The "I" am "God"

If I have a notion of God, I presumably think of a God that is really there on the "other side" of this notion. God is more than my idea of him. But all I can know of this God is precisely my idea of him. Therefore God can be for me nothing but my idea of him.

But this idea I have of God fits within my vision of reality as a whole. I understand God to be a part of this reality. If I think of God as the creator of the universe, then I think of both God and this created universe together within a reality that contains them both. But this reality is itself an idea within my mind. We know, of course, that there is a world outside of our mind. It is madness to deny to reality of the external world and of the consciousness of the other human beings in this world. On the other hand, we only know this world through concept, sensation, and feeling. We know that this knowledge is incomplete. We can be run over by the truck that we don't see or hear coming. We know that there are things that we don't know. But this knowledge is strangely "negative." All that we can know of an "unknown unknown" is that it is an unknown. It is a more or less empty "negation" of knowledge within knowledge.

But let's move on to God. What do we worship or admire in God? We can only worship our conception of God. We can only feel something toward what we know of God. In this sense our conception of the God we worship is revelation to ourselves of that which we value most. As Feuerbach is famous for indicating, we can only worship a God with human qualities or predicates. For instance, we admire God as a wise and loving Father. But this can also be interpreted as a worship of wisdom and love. We unite wisdom and love in an image of disembodied self-consciousness.

We tend to view God also in terms of power. God is supernatural. He can violate natural laws at will. He "installed" these natural laws in the first place. But do we worship this power? If so, then "should" we worship this power? If we imagine a human time-traveler taking impressive technology into the pre-scientific past, then what do we make of the idea of these pre-scientic humans worshipping this time-traveler as a god with "supernatural" powers? As practical beings with a need to manipulate material reality, it is natural that we admire power that doesn't threaten us and may even be used for our benefit. But is this our notion of the spiritual? To worship the power of God is to be more or less an "anti-Christian" philosopher like Nietzsche. "Might makes right" is not typically understood as a "spiritual" position. To be clear, I'm not interested in taking sides here. The goal is a clarification of the concept of God and what it means to worship or adore God.

Continuing this line of thought, we can examine the meaning of miracles. We usually think in terms of the "laws" of nature, but Hume's critique of induction reveals (or strongly suggests) that these laws are mathematical codifications of our expectations. Nature in the abstract is a concept system of expectations. Even those not trained in physics and chemistry still understand a certain stability in material reality. Things are created, destroyed, transformed, and moved around, but the nature of this transformation is itself fixed, or at least we understand it to be fixed and build skyscrapers on our trust that these expectations are valid. Miracles are of course surprising. They violate this system of expectation. If Jesus walks on water, he demonstrates a power beyond these laws.

But the concept of the natural evolves. Human flight was once "supernatural." Radioactivity and relativity were once "supernatural." Eventually the concept of the natural is expanded and elaborated to include surprises or miracles so that they are no longer surprises or miracle. To be fair, phenomena can in theory resist "explanation" indefinitely. Moreover there is a strong case to be made that reality as a whole is inexplicable in principle. We might say that the explanations of science are useful descriptions. For instance, the movement of the planets might be explained in terms of the "law of gravity." But why is there this law of gravity in the first place? Assuming we can fit this law of gravity into a yet higher law as its natural consequence, we can ask this same question of this higher law. The idea is that the annoying why of the child can keep climbing the ladder until it reaches questions like: why is there something rather than nothing?

A traditional religious answer might be that God created this "something." But the child's why can demand an explanation for God himself. Why was there a God who wanted to create the world? At this point answers tend to refer to the psychology of God. Explanations of the material world tend to refer to natural law. Explanations of the actions of persons tend to refer to motives. Even if we appeal to the motives of God, this fails to address the existence of God. Those attached to the idea of God as creator will perhaps speak of God creating time in the first place.  But can we genuinely possess this kind of concept? What is this but confusion or ambiguity masked as explanation or knowledge? Or perhaps a traditional theist will invoke an "known unknown. " God transcends human thinking.  But what can this "transcendence of human thinking" be but an empty negation? What is this but a confession of ignorance?

A case can be made that thinking is "machine like." It thinks the world as a system of cause and effect. If we think of God separate from the physical world but joined with this created physical world in the "totality" or "reality as a whole," then we might perceive that God is functioning on a "metaphysical" level as an object within a system of objects. God as the ultimate object is used to explain the presence and character of every other object. But this God as explanation is just "clockwork." This philosopher's God is not the God we adore for his loving wisdom. Instead this "clockwork" is an attempt to fit our emotionally necessary necessary notion of God into our need to make sense of reality. If we insist on providence (a God who manifests himself as a physical force for our benefit), then we find ourselves trying to make sense of the interaction of the physical and this invisible personality God. But note that all along we have idea of this reality as a whole that is bigger than God. It contains God. Moreover our own mind is the conceptual or intelligible structure of the "totality" or reality as a whole. God exists for us as an idea toward which we have intense feelings.

I'm trying to trace out my mental process that led to a recognition of (traditional) theology as "mechanics." If you look into Fichte's definition of critical philosophy, then that's more or less what I am getting at. Anything comprehensible or about which we can have knowledge is smaller than the "transcendental I" in which this knowledge exists. The thing "as such" is conceptual, even the "God thing" that philosophers sometimes use as an explanation. All of these things exist within a system of concepts. We might say that the "transcendental I" is both the witness of and the unity of this system of concepts. Moreover the nature of any particular thing in this concept system is more or less nothing but its relation to other things. If you tell me about what a cat is, you will likely tell me about mice, for instance. To exhaust the nature of the cat (to say everything about it) is to indicate every possible relationship of the cat with every other object, even God. This is why (as I understand it) the "true is a whole" and science must exist as a system. Our knowledge is "always already" systematic. That is a nature of human knowledge. But this nature is itself a piece of human knowledge. It was discovered or brought to consciousness by thinkers. But this means that the concept system adds itself to the concept system. Intellectual reality can attain increased self-consciousness, we might say. The world becomes richer and more complex.

