The Vaunted “Real” World

Now and then it strikes me that the tumultuous, romantic—the adventurous, daring, dramatic, and tense—the sort of thing that fills romances like Poldark or seem to characterize the lives of femmes fatales like Alma Mahler of many lovers, say—is ultimately quite unpleasant when actually lived. The pleasures are brief, the turmoil huge, and the inner state fragmented and of necessity troubled—troubled if the individual even briefly thinks about the people who’ll be hurt. And if this awareness is absent, the person is being lived by passions rather than living a life.

The reason why dramas work is because the spectator can experience successive emotions in a necessarily foreshortened and compressed form but is spared the full, wretched experience. That experience is surely filled with agonies or, if awareness is absent, has the character of stupid, passive tumbling, falling, and spinning like some leaf blown by the wind.

The experience of life is quite different from the fictional “real” world people long to taste. The vaunted “real” is a mirage—or, put another way, is a servitude to passions, always wanting something, wanting to grasp it, hold it, to consume it—and when denied it suffering and writhing in the lack. The thought occurs that all of us inhabiting this realm were drawn to it by some such immature desire—only to learn that we were going down rather than up; we cannot find it here either, except in artful dramas; but those soon end. Longing of the lower sort is never fully satisfied in this life or, if satisfied, simply grows more virulent—while the hair thins so that that it must be combed over the bald spot, the thickening body is strangled by corsets, the sagging face lifted, the grey hair painted blue. Even the saints do not escape it—although they learn the lesson sooner. Dryness plagues them and the dark night of the soul…

When it comes to pearly gates the gate that led into this world, it seems to me, was the problematic one. It probably has a sign that says: Thus Far! No Farther! Those tempted to stray beyond into the borderzone, where passions writhe seductively tempting them to keep on going, may cross the border. Then the re-education of the stupid finally begins. At that crossing is another sign. It probably says: Welcome to the Real World.

A Tally of the Theories

What do concepts like the Fall, Maya, Fourth and Higher Dimensions, Alienation, and David Bohm’s Explicit and Implicit orders have in common? And here I might also mention Doris Lessing’s Substance-of-We-Feeling (SOWF). They suggests powerfully that our experience of reality, not least the entire whole we call the cosmos, may be something incomplete.

The Fall, of course, holds the idea of some kind of descent—from something high; in actual usage the concept of a spatial height is not what the Fall means. The spatial reference is a metaphor. Some condition or event is likened to a physical descent. The reason for the Fall, of course, isn’t clumsy climbing but disobedience. The process is also likened to an expulsion—from the Garden—into another and highly deficient realm. Here the imagery is horizontal, but its cause, disobedience, is the same.

The Sanskrit word Maya means illusion; it suggests the unreality of the cosmos. It is said to arise from ignorance, thus the false belief that what we experience has genuine essence. It is an appearance, not the real. Thus the cosmos lacks—reality, reality as fully constituted.

The dimensions above the three spatial (length, width, height) and time, thus a fourth spatial dimension (and successive others) were uncovered by mathematical contemplation. But extra-dimensionality, thus the possible existence of reality beyond the three, or four with time added, quickly captured the fancy of those who believe in a spiritual reality. It provides a modern, math-based “proof” of sorts that the spiritual intuition may be backed by science. We are not really home until we return to the Garden.

Alienation is the core of gnostic beliefs—of which a modern representative is Existentialism. We’re living in a world produced by an underling, the demiurge. Therefore we live as strangers in a strange land—and won’t escape until we know this (gnosis).

David Bohm, the physicist, conceived of a vast enfolded reality of which our cosmos is but a temporarily unfolded bubble. The Big Bang therefore produced a tiny bubble. Here too the symbolism is metaphoric; the Big Bang was a coincidence of the most minute wavelengths. Bohm also suggested, however, that there is a conditioned order, meaning deterministic to a fault, and an unconditioned order, intelligence, perceivable directly in humans.

Lessing’s fictional Fall is caused by the thinning of some mysterious psychic energy in the cosmos, that thinning assigned to a celestial event; it causes human behavior as we know it—but also affects everything else.

