.

(Note: While I believe in the afterlife and am a Christian, both of my Creation Stories predate Jesus Christ, so I don’t include Him in the theistic Story. And while I believe in the afterlife — and believe that Deity created the spiritual universe before the natural universe — my Creation Stories deal only with the natural universe. Thus I will only mention the human soul in one paragraph. The human being is the subject to which I devote all my other writing, but the one subject that lies outside of my Creation Stories.)

First, in my theistic Creation Story, I’m going to use the word Deity.

Each of us who is a theist has chosen to believe in one or more deities.

Those who believe in more than one deity are, of course, called polytheists.

Those who believe in one Deity are called monotheists.

Most of my fellow Christians believe that, at least since the Incarnation, there have been three-deities-in-one-Deity. If you believe that there were three-deities-in-one-Deity prior to the Incarnation — perhaps from eternity — I invite you to modify my theistic Creation Story to reflect your Triune-God-from-eternity belief.

I will write as if there was one Creator God, and I’ll use the Name for the Creator God used by more people in human history than any other Divine Name. I agree with the scholars who take the Old Testament consonants YHWH or YHVH — which are most often turned into “Yahweh” or “Jehovah” — to mean “Yehovahe".

I invite you to take my Creation Story, and change “Yehovahe” to the Name or Names you use for Deity.

All those of us who are theists believe not only in Deity but in an associated Divine level or dimension of reality.

Let me deal in five sentences with four theistic views — different than my own — that could take up many pages:

Nondualists believe in an ultimate reality with no real difference between the Divine and the natural universe of energy and matter.

Monists go even further, and believe that all reality is one unified Divine reality.

Nondualism and monism overlap with pantheism, which equates Deity and the universe, and with panentheism, which asserts that God contains the universe.

Like most of the world’s billions of theists, I do not share in any of these four views.

If you do so, I invite you to grab what you like in my theistic Creation Story and adapt it to your metaphysical view of Divine and natural reality.

I believe that Divine Reality and natural reality are two different levels of reality. In my view, God is not nature. Nature is not God. And the natural universe is not Divine.

Likewise, in my view, the Zero Point Field is not God and God is not the Zero Point Field. The Field was created by God but is not a Divine Realm. The Field is not Divine. (And thus the Field is not the Holy Spirit.)

In my view, the Zero Point Field is the inmost dimension of nature — the inmost dimension of the natural universe.

In my view, however omnipresent God is, God is also transcendent to the natural universe of natural energy, matter, and living natural bodies. The natural universe is outside of God as the Earth is outside of the sun.

There is, of course, another possibility — that God or gods emerged from the Zero Point Field. This view doesn’t resonate as true for me. But it is consistent with the beliefs in some theistic traditions. If you believe this, again, feel free to adapt my Creation Story to your beliefs.

So you can see why I do not agree with Bernard Haisch’s argument that God and the Zero Point Field are the same thing. His view is a nondualist view and mine is not.

In addition, consider this: We know that MRI machines run on zero-point information. I can never personally accept that machines will be running on Divine “information”. People are trying to design and build machines powered by zero-point energy. If they succeed, Haisch would have us believe that we’d then be fueling our cars with God (or Divine Energy). This strikes me as preposterous.

Those of us who accept the reality of the Zero Point Field sharee some thinking with dynamists. We believe in a pervasive and immanent yet impersonal Field, Quality, Energy, or Power. But this is what I believe about the Field, not what I believe about Deity.

So who has influenced my theistic view of Creation?

There’s a template there in Genesis 1:1 to 2:3, for sure. The story by the Elohimist writer certainly conveys the Creation with all the reverent and elevated tone It merits. (The story by the Jahwist writer beginning at Genesis 2:5 is about God’s relationship with human beings, which is a separate subject.)

Corey deVos, a protege of transpersonal and “Integral” philosopher Ken Wilber, wrote my favorite Creation Story. DeVos seems to rely on the German Idealism most fully expressed by G.W.F. Hegel and on the Hegelian notion that “Spirit” has been enticing life forward toward ever-more complex and full expressions of mind and consciousness.

