Participatory Theism

Discussion

Matthew Segall:

"A different sense of theism ... : Not dogmatic, not belief-based in the narrow propositional sense, but participatory. A participatory theism is not simply the view that God is a social construct (eg, a Durkheimian collective coordination device), nor is it a literalist belief in God as a “man in the sky” we might petition for favors. Participation here signals my desire to come back into relationship with the divine as a reality, not just an idea—a reality that inevitably exceeds our intellectual grasp and certainly our volitional control and yet which makes moral demands on us in a way intimately bound up with our very sense of selfhood. I mean to say that God’s reality is not that of an external law-giving authority who commands us to obey, but that of an intimate partner and fellow sufferer whose companionship in my inmost experience provides me with the sense of an ideal by which I judge myself, my inclinations and actions, and without which I would have no sense of even the possibility of my own moral freedom much less a sense of whether my inclinations and actions were good or bad. Philosophy, for me, naturally flows into an inquiry into this ground, whether we call it “God” or something else. My “faith” in this ground, this ultimate goodness latent in the nature of things, will always outrun my ability to justify it propositionally. But it nonetheless compels me morally, aesthetically, existentially, and yes, intellectually. Though I cannot prove it, it does feel to me as though the very possibility of rational justification of anything else in some sense depends on it.

My faith does lead me to feel that this divine ground places a certain kind of “demand” on me. This is not the same thing as coercion or divine authoritarianism. It is a relation to something better thought of as a lure: an inward call, whispered in each moment, that offers an ideal possibility of alignment with what might contribute most to enhancing the beauty of a situation, including the beauty of others’ lives, not only my own.

Nathan’s own way into this was to speak about truth, goodness, and beauty as lived normativities, ideals which draws us. Truth as the normative demand in thinking; goodness as the normative demand in willing and acting; beauty as the normative demand in feeling. It follows from this that our philosophical outlooks are never merely intellectual. They are always already ethical and aesthetic. Even science, when it presents itself as value-neutral, presupposes a posture toward intelligibility, it assumes the unity of nature, and the meaningfulness and worthiness of truth-seeking.

Scientistic atheists often forget that modern science emerged in 17th century Europe out of a whole suite of theological assumptions. The intelligibility of nature, the mathematical form of the world, the idea that there are lawful regularities worth discovering—these were historically linked to deist assumptions (nature designed by a rational God; the human mind furnished with innate ideas adequate to that rationality). At some point, certainly by the time of Darwin, science began to defend its epistemology without reference to those theological roots. It learned to forget what it had presupposed. And then scientism, itself a metaphysical extrapolation reaching far beyond what the scientific method justifies, began to get away with eliding the deeper conditions of its own possibility, thus denying its own metaphysical overreach.

My point is not that we ought to make science theological again. The old theological foundation of science was precisely the dogmatic theology that has lost credibility. The Cartesian-Newtonian world-picture, with God as an external designer of a mechanistic nature, is a picture that deserves critique from within theology as well as from without. So I do not want a regression to Paley-style natural theology any more than I want the Darwinian naturalism that merely replaces Paley’s external designer with “nature” as an impersonal “selector.” In both cases, the metaphysical imagination remains mechanistic (even if Darwin’s emphasis on variation would end up undermining the mechanical philosophy he still explicitly professed allegiance to). Whether God or nature, only the name of the external designer changes.

That is why the creationism v. evolution culture war flashpoint is, in my view, a symptom of deep metaphysical confusion on both sides. Evolution, in some sense, is a fact. But how we interpret that fact remains an open a metaphysical question.

Nathan, from his idealist perspective, offered a compelling reframing of the Biblical story of Genesis that I am familiar with from a different lineage (anthroposophy). Genesis is best read not as a historical/causal account in competition with the scientific theory of evolution but as a symbolic account of the emergence of consciousness—an allegory of developmental psychology, an origin story of subjectivity. The “tohu vavohu” as the undifferentiated chaos of an infant’s experience (William James’ “blooming, buzzing confusion”); the gradual emergence of differentiation (day/night, self/other); the dawning of moral conscience alongside self-awareness after eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

I reject the false choice between taking our evolutionary history seriously and finding spiritual meaning in our origins as human beings. That said, I do think reconciling the two requires that we reject a purely naturalistic, “blind mechanism” interpretation of evolution. Like the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russell Wallace, I believe a coherent account of conscious agency and moral personhood is impossible on a classical materialist reading of evolution. So while I affirm our evolutionary emergence, I don’t think of evolution as an aimless mechanism. If by “naturalism” we mean nature is just a bunch of dead stuff colliding under the strict rule of apparently eternal laws (whose origin science is embarrassed to ask about), I am not a naturalist. I think evolution has always had an inside, that there is an experiential dimension latent throughout nature. It is no surprise that physics has missed this aspect of nature because it simply is not legible to a geometrical analysis of the physical world. When Whitehead and even Russell later gesture toward panpsychism or panexperientialism, they are trying to say something like this: there never was a time in the history of the universe when it was only matter. There has always also been an interior or psychic dimension, what Teilhard de Chardin called a “within of things.”

This new form of participatory, evolutionary theism is as different from dogmatic theism as it is from modern atheism. It is not a compromise between scientism and subjectivism. It is a different metaphysical posture altogether, one that honors the truths of natural science without succumbing to the temptation to imagine those truths might provide a reductive explanation of personhood. It also honors the constructive, interpretive, open-ended meaning-making task of human life without collapsing reality into social construction.

