GOD AND THE WORLD OF SIGNS: INTRODUCTION TO PART 2

We introduce the second part of a two‐part collection of articles exploring a possible new research program in the field of science and religion. At the center of the program lies an attempt to develop a new theology of nature drawing on the philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Our overall idea is that the fundamental structure of the world is exactly that required for the emergence of meaning and truth‐bearing representation. We understand the emergence of a capacity to interpret an environment to be important to the emergence of life, and we see the subsequent history of biological evolution as a story of increasing capacities for meaning‐making and ‐seeking. Theologically, we understand God to be the ground of all such meaning‐making and the ultimate goal of the universe's emerging capacity for interpreting signs. Here we summarize the articles in Part 1, which focused on scientific and philosophical aspects of the research program, and introduce Part 2, which turns to the theological outworking of the project.     

INTRODUCTION: TOWARD A METAPHYSIC OF MEANING

We introduce a two‐part collection of articles (Part 2 to appear in the September 2010 issue) exploring a possible new research program in the field of science and religion. At the center of the program lies an attempt to develop a new theology of nature drawing on the philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Our overall idea is that the fundamental structure of the world is exactly that required for the emergence of meaning and truth‐bearing representation. We understand the emergence of a capacity to interpret an environment to be important to the emergence of life, and we see the subsequent history of biological evolution as a story of increasing capacities for meaning making and meaning seeking. Theologically, we understand God to be the ground of all such meaning making and the ultimate goal of the universe's emerging capacity for interpreting signs. Here we explain our reasons for seeking a new metaphysical framework in which science and theology may each find a home. We survey the contributions to the two‐part collection, and we suggest that the interdisciplinary collaboration from which these have arisen may serve as a methodological model for the field of science and religion.     

Theosis and Human Enhancement

Recent theological work on the meaning of theosis or deification has largely ignored today’s cultural context in which ordinary Christians are expected to put theosis into practice. The widespread use of various technologies of human enhancement creates expectations that might distort the interpretation of theosis. Human enhancement technologies tend to feed off the desire to expand the self, while theosis is grounded in the idea that true divinization means becoming like God in God’s own kenosis of self-giving love. The theology of theosis is a call to empty the self, not to expand it. If theosis defines the Christian life, the use of human enhancement technology is largely a matter of indifference.     

In Search of Authenticity: A Heideggerian Quest

Martin Heidegger's conception of authentic resoluteness gives us a picture of life as an unfolding story aimed at a fulfillment of a specific sort. Such resoluteness provides a focus and continuity to a life that can help an individual find meaning and order during times of personal difficulties. This phenomenology of an attempt to live an authentic life gives an image of how such a personal quest might be worked out. In this article, I talk about how Heidegger's concept of authenticity has affected my life ever since I learned about it from lectures and secondary sources in 1961. The narrative conception of life as a story adding up to something is an idea that has helped me through difficult times, and I continue to embrace it to this day.     

A Humanist Synthesis of Memory, Language, and Emotions: Qian Mu’s Interpretation of Confucian Philosophy

While Qian Mu intentionally avoided systematic philosophical arguments, his references to memory, language, and emotions, as expressed in a book he wrote in 1948, were suggestive of new interpretations of traditional Chinese, and especially Confucian, ideas such as human autonomy, mind, human nature, morality, immortality, and spirituality. The foremost contribution of Qian’s humanist synthesis rests in its articulation of the idea of the person. Across the context of memory, language, and emotions, the tiyong dynamics of mind and human nature recreate, in modern terms, the traditional Chinese concept of the person who is individually unique and simultaneously interrelated. Avoiding the extreme polarities of individualism and collectivism, he stresses rather their coexistence. His synthesis explains to the Chinese people something about who they are, the meaning in life in the framework of their culture, and how their (revitalized) way of life is at its best in the most important area, that of human relations.     