One of my favorite books in my twenties was Creative Evolution (1907) by Henri Bergson. So I got an early exposure to “vitalism” and the notion that there’s something metaphysical going on in the physical world, and there’s still a little spin of Berson’s vitalism in my thinking.

Bergson, in turn, influenced the mystical Catholic scientist-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. (Teilhard replaced Hegel’s Spirit with Jesus Christ.) I read all of Teilhard’s books multiple times in my twenties, and while I didn’t become a Teilhardian, I absorbed that sense of the Divine Being drawing life forward toward deeper and deeper spirituality.

I also picked up one idea from the great conservative Catholic writer J.R.R. Tolkien. In his Creation Story in his Silmarillion, Tolkien moved to the idea that Deity’s role in Creation can best be expressed as a musical phenomenon. We hear some reflected intimations of this in the musical atmosphere of the immortal society of the Elves in Lord of the Rings.

Lastly, I’ve read every major Christian theologian from the past 2,000 years.

While I do not write this with the intent that you agree with me, I’ve arrived at a view of the Nature of God that is not at all at odds with major orthodox thinkers in our monotheistic faiths across the past two thousand years:

From eternity, the Creator God whom we call Yehovahe had a Being and an Essence.

God’s Being is absolute Being in Itself, absolute Existence in Itself, absolute Reality in Itself, absolute Substance in Itself, and absolute Form in Itself — uncreated, self-subsisting, self-sufficient, eternal, infinite, and with the intrinsic capacity to become manifest.

As uncreated infinity beyond space and as uncreated eternity before time, God’s Being is infinite in relationship to time and space, supersedes time and space, and is infinitely free of time and space.

God’s Essence, which is God’s very Self, is Life — infinite and eternal Life.

The Essence and Life of God, and of Themselves — are Love Itself and Wisdom Itself, making one.

God is infinite and eternal Love and Wisdom. God is Love. God is Wisdom. God is Wise Love.

Love is the motive, intention, or desire to be useful to — to be a blessing to — another being from one’s own being.

Wisdom is perceiving, understanding, and thinking from love.

Everything that emerges, proceeds, and flows from Divine Love is Divine Goodness.

Everything that emerges, proceeds, and flows from Divine Wisdom is Divine Truth.

And so the Essence of God has always been Love Itself, Goodness Itself, Wisdom Itself, and Truth Itself — eternal and infinite in all Their Divine Perfection.

One final step. Since my early twenties, back in the late 1980s, the way I visualize Deity is the way Deity was visualized by the 18th Century scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg:

God’s Wise Love — which is supernatural yet substantial Energy — emanates and radiates out in abundance and centers Itself in an immense and imperishable Divine Flame. And this Divine Flame forms a single Divine Sun.

God’s active Divine Essence and Energy — the Warmth of God’s Love and Goodness and the Light of God’s Wisdom and Truth — proceed and flow out from God via this Divine Sun. This Divine Sun, which God brings forth out of God’s very Self, is the Divine Wise Love that is most near God.

This Divine Sun most nearly encompasses the inmost Essence of God, which centers in the midst of this Divine Sun. Radiant and lucid, God’s Wise Love glows and beams infinitely and eternally. Untempered, God’s Wise Love is spiritually brighter and warmer than many stars, ablaze and dazzling in Its full resplendent glory.

At this point, on both an experiential and an intellectual level, I can scarcely imagine or conceive of God any other way: Because I’ve visualized and / or experienced God several hundred times (over the past 35 years or so) as a Divine Sun. And because I cannot find another way to congruently put together the Divine, spiritual, and natural dimensions of reality.

Everything I’ve learned since about the Zero Point Field has neither disrupted or altered my view of Deity. Although, like anyone with a proper level of humility, I wouldn’t presume to understand how God as the Divine Sun interacts with the Zero Point Field. (Perhaps it will be much clearer to people a few hundred years from now.)

And with that, I’ll be ready this weekend to share my theistic Creation Story.

Expect no surprises. You’ve read about and seen all the modular building blocks — and where they came from — so only the synthesis and a little of the language will be new.

All my best,

Mike