Science as an Aspect of God--Power Point outline

 

Presentation for “Science and Scientist” Conference, Rutgers University,

June 15-16, 2019

Robert M. Wallace, PhD

Author of Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God (2005), and

Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present (forthcoming, 2019)

bob@robertwallace.com; robertmwallace.blogspot.com

Science as an aspect of God

I want to outline what I found after wandering for a long time in the wilderness of “modern” thought.

I found it in Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, the sacred writings of many religious traditions, and in great literary artists, including Jelaluddin Rumi, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Virginia Woolf.

As a doctrine, it’s spelled out in an especially clear way in the writings of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831).

Hegel reconciles science and religion, and objectivity and subjectivity as well, by showing how science and objectivity (the pursuit of objective truth) are aspects of God, who is the ultimate “subject.”

Besides science and objectivity, other aspects of God (or the ultimate “subject”) include religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy.

Being aspects of the same ultimate reality, each of these (science, religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy) must be practiced in a way that respects all of the others.

What would an “ultimate reality” be?

You might think that “reality” is simply what’s “objective,” and that science is the authority on that. In that case, no reality would be any more “ultimate” or less “ultimate” than any other.

But Hegel proposes a different conception of “reality”: What’s most real, he suggests, is what it is by virtue of itself, and not by virtue of its relations or interactions with other things. It’s the causa sui, cause of itself, as Spinoza put it.

How could something be what it is “by virtue of itself”?

This idea is not as strange as it looks at first glance.

Example: When I merely react, unthinkingly, to my surroundings, I am like an extension of those surroundings. I’m not functioning as “myself,” in any significant way. Whereas if I think what to do or to believe, I am functioning as “myself,” and thus I’m more real as myself.

If I lost a particular opinion or desire, I would still be entirely me. But if I lost my thinking, I would be no better than an automaton, and no longer real “as myself.”

So by acting “thoughtfully” or (on the other hand) “thoughtlessly,” I can be more or less real “as myself,” at different times.

A “more intensive” reality

This is why Socrates promoted the “examined life.” It makes us real as ourselves. Through it, Hegel says, we have a “more intensive” reality. “More intensive” because it makes us more “ourselves.”

Because science seeks knowledge, rather than just to confirm our preexisting opinions, science contributes to this “more intensive” reality in us.

This is how science is an aspect of a “more intensive” (what I earlier called the “ultimate”) reality.

Ethics

But religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy are also aspects of this “more intensive” reality.

Ethics is an aspect of the more intensive reality insofar as ethics asks us to act in ways that may not correspond to the way we initially want to act. It asks us to act more “thoughtfully.”

And insofar as ethics reflects our capacity for thinking (and not just our initial urges), it makes us more “ourselves” than we would otherwise be.

The Arts

The arts are aspects of the ultimate reality insofar as they have an inner logic that doesn’t reflect merely our existing desires, or conventional rules.

This is why we find outstanding works of art “inspiring”: They suggest something that’s “higher,” more intensive, and more “itself” in a way that we ourselves would like to be higher, more intensive—and more fully ourselves.

Religion, too, is an aspect

Religion, too, is an aspect of this more intensive reality, inasmuch as it asks us to act justly, to “love our neighbor,” and so forth. It holds out a higher ideal, in contrast to our initial desires, our self-importance, and the like.

But doesn’t religion subject us to an alien power (“God”), and thus make us less “ourselves,” and less real “as” ourselves?

Not if “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21),

and not if “in [God] we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), and so forth.

That is, not in a “mystical” version of religion, such as Hegel promotes (following Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and others, and resembling Adi Shankara’s “nondualism,” and doctrines of an omnipresent “Buddha nature”).

In these views, God is not a separate being from us, though God is still “higher.”

Only the mystical God is truly higher

It can in fact be argued, and Hegel does argue, that the mystical view presents the only coherent conception of the higher reality.

According to the conventional, non-“mystical” conception, God or the higher reality is a separate being from the world and from us.

But Hegel points out that a separate being is limited by what it’s separate from. So it’s not infinite. In fact, it’s just one of the beings that make up the world (though certainly an unusually powerful one).

So a God that’s truly infinite must be “within us” as well as beyond us. This is the only way it can truly be unlimited or infinite, and thus truly “higher” than us and higher than the world.

From “within,” it goes “beyond”

The mystical God is not limited by us, because it goes beyond us. But it’s not limited by being beyond us, either, because it’s also within us. From “within,” it goes “beyond.”