Something-We-Know-Not-What,Something-We-Know-Not-Why: Berkeley,Meaning and Minds

It is sometimes suggested that Berkeley adheres to an empirical criterion of meaning, on which a term is meaningful just in case it signifies an idea (i.e., an immediate object of perceptual experience). This criterion is thought to underlie his rejection of the term ‘matter’ as meaningless. As is well known, Berkeley thinks that it is impossible to perceive matter. If one cannot perceive matter, then, per Berkeley, one can have no idea of it; if one can have no idea of it, then one cannot speak meaningfully of it. But if this is Berkeley’s position, then there is a puzzle, because Berkeley also explicitly claims that it is impossible to perceive/have ideas of minds. So if he is relying on a criterion on which terms get their meaning by referring to ideas, then, just as Berkeley rejects talk of material substance, so, too, must he reject talk of mental substance. Famously, however, Berkeley insists that there is no parity between the cases of material and mental substance. It is typically suggested that the disparity between matter and minds rests on the fact that although one cannot strictly speaking perceive minds, nonetheless Berkeley thinks that one can have experiential access to minds via reflection, and that this access allows for meaningful talk of minds. Of course, one can only have reflective experience of one’s own mind. But what of other minds, which one cannot reflectively experience? Here the usual tactic is to suppose that, although one cannot have direct reflective experience of other minds, nonetheless one can indirectly experience such minds via analogy to our own minds, and that this indirect experience grounds the meaningfulness of talk of other minds. In this paper, I argue that the reasoning behind Berkeley’s ‘likeness principle,’ that an idea can only be like another idea, can be generalized to argue against this experience-based account of our access to other minds. I claim instead that Berkeley allows for the meaningfulness of talk of other minds by expanding the criterion of meaning in a different way. I argue that Berkeley holds a criterion of meaning on which a term is meaningful just in case it signifies either an object of experience or an object that one has reason to posit on the basis of experience, i.e., an object that is necessary to explain our experiences. When an object is neither experienced nor explains our experiences, then and only then is Berkeley willing to reject it as meaningless. Thus he writes of “the word matter,” that “it is no matter whether there is such a thing or no, since it no way concerns us: and I do not see the advantage there is in disputing about we know not what, and we know not why” (Principles, §77.) The word is not meaningless merely because we do not know what matter might be; it is meaningless because we also do not know why it should be. Correspondingly, I argue that the term ‘mind’ is meaningful because although we have no experience of minds, nonetheless they play an important role in explaining our experiences.     

LIFE AND MEANING

This paper addresses an apparent tension between a familiar claim about meaning in general, to the effect that the meaning of anything owes to its place, ultimately, within a ‘form of life’, and a claim, also familiar, about the meaning of human life itself, to the effect that this must be something ‘beyond the human’. How can life itself be meaningful if meaning is a matter of a relationship to life? After elaborating and briefly defending these two claims, two ways of amending and thereby reconciling them are considered and rejected. These ways involve either spiriting away the issue of life's meaning or encouraging unwelcome metaphysical views. The author then argues that, rather than remove the tension between the two claims, each should be viewed as expressing an aspect of a delicate metaphysical position. This position is distinguished from ones, like transcendental idealism and constructivism, with which it might be confused, and is then related to Daoist and Zen thought and to the later philosophy of Heidegger. Crucial to the position is the proposal that the ‘beyond the human’ which enables life to be meaningful is both ineffable and ‘intimate’ with life itself.     

MICHAEL POLANYI ON ART AND RELIGION: SOME CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON MEANING

This paper is a critique of the theory of meaning in art and religion that Michael Polanyi developed in his last work entitled Meaning. After giving a brief summary of Polanyi's theory of art, I raise two serious difficulties, not with the theory itself, but with the claims Polanyi makes about the relation of meaning in art to science and religion. Regarding the first difficulty, I argue that Polanyi betrays an earlier insight when in Meaning he attempts to dissociate meaning in art from meaning in science; instead I argue that both science and art are aesthetic enterprises. Regarding the second, I argue that Polanyi's account of religion is an aesthetic reduction, that meaning in religion, at least in the Western tradition, is not so much an aesthetic as it is an existential matter.     