Before discursive debates about -isms, there’s a more basic distinction—existential rather than doctrinal: do we treat the universe as something to which we can relate, intimately, reverently, responsively; or do we treat it as inert material to be manipulated and utilized? Is the universe ultimately hostile, or is it the kind of place we can feel at home in? William James suggested something similar at the beginning of A Pluralistic Universe, that our basic emotional orientation to the universe has shaped our philosophy before we even consider rational arguments. We discover rational justifications after we’ve already formed our core cosmic postures.

I do not mean that atheists cannot relate to reality reverently, or that theists cannot instrumentalize reality. Obviously both happen. What I mean is that, in our cultural moment, a certain popular atheism (especially the “new atheist” style, now thankfully less fashionable) often smuggles in a quasi-theological structure while claiming to have escaped theology. There is something rather Calvinist about the way Dawkins frames the moral drama of humanity’s response to evolutionary theory. Nature is a bloodbath; we inherit selfish genes; but we, uniquely, can “rebel” against our genetic programming. Replace “sin” with “selfish genes,” replace “angry God” with “pitiless nature,” and all the dramatis personae of the Bibical narrative are there: guilt, struggle, redemption. It is a barely secularized unconscious theology.

Likewise, dogmatic theism often projects an idolatrous image of God as Caesar or Pharaoh who weilds coercive power from the top of the pyramid. Many atheists are, quite understandably, rebelling against that idol. I am rebelling against it, too. The God I can take seriously is not a large and in charge dictator barking orders, orchestrating every detail, designing everything in advance. The God I can take seriously is a fellow sufferer, a lure toward the good, present in herbs and pebbles more so than in lofty abstractions. The incarnation, for me, means that God and world are no longer separable. They depend on one another, creator needing creation to be a creator, and so in that sense becoming a co-creator alongside us. I reject the pyramid scheme. God is not only at the top. God is also at the bottom. That is not meant as a flattening all value hierarchy in the moral sense but a dialectical and incarnational reconfiguration of hierarchy. “The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” The divine is immanent in the smallest among us, and that immanence places moral demands on us.

If the culture war is downstream of the death of traditional images of God, then one of the main casualties is not merely belief, but trust: trust in intelligibility, trust in value, in institutions, and in a world that can be more than a consequence of blind mechanisms of power, whether natural or social. Scientism wants intelligibility without acknowledging the ground that makes intelligibility meaningful. Subjectivism wants freedom without acknowledging the ground that makes freedom more than arbitrary self-assertion. Dogmatic theism wants authority without acknowledging the participatory authenticity required to make divine love non-coercive. We are, in different ways, trying to find our way back to a world where truth, beauty, and goodness are not severed from one another.

Nathan and I both reject the slogan “facts don’t care about your feelings.” This is not because feelings trump facts, but because it assumes an ultimate disconnection between truth, beauty, and goodness that can’t actually be lived or consistently practiced in real inquiry. Ultimately, if truth is not good and not beautiful, why would we be devoted to it? And if goodness has no truth, how could it guide action without collapsing into sentimentalism? And if beauty is unmoored from truth and goodness, how could it not devolve into spectacle? You get the idea.

And yet the allurement of these Big Ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness has not yet convinced me to adopt an idealist stance. I can't shake my realist impulse, perhaps because I am fearful of allowing metaphysical optimism to become an evasion of suffering. I’m deeply sympathetic to the idealist orientation, and I do find it morally and intellectually superior to materialism as classically understood. As Nathan put it, to be an idealist means to begin with personhood, with the value of consciousness, and with the true, the good, and the beautiful as archetypal values that structure human life, or ought to. The very organization of our experience suggests their reality. In our thinking life we’re driven toward intellectual satisfaction, and we name that pull “truth.” In our willing we sense a demand we didn’t invent, and we name that “goodness.” We feel, and we’re drawn, sometimes against our best judgment, toward a certain kind of radiance, a fittingness, a harmony, and we name that “beauty.” This isn’t just a psychological structure, it is physiological (in anthroposophic terms, the thinking, feeling, willing threefold is mirrored in the threefold nerve-sense system, rhythmic system, and limb-metabolism). Our whole embodied orientation seems shaped as if in response to these three transcendental ideas.

And yet, what do we do with the weight of the world’s suffering, and with our own lack of complete knowledge? The realist side of me wants to wrestle with natural science, not as a rival to value or meaning but as a way of being honest about the facts. I’m an optimist by temperament, but some regions of existence are just unbearable. There’s senseless pain, there’s rank injustice, there’s an obscene surplus of misery in the world that can’t be tidied up with nice sounding ideas. And so theodicy, the meaning of evil, keeps pressing on me.

My realism isn’t disbelief. It’s more like a resistance to premature closure. It’s a desire to keep open my attempt to account for my own, others, and the world’s existence long enough for the full gravity of evil to register, without rushing to translate it into the convenience of a metaphysical privation.

I’m deeply influenced by Carl Jung. His critique of Christianity is relevant here because it’s not a cheap, external dismissal. It’s an internal probing of the symbolic structure, what it includes, and what it excludes. His Answer to Job has stuck with me as a crucial spiritual provocation. Jung doesn’t think Christianity, as traditionally configured, offers a fully adequate answer to the problem of evil. The Trinity, he says, is incomplete, because it leaves out Satan, the serpent, the shadow. But also matter, embodiment, the darkness of the real that refuses to be spiritualized away.

So my realism stems from my unwillingness to tidy the world too quickly. It is bound up with the incompleteness of my understanding, and of the world itself. It’s William James’ sense of the “moreness” of reality, the excess that outruns every conceptual net."

(https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/transcending-the-culture-war-by-recovering)