As the above illustrates, there is a strong tendency to project explanations of reality using dimensions directly or relatively—height, planes, space-time, distance, and such. The results, taken more or less literally, are incomprehensible. We cannot picture a fourth space dimension; if this table is illusion, it’s still certainly very hard. What precisely is present in the Garden that, if we had it, would make us happy? Harps on clouds won’t do it. At the same time, human intuition unfailingly answers Yes, yes, yes—producing the conclusion that we know something. But we have the devil of a time giving it expression in the language and thought modes of this Fallen world. And the inability also afflicts those few who manage to get a really good look at that Garden, another Dimension, the Implicate Order, or feel the winds of SOWF blowing right strongly a ways beyond Borderzone.

Fallen Orchid

This orchid has a long and, for an orchid anyway, dramatic history. It was first planted in some kind of commercial garden and sold along with probably about eighty others to the operators of an office building in Southfield, MI called the Onyx Building. We had our offices there back then. It reached our own suite as a gift from the landlord—and every other office got one too. The orchid stayed in that air-conditioned space, with glorious views of a vast parking lot, until I drove it right across the Detroit Metroplex to the east side, and it has since then occupied this space in Brigitte’s bedroom window, growing from a quite small plant into this gorgeous thing. How old is it? It’s nine years old. I took this picture just the other day.

Faithful orchid—living against the odds. Orchids are air plants. They grow attached to trees or other sturdy growths in the tropics, and use these as a place to hold themselves. Their seeds are so tiny they easily float in the air; currents carry them high into the trees where they settle and then, growing, attach through so-called air roots. Our brave orchid is out of place. No stout tree to give it shelter. A stiff rod serves it, poorly, for support, with help from a bit of twine. It has some plastic butterflies for company. In place of a desired “jungle out there” it can only sense vast masses of brick.

It occurred to me, looking at this picture, that our orchid symbolizes the human condition too. We too are out of place—and live an odd adventure in a fallen dimension. The difference is that the orchid, being more innocent or stalwart than we are, takes it all in stride and simply thrives and blooms.

Rohanda or Shikasta?

When we speak of “the Fall,” should we speak of the Fallen World or, instead, of Fallen Man? That’s an interesting distinction for me. Yes, I know. For some the most fundamental feature of the fallen world is that living beings feed on each other: predation. That seems to put evil squarely at the heart of nature—based on sympathy. I wouldn’t want something to hunt and eat me. And that seems also to answer the question simply. Fallen world. A place where the living, to live, eat other living creatures, that has to be a fallen world. End of discussion?

Predation and its link with the Fall comes from Isaiah in two verses (Revised Standard):

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
and the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them. [11:6]

Isaiah liked this cluster of images. Much later he repeats them:

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
and dust shall be the serpent’s food. [65:25]

In the first volume of her exalted sort of science fiction beyond SF, Canopus in Argos, Doris Lessing projects an image of the planet earth in its paradisaical state, its fallen state, and then again restored. The first volume is called Shikasta, the name of the planet after the Fall, as it were. She derives the word from the Persian word for broken. The earth before the Fall and after the restoration is called Rohanda, derived from fruitful (from Tolkien’s Rohan, I assume). In a most telling chapter showing the restoration, people suddenly notice that predatory animals no longer hunt; they consume vegetation, much as in Isaiah we see the wolf and the lamb grazing side by side.

In my mind the discussion doesn’t really end there. Staying in the West for the moment, I note that vegetation, poor domain, benefits neither from the End of Time in Isaiah nor Lessing’s restoration. Grass still gets eaten. The fruit of the trees is still in peril. We justify the eating of meat by arguing that animals have no meaningful consciousness—and plants even less. But how do we know that?

Expanding our view to encompass the East as well, we see the notion of the Fall extended. The world isn’t just fallen. It becomes entirely illusory, maya. And in Buddhism, where eating meat or destroying even insects is forbidden, the Vegetable Kingdom still remains our prey.

For me the discussion is still open. And in my context the world, as such, seems innocent. And the weight of original sin seems to rest squarely on humanity alone.

(Image: Edward Hicks (1780-1849), “Peacable Kingdom” (link).)

The Monstrous Restoration

In the context of yesterday’s post on a verse in Genesis, it is sometimes instructive to contemplate the vast process by means of which ancient writings have been raised to the rank of revelation and how orthodox doctrines are formed by a process that functions exactly like legislation—thus hammered out, voted in or voted out. How this observation fits the general thematic of the last few posts, the Fall of Man, will become plain as we proceed. The Genesis view is that the Fall was occasioned by sin and brought death as its consequence. (Paul: “The wages of sin is death,” Romans 6:23). One of the very prominent early Christian theologians, Origen (c. 185-254), held a view that is at least mildly conformant to this doctrine, at the abstract level, anyway, if not in detail. Whenever the Church Fathers are mentioned, there you will find a mention of Origen—but invariably followed by the annotation that, well, technically, he was not a Church Father because he had heretical views. Of that in a moment.