PROBLEMS BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY IN THE COURSE OF THEIR MODERN HISTORY

Abstract. It is misleading to speak of warfare between science and Christian theology, as Andrew White did in 1896. White also was mistaken in exaggerating the conflict between the church and Galileo and Copernicus. The more important issue between science and theology has to do with the mechanistic interpretation of nature. When he introduced the principle of inertia in his natural philosophy, René Descartes insisted that God's immutability renders it impossible for God to intervene in the creation. He reduced the idea of God to a deistic notion by speaking of motion exclusively as a property of bodies. Even though Isaac Newton offered a different view, the Cartesian view dominated subsequent thinking. This made dialogue with theology difficult. Michael Faraday, followed by Albert Einstein, introduced the idea of field; bodily phenomena were subordinated as manifestations of fields. The precursor of the idea of field is the Stoic idea of spirit, which is close to the biblical concept of spirit. Thomas Torrance and I have taken this concept of field as an occasion to reopen dialogue. Mechanistic thinking accounts for the tension between Darwinian thought and theology. In principle the tension can be resolved, because the Bible itself asserts that all living things were brought from the earth—that is, organic life emerged from inorganic matter. Thus, emergence, contingency, and novelty are consistent with Darwinian evolutionary thinking. Contingency can be related conceptually to the activity of God in creation.     

Wonder,Mystery, and Meaning

Abstract

This paper explores the connection between wonder and meaning, in particular ‘the meaning of life’, a connection that, despite strong intrinsic connections between wonder and the (philosophical) search for meaning has not yet received any sustained attention. Does wonder ‘merely’ inspire our search for meaning, or does it also point the way towards meaning? In exploring this question I first engage with Hannah Arendt, then examine the suggestion (by Josef Pieper and Rachel Carson, among others) that the meaning wonder points us to lies in connecting us with the mystery of existence. Can there be meaning in mystery, or is wonder––as a state of being lost for words in the face of mystery––rather antithetical to meaning? This discussion leads to the idea, emphasized in recent writing on wonder, that wonder (also) depends on the meaning we ascribe to things. In the final section I discuss wonder as a potential source of meaning in life, then return to the question whether it can also point towards a deeper meaning of life. I conclude that no purely rational justification can be given for this view, but that this need not detract from the importance of wonder in our lives.     

Meaning gained versus meaning lost: The effects of meaning salience on anxiety and depression during the coronavirus pandemic

People who have meaningful lives generally experience less anxiety and depression. Meaning salience, or the awareness of the meaning in one's life, is believed to partially explain this relationship. However, in times of isolation, what might be most salient to people are the meaningful aspects of their lives that have disappeared. This study seeks to understand how making gained versus lost meaning salient affects anxiety and depression. Participants either wrote for 5 minutes about how their life gained meaning (n = 29) or lost meaning (n = 30) due to the coronavirus restrictions, or about music (i.e., the control condition; n = 32). Those who wrote about gained meaning experienced less momentary anxiety than those who wrote about lost meaning. In addition, meaning salience moderated the relationship between meaning and both anxiety and depression. Those who wrote about gained meaning appeared to exhibit a positive relationship between meaning in life (MIL) and both anxiety and depression, while those who wrote about lost meaning exhibited negative relationships. In all, this suggests that meaning salience is not always positive and that researchers and practitioners should consider how making positive meaning salient may be more beneficial than a general focus on MIL.     

Chronic pain as a posture towards the world

This article discusses what chronic pain is “about”, what the intentional object is of pain, and what is the intentional relation like? My approach is based on Maurice Merleau‐Ponty’s phenomenology, with an aim is to understand a two‐way relationship: how the sufferers bestow meaning on chronic pain, and how pain, on the other hand, signifies peoples’ life. In contrast to biomedical and cognitive‐behavioral theories, chronic pain is not only meaningful, but as an intentional emotion as well; it does not simply “happen” in the nervous system. I analyzed meanings assigned to pain through the narratives of three patients with chronic pain. Pain is described as creating a discontinuity in the patient’s Lebenswelt at the narrative level. When attempting to find meaning to their pain, patients point both to everyday life and biomedical referents. The structure of bestowing meaning is, metaphorically, like a necklace with everyday world and biomedical interpretations strung like beads, one after the other. The intentional object of pain, on the contrary, is constituted of the patients’ world in its wholeness. My results don’t confirm Drew Leder’s idea of disrupted intentionality, but underline directness as the basic relation of human experience also in case of pain and disease. Pain in itself is an e‐movere, an intense passionate movement, an intentional relation with and a bodily posture taken towards the world.     