This is the beauty and the truth of mysticism.

The mystical view is still “religion,” because (in it) what comes from within us truly goes beyond us.

In that way, the mystical view presents an attractive version of religious notions like creation, faith, and salvation or enlightenment.

Creation and faith

The mystical view embodies a kind of “creation,” inasmuch as, by being present in the world, the God that Hegel describes gives the world all the (full) reality that it possesses.

The mystical view embodies “faith,” inasmuch as the “higher” values and activities that it involves go beyond what our initial desires and opinions would dictate. The higher values and activities require a kind of commitment that ordinary materialism, hedonism, or egoism would not require, and they promise a kind of fulfilment, salvation, or enlightenment that materialism, hedonism, and egoism likewise can’t promise (or even conceive of).

Salvation/enlightenment

By showing how we can be fully ourselves and at one with the fullest reality, Hegel’s view holds out a kind of salvation or enlightenment.

In Hegel’s view we become fully ourselves and at one with the fullest reality by committing ourselves to higher values and activities and giving up the self-centeredness or egoism that materialism takes for granted.

Summing up

So this is how the sciences, the arts, ethics, and religion all contribute to a higher, more “ultimate” reality in which we are more fully ourselves, and we’re one with the full reality in everything. (This ultimate or full reality is what Hegel calls “absolute Spirit.”)

As for philosophy, it contributes to this ultimate reality by clarifying how the sciences, the arts, ethics, and religion all contribute to the ultimate reality, and thus making it clear how they can’t, ultimately, conflict with one another.

So what about “subjectivity” and “objectivity”?

The sciences specialize in “objectivity.”

But that doesn’t mean that the philosophy of the higher, more intensive, or ultimate reality, which is not one of the familiar sciences, is therefore “subjective.”

Rather, this philosophy identifies a kind of “reality” that the sciences, in their modern forms, do not study. Namely, the higher reality that is partly composed of the pursuit of scientific knowledge—together with ethics, the arts, religion, and philosophy.

Beyond the “subject/object” contrast

By focusing on the “subject,” which is the scientist (and the ethical person, the artist, the religious worshipper, and so forth), all of which constitute the higher reality, the philosophy of the higher reality goes beyond the familiar contrast between “subject” and “object.”

For by being “more intensive,” this “subject” is more fully real than any “object,” as such.

This is why Hegel says that “substance” always gives way to “subject.” The ultimate reality is this “subject,” which is most fully real. (Here you might think of “I am that I am” [Exodus 3:14].)

What does this doctrine tell us about the origins of life and mind?

It tells us that although life and mind weren’t “present” at the time of the Big Bang (if there was such a “time”), in the way that they’re now “present,”

nevertheless, they constitute something that’s more fully “real” than what was “present” at that time. They are more real because they are indispensable aspects of science, religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy, and thus they are indispensable to the highest reality.

And thus the history of the universe is the history not of transformations of a preexisting full “reality,” but of the emergence of a reality that’s fully “real” only after billions of years.

This is the crucial sense in which the “potential” for life and mind was always there.

Reality is inherently goal-directed

In fact when we understand what this process is, namely, the “emergence of life and mind,” we have to say that the “potential” for life and mind guided the entire process.

This is because full “reality,” or “reality” in the fullest sense, is the process of the emergence of life and mind. To understand it properly, is to understand it as that.

So this is the sense in which reality, throughout most of its history, is inherently “anticipatory,” teleological, goal-directed.

And we know this higher and goal-directed reality

Knowing that we inhabit a higher and goal-directed reality obviously makes our experience very different from the experience that we have when we suppose that we are part of a merely “flat” reality that contains nothing “higher,” and that has no inherent goal.

And Hegel does suggest, I believe correctly, that we know that we inhabit a higher and goal-directed reality.

We know this because Hegel’s doctrine (like Plato’s and Aristotle’s, before him) simply draws out the implications of our familiar and hardly controversial experience of sometimes being more real “as ourselves,” and sometimes less so.

And this higher reality is “God”

To know that we inhabit a higher and goal-directed reality is to know that we inhabit something that, as higher and as the supreme goal, fits traditional descriptions of “God.”

Since science is one of the ways in which we inhabit this higher reality, science is an aspect of “God.”

And since this God is also ethics (that is, love), art (that is, beauty), pure “subject,” and, as our supreme goal, our supreme fulfilment, it has everything that seems to be essential in traditional conceptions of God.