Origen’s fascinating view was that souls pre-exist their incarnation, thus that they were created at the very beginnings of Reality. The very fact that we are material bodies was proof for Origen of the Fall, but the disobedience took place before such objects as bodies existed. You might say that humanity’s disobedience took place in a higher realm and that all those here were personally disobedient. The problems associated with “inherited” original sin therefore go away. The disobedience produced a degree of nonbeing in those who disobeyed, and a consequence of disobedience was, is, bodily existence. Origen, therefore, believed in reincarnation, metempsychosis. “Every soul comes into this world strengthened by the victories and weakened by the defeats of its previous life,” Origen wrote. A source I found for that is here—on page 42 of the referenced book. Origen’s scholarly labor involved work in discerning the origins of the New Testament, thus he participated in the process that turns old writings into revelation. But some of his own theological ideas were later condemned as anathema by a legislative body, the Second Council of Constantinople, in 533. He thus exemplifies in person the processes by which doctrines evolve.

The Council declared the “fabulous pre-existence of souls” anathema and condemned those who believed in “the monstrous restoration which follows from it.” The use of those energetic adjectives pleases me—none of the usual bland-talk in the sixth century. The monstrous restoration, of course, is reincarnation. Well, perhaps it is monstrous—if seen from a much, much higher perch in the order of creation.

Two observations. First, it is interesting to note that a very broad hermeneutical interpretation of Genesis’ Chapter 3—viewed as a poetical take on a real state of affairs—could result in so enlarging the picture that Origen’s view becomes credible. Second, that view is widely held in Hinduism, not least the eternal nature of souls and the fact that their capture by Wheel of Karma is the consequence of desire for the low. In that context the death of someone who has become purified is, indeed, a blessing, devoutly to be wished.

East of Eden

Poetry holds something beyond conceptual thought—and by the last, of course, I mean the rigorous, the philosophical kind. The poet tries to capture something elusive. He or she has been inspired. The act is a kind of mirror-making. The mirror is made of images drawn from sensory, actual, day-to-day experience. What it suggests is the not-quite-graspable. But if poetry then also mythographic works like Genesis. Both are subject to hermeneutics; we contemplate them; we try to extract meanings implicit but not sharply visible in them. Some view hermeneutics negatively: dissect the apple, analyze it chemically. The knowledge never tells you how an apple tastes. But we engage in hermeneutics all the time—even if the word is unfamiliar. We’re always pondering the meaning of our own intuitions and experiences.

The hermeneutic task I set myself today is to examined Genesis 3:19, the last verse of what is known as “the curse on man and woman” after their disobedience. It is interpreted to mean that death first appears in human experience after the fall. Yes. That’s an interpretation. The verse says (Revised Standard):

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The verse certainly doesn’t say: “Although my original plan was that you should live forever, always young, I’m now introducing a change. Your body will decay and you will die. You came from matter and back to that state you shall go.”

But then verses 22-24 complicate matters. They are much more specific. Do they already represent a bit of hermeneutics that got included into the myth itself later? Here is the passage:

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.”

A curious verse. Adam had not been forbidden to eat of the tree of life. But now, now that he had knowledge, it was time to prevent him? Such readings of the Torah, of course, suggested to Paul (in Romans, for instance) that death came with the fall—not because of knowledge so much but because the fruit of the tree of life was then also denied—by denial of access to it.

But no. I’m not talking tongue in cheek here. This is a myth, a poetic statement. The sensory images of trees, magic although they are, are symbols easy for ordinary minds to grasp and to imagine. They simplify through images. They suggest the gist of things. The distance between human and the divine is symbolized simply as the distance between the lord-owner of the rich estates and the poaching peasant who doesn’t know his place. Genesis 3 is not a problem for the poet. Two big intuitions are wrapped up in it and turned into a story without too careful a logical parsing. One is the wayward, willful, selfishness of man. Another is an explanation of our current condition. One is said to cause the other. No critical analysis of each verse was contemplated by the writers—or, indeed, undertaken by them—much less the isolation of single verses as if they were hard facts like gravity.