New Work on Kant's Doctrine of Right

Super-substantivalism is the thesis that space is identical to matter; it is currently under discussion – see Sklar (1977, 221–4), Earman (1989, 115–6) and Schaffer (2009) – in contemporary philosophy of physics and metaphysics. Given this current interest, it is worth investigating the thesis in the history of philosophy. This paper examines the super-substantivalism of Samuel Alexander, an early twentieth century metaphysician primarily associated with (the movement now known as) British Emergentism. Alexander argues that spacetime is ontologically fundamental and it gives rise to an ontological hierarchy of emergence, involving novel properties such as matter, life and mind. Alexander's super-substantivalism is interesting not just because of its historical importance but also because Alexander unusually attempts to explain why spacetime is identical to matter. This paper carefully unpacks that explanation and shows how Alexander is best read as conceiving of spacetime as a Spinozistic substance, worked upon by evolution.     

Negative hallucinations,dreams and hallucinations: The framing structure and its representation in the analytic setting

This paper explores the meaning of a patient's hallucinatory experiences in the course of a five times a week analysis. I will locate my understanding within the context of André Green's ideas on the role of the framing structure and the negative hallucination in the structuring of the mind. The understanding of the transference and countertransference was crucial in the creation of meaning and enabling the transformations that took place in the analytic process. Through a detailed analysis of a clinical example the author examines Bion's distinction between hysterical hallucinations and psychotic hallucinations and formulates her own hypothesis about the distinctions between the two. The paper suggests that whilst psychotic hallucinations express a conflict between life and death, in the hysterical hallucination it is between love and hate. The paper also contains some reflections on the dramatic nature of the analytic encounter.     

AN IDEA OF NATURE: A BIPOLAR PROPOSAL

This article argues that in order to understand nature, we depend on a basic idea or ideal type of nature, following R. G. Collingwood's work The Idea of Nature. Collingwood asserted that the prevailing idea of nature in Western thought evolved through three analogies for understanding nature: (1) living organism, (2) machine, and (3) historical process. His use of the concept of idea is comparable to the use of ideal type proposed by Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. This article is a bipolar proposal: the one pole suggests revising Collingwood by including three additional elements: (4) emergence, (5) mystery, and (6) full‐bodied/God‐intoxication. Each of these elements is elaborated. The second pole concludes that under the aegis of this sixfold idea of nature, the classical Christian dogma of the Incarnation, the Two Natures of Christ can be interpreted as a proposal for understanding nature. The two poles are not necessarily bound together, but for certain theological purposes they may indeed work in tandem.     

ALTRUISM IN NATURE AS MANIFESTATION OF DIVINE ENERGEIA

Abstract. Christian theological attempts to integrate scientific claims about altruism in nature have not been completely successful largely because Western theologies—particularly some Protestant versions—lack a theologically grounded ontological basis for speech about altruism, agape, and other forms of love. Patristic theologies of divine essence, energeia and logoi, most fully developed in Eastern Orthodox thought, provide just such an ontological basis upon which Christian thought can stand in order to demonstrate that altruism in nature does not challenge religious claims that moral behavior has transcendent meaning but rather suggests that it is itself a manifestation of the divine will.     

Some Thoughts on the Integration of Narrative and Humanistic/Existential Approaches to Psychotherapy

Although humanistic and narrative approaches to psychotherapy make some different assumptions about the nature of the human condition and emphasize different aspects of human functioning in their therapeutic endeavors, I argue here that the underlying assumptions of these two approaches reflect a common view of humanness, thus making these two approaches candidates for attempts at integration. Four areas of commonality are discussed in detail: (a) life as a process of continual development, (b) the nature of experience and the process of meaning creation, (c) the nature of psychological dysfunction, and (d) the nature and importance of human relationships. The implications of these commonalities for the practice of therapy from an integrated perspective are explored in an extended case example.     

The three eras of cosmic evolution

The time‐honored concept of change seems capable of accounting for the appearance of matter from the primal energy of the Universe, and in turn for the emergence of life from that matter. As sentient beings, we, perhaps along with other advanced life forms in the cosmos, have become the collective consciousness of the Universe. Our raison d'etre is our ability to appreciate the cosmos—