A thinker with less self-consciousness might imagine that the world is fixed at least in its essential as he contemplates it. But these "essentials" are exactly what thinking adds to the world. Where merely physical reality is concerned, we can project our discoveries backward. We can say that the law of gravity was in effect long before a human ever became conscious of it mathematically. But what about "spiritual concepts"? Let's say that a thinker "unveils" his "radical freedom." He achieves a vision of reality in which no conscious being has authority over him. I'm talking about theoretical freedom. As a matter of fact there are physical and legal constraints on our behavior. But certainly humans have tended to project a Deity, for instance, who imposes a law that is greater and more important than these physical limitations. So our thinker of theoretical freedom has transformed a legitimate bondage on his part to a bondage that just happens to be case and is therefore not absolute or divine. This freedom cannot be projected backwards. The man who doesn't know that he is theoretically free isn't theoretically free. So the reality of this freedom is simply the consciousness of this freedom. Objective physical reality is at the center of our practical or "animal" concern, so we tend to dismiss "mere" consciousness. But consciousness is what we are. We separate consciousness into "just for us" and "also for others." Where does language fit into this picture? We share an intellectual world of concept as well as a physical world. An idea born in the mind of one thinker can spread through this intellectual world and eventually reshape the physical world. Our modern cities of miles and concrete and steel are largely the result of idea creation. Some thinkers have called this mysterious hole out of which ideas come God or the "poetic genius." This God is the creator of the spiritual realm, and every thinking mind participates in or "hosts" this God --or has this God as its truth or center. This idea is related to theology-as-God, but it's mostly mentioned in passing.

The key idea is that the "intelligible structure" of reality evolves "spontaneously." We in our first-person experience constantly enrich our notion of reality. The situation becomes more complex as we include billions of others who participate in this creativity through language. When we value ourselves, this is likely going to be in terms of ideas about ourselves. We are objects for ourselves. We attach predicates to this idea of ourselves, and we love or hate ourselves in terms of these predicates. We might say that these predicates are divine. For they are at the root of our love of God and of ourselves. Moreover we love the same predicates in both objects of thought. If we ignore negative conceptions of God (the kind that atheists justly bring up as a critique of unsophisticated or cruel religion), then we can say that God is one and same with the person we ought to be. We ought to be wise and loving like God. In the case of the atheist, rationality or reason plays the role of God. The atheist ought to be rational and experiences self-respect to the degree that he is so. I myself have been (and still am in a particular sense) an "atheist." But thinking about "objects of ultimate concern" led me back to this word of my intellectual childhood. In a sense theists and atheists are both "theologians" debating about the highest object or principle. It's hard to imagine a thinker without interest in some version or another of this highest object or principle. I like to call this object the Thing. My basic theory is that we worship the Thing when we worship our highest self. Also we worship our highest self when we worship the Thing.

We can understand worship in terms of sacrifice. The atheist "worships" rationality by exposing his wishful thinking to criticism. This is a "burnt offering" of a "lower" part of himself. It is proven to be a lower part of himself precisely through this sacrifice. Similarly a patriot may risk his life for his nation. He proves that this nation is his higher self by risking his entire bodily life to preserve it. The anorexic worships thinness by sacrificing the pleasure of food and health itself to "incarnate" this thinness. Sacrifice is a measure of intensity or seriousness. We experience ourselves as a mess of desires and fears. The Thing is the object that forces this mess more or less successfully into a unity.  But to think the Thing in its generality is already to understand the entirety of my theory. This thinking of the Thing in its generality is terrifying or perhaps even impossible for those attached to a thing in its particularity. As long as we identify with a supernatural God or social justice as our highest self, the thinking of the Thing is the thinking of ourselves from the outside. We convert the most precious form of our subjectivity into an object for ourselves. In this sense we kill it. We have offered up this former higher self as a "burnt offering" to the fire of thinking. We might say that theology is this process of throwing ourselves on the fire, of making the subjective that is fixed and unfree into an object that our now-freer mind can contemplate calmly. Theology recognizes itself as God when it has offered up all "particularity" or "identification." It reveals itself as a "nothingness." But this "nothingness" is completed being. Reality exists more enriched and complex than before. But  "theology" is now detached from every particular object. It is in this sense "bodiless" passionate self-consciousness. The "I" of this completed theology is universal. It is all personality and it is no personality. The infinite is exactly the negation of the finite. The "false" infinite is something particular (often hidden and difficult). It has a "positive" existence. It is a version of the Thing. 
The "true" infinite is revealed by an abandonment of this quest for the Thing. The "I" that seeks the Thing is that which was sought in the Thing, or rather it becomes what was sought in the seeking.
The God-seeking individual or "theology" is a fire or a process. It sews or weaves its own narrative. In order to find God it discovers that it needs to understand itself as this finding. But it finds that this finding is itself the construction of manifestation of God. It's original concept was a relatively empty promise of knowledge and completion.  "Pure being" in its transcendence of all specification and perfect unity is a symbol promising the self's own attainment of harmony, unity, simplicity. It journeys toward the Sky Father or Reason and develops its knowledge and therefore specifies this Father and/or this Reason as it continues on its way. The final specification is a recognition that its image of itself as knower and image of "God" as known are one in the same. Life goes on, of course. Thinking continues. I write this "poem," for instance, elaborating on the basic realization. But the realization is attended by a feeling of achievement or completeness. It is experienced as a complete and beautiful idea, even as the most complete and most beautiful idea.