There is no hint here, not the faintest, that after his body returns to the dust Adam’s soul shall rise into the heavens there to be judged. Materialists might find great comfort in Genesis 3. Dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return is rather, you might say, orthodox materialism. Isn’t it? But the poetry of humanity is not exhausted by reading Genesis. Genesis was one take on the subject. There are others. In some death may be viewed as a great blessing—rescuing the individual who, like Paul, in Romans 7:24, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

More Notes on The Fall

The story of the Fall commences roughly on the third page of Genesis; where it falls depends on print size. It is the very opener of the story. The story of Creation sketches in the setting, but the setting is not elaborated. We hear something more about Adam and Eve and how they came about, but nothing like a history of their lives in Paradise. The human events begin with the Fall. If this were not our own at least inherited myth—inherited by way of the decline of the last civilization and the myth’s acceptance by our own, in Christendom—but there promoted to the status of revealed truth—thus if we see it from the outside, objectively, it would be quite correct to surmise that it is a myth attempting to explain the mystery of human existence and suffering. At the same time, it recognizes our very high state in the order of nature, our transcending capacities—while also explaining the dark side, man’s war against himself and nature and, above all, the absolutely unavoidable—death.

We might also read the third chapter of Genesis as a head-shaking and despondent look back to another and ancient time. Tiny pockets of “paradise” have actually survived into ours: primitive hunting and gathering societies (e.g. Papua New Guinea, Amazon region, some island societies). The Fall in Genesis could thus also be read as a view of the transition between such primitive societies and the later agricultural dispensation, the last vastly more complex and riddled with conflict. The herding phase was an intermediate between the two here and there. That this surmise is also correct is evident. Agriculture is prominent in Genesis 3:17—and it is the new thing; it is part of the curse.

Now, of course, we tend to view the primitive as holy, the complex as riddled with evil. The higher the knowledge, the more complex the society always tends to be. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is thus—shifting to another culture—the opening of Pandora’s box. But sentimentality is clearly at work here. To know anything genuinely means to live it. The hunting and gathering life undoubtedly is also just—life. What characterizes it, when we find it, is ample resources and low levels of conflict; those two are obviously linked. That we find it is already a kind of fall—at least for the people who’ve been found. The next thing you know, they’ll be greedily wanting gas-engines for their boats. After that, kiss paradise good-bye.

When I ponder it, the paradisaical state is present all around us as the animal kingdom. It is primitive society—but without the presence of mind. It lives without our form of consciousness, without history, and without memory. Animals don’t consciously notice death taking others; no fear of it is present—as it it’s also absent in little children. Thus the ultimate Fall is the rise of consciousness as such—and secondarily those transformations in the environment that cause knowledge to increase and also to sharpen. Knowledge is only mildly present in the primitive, and always closely twinned with particulars; it is extraordinarily sharp (conceptual) in a vast, rich, and dying technological culture. Its level increases with every advance of civilization; conflicts multiply; and tools for giving it force become obscene, like atomic bombs.

Having said this much, the core issue sharpens. It is the stupefying observation that something sublime, like awareness, produces evil and the more it develops, the more its dark shadow grows. This is a real issue. Genesis attempts an explanation. The problem is disobedience. But Genesis’ explanation is paradoxical. The idea of obedience contains within it two crucial elements: freedom and knowledge. Adam and Eve knew something—before, as it were, they did. The knew about the Tree of Knowledge. They had been told about it. Something of the fruit of that tree had been given to them before Eve ever reached for that famous apple. The writers and editors of Genesis were people just like us—stupefied by the paradox of reality. And they, too, punted. The explanation must lie deeper than anything that we can now see from the shadows of this valley.

Blog posts should not grow into chapters. These comments will continue. I want to extract more from this, not least something more on death and its linkage to transcendence.

I Didn't Want To! Sin Made Me Do it!

One of the ways to discover how really old our dogmatic religions are is to ponder the curious concept of original sin. It’s root is in Paul’s letter to the Romans, Chapter 5, Verse 12: “Well then, sin entered the world through one man, and through sin death, and thus death has spread through the whole human race because everyone has sinned” (Jerusalem Bible). That death “entered the world” is linked back to Genesis chapter 3, where the event of Adam and Eve’s disobedience is told, and where, in verse 19, we’re told that one consequence of it is “return to the soil.”

The curious aspect of this view is not the rather straightforward observation that people are capable of wickedness, but that one man brought all this about. Thus it is involuntary for Adam’s descendants, never mind the tortured justification of our voluntary participation in the original disobedience that the Catholic Encyclopedia uses, quoting and summarizing Augustine here (see subtitle “How voluntary.” The pertinent quote follows at the tail of this post). In Paul sin and death are linked. Later successive councils and theologians have dug a deep trench to separate the two; not Paul. Bodies die. Indeed, in the same letter to the Romans, 7:14-24, Paul manages to elaborate the linkage by blaming the body for sin; sin is in the body. Therefore “When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me.”

There are some genuinely valuable insights in those verses in Chapter 7, not least a well-observed tension between at least two levels of consciousness that often tend to be in conflict. Worth reading; a link is here. Too bad that concepts like divine revelation have frozen this testimony and its interpretation—and the foregoing presentation of original sin—into a kind of untouchable fossil unquestioned acceptance of which has led to multiple dicta by church councils and countless theological explanations.

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Here from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

It is this law of solidarity, admitted by common sentiment, which attributes to children a part of the shame resulting from the father's crime. It is not a personal crime, objected the Pelasgians. “No", answered St. Augustine, “but it is paternal crime” (Op. imperf., I, cxlviii). Being a distinct person I am not strictly responsible for the crime of another; the act is not mine. Yet, as a member of the human family, I am supposed to have acted with its head who represented it with regard to the conservation or the loss of grace. I am, therefore, responsible for my privation of grace, taking responsibility in the largest sense of the word. This, however, is enough to make the state of privation of grace in a certain degree voluntary, and, therefore, “without absurdity it may be said to be voluntary” (St. Augustine, “Retract.”, I, xiii).

As a member of the human family I am supposed to have acted with its head? Before being born? Without absurdity? Come again?

I’m not saying that something like “the Fall” didn’t take place; no; but that above is just one hypothesis.

On “Teleology” and “the Fall”

The end-seeking character of the life phenomenon has long been of great interest to me. Organic life surrounds us—and human-made products all of which are purposive. It is therefore very easy to feel that the teleological is a dominant feature of living reality. But any even minor contemplation of the wider cosmos, especially with modern observation giving us a great deal more information than earlier times had on hand, suggests the very opposite. It suggests that end-seeking entities are only found on earth, at least so far as we’re able to determine. Even just an examination of the solar system reveals an enormous number of bodies, large and small, bereft of any teleological performance. A favorite of mine is the asteroid belt, most likely the result of a planetary collision: countless rocks move there on orbital paths, have moved for millions of years, in darkness; they give nary the breath of a hint of what purpose they could possibly have. And as best as our telescopes can tell us, the cosmos is filled with inorganic objects just like these rocks, by the billions of trillions. We only see the very big and hot ones; they’re all moving but not by inner causes; they’re chained in space by gravity. Using the presumption of the uniformity of nature, we project very large numbers of other planets featuring life; statistical projection would yield such a result, but we have no positive proof at all that anything lives out there in the sense of moving itself and reproducing.

This situation produces certain problems for me. The problem, you might say. It has different facets like a diamond. One might put it this way. In the absence of teleology the universe displays no meaning. Even if life—and conscious life—existed on trillions of planets equally as hidden as ours—the only meaning of the cosmos would be concentrated in the living entities on them. Yet in each such solar system, in addition to a vast sun which made this life possible, there would (uniformity of nature, etc.) be the mass of other big bodies, rocks, and comets, an enormous (call it administrative) overhead for the bit of flowering life. But the purpose of this overhead, assuming that life is its aim, is not discernible to me, the sun aside. It seems in fact to be irrelevant. Realistically considered, life appears much more like an infestation, like a fungus on a statue, an infestation on an otherwise stalwartly and stoically meaningless order of simple being. The cosmos doesn’t point to humans (or birds, bees, or bacteria) despise Brandon Carter’s Anthropic Principle, which in turn is based on the notion that all kinds of other universes could exist. I think of this facet as the “incommensurability” —of life and cosmos.

The problem of incommensurability remains even if we assume that the story told in Genesis is at least poetically true—if the creation of the cosmos ex nihilo is assumed to be part of the story rather than already present as the chaos or the void. The aim of the act is Man. What purpose then does the creation of billions of galaxies serve? Or is this just a tiny episode in a more colossal creation story of which we have no inkling—in which those galaxies have some kind of meaning? And we’re still, as it were, too little to be told?

Another facet of this problem is that teleology is meaning—a genuine marker which says that meaning does exist in the cosmos. What life displays, however, is not really divine design. What life shows is a tour de force by means of which some agency—but well short of divine—coaxes law-abiding but otherwise meaningless inorganic matter to manifest self-moving entities with purposive and even conscious behavior. To study life in its details, the details of its manifestation, thus its mechanisms—which are far from explaining life itself—is to come face-to-face with technology orders of magnitude more sophisticated than ours but similarly “evolved” by what seems to be a process of trial and error, intention and serendipity. This technology operates against a tremendous inertial resistance. But an omnipotent being needs no technology and faces no resistance in manifesting a creature or, for that matter, a vehicle for it. It says “Be!” and there you are. But life is a technology. It behaves like a super-complex log-rolling performance during which we use solar power to roll that log in the water until our bodies just can’t any more. Our manifestation of teleology is also inconclusive. It does not show its true end. We die. The purpose of this physical manifestation is not to continue forever; no; its evident purpose is to achieve something while it is alive. The only way in which the manifest teleology of life points towards divinity is in displaying agencies, by means of bodies, and agencies, furthermore, that lack omnipotent powers and must struggle against inertia. Something must have caused them to Be. But to infer that this command, to Be, meant to be inside bodies—that conclusion is not at all evident, despite the poetic image of God forming Adam from the clay of the earth.

That image I find problematical. Man is an artificer, a limited creature, not God. Another aspect of the Genesis story, however, I find oddly attractive and informative. I like the idea of the Fall, considered here as a raw concepts without specification, in the sense that it might be taken for a calamity of some sort, never mind how it was caused. The effect of such an idea, that of a calamity, is to defer any cosmological consideration to another phase of my existence, anyway, a time when I shall have succeeded in extricating myself from this mess, not before. It narrows the focus to the task at hand. To put this another way, this existence appears to be an adaptation to a most unnatural situation for beings like ourselves (logrolling, etc.).

How this calamity came about and how we got here is only captured symbolically by the concept of the Fall, but the Fall is not only a useful concept but also intuitively matches our experience—that of suffering as well as having aspirations, thus the teleological character of life. The very fact that we can’t do better than that—better than talking about a Fall without specifying precisely how it came about, the mechanism of it, etc.—may be due to what the Fall did to us. It plunged us into deep ignorance (the Buddhist version of it). For my purposes, of course, the Fall should not be detailed. To speak of sin, error, or disobedience has no proof either way. Our sinful nature here may be due to ignorance, thus caused by the Fall rather than causing it. It could have been our fault, of course; we take it to be our fault, but that may be the same reaction we sometimes have when misfortune befalls us even in those cases when we did nothing to bring it about. We don’t know. Either way.

Here my own wits only tell me that deriving our situation from an omnipotent creator isn’t helpful. We can’t know anything well enough to reach that conclusion. What we do know is that we do get help, in the form of inspiration. There is a vector. We know that even if we didn’t see the traces of teleology in all things linked to life. We also know that order is present everywhere—in both the organic and in the inorganic dispensations. A punishing God is not a concept I can buy. Therefore this process has a lawful necessity under which only that which we experience is possible (e.g., inspiration)—not the arbitrary intervention of expulsion from Paradise or miraculous rescue by omnipotence.

In summing up these various takes on teleology, teleology, it seems to me, strongly marks the presence of agency in us—not in non-living nature. In that nature lawfulness would indicate a residual sign agency, nothing else. Beyond lawfulness, it is meaningless. Teleology as we see it manifesting here appears to be a unique situation, not part of the design of the cosmos. To derive the meaning of the cosmos from teleology manifesting in life here is more of a philosophical extrapolation to dangerously fuzzy extremes than I would hazard. Our situation suggests, however, something of the truth of a genuine Fall of some sort, of a project, limited to our community of souls, to get out of the pit. And a reality vastly richer than we conceive of it—and own role in it probably rather humble.

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The above inspired in steps beginning with a post on Siris (ht) pointing to the Gifford Lectures of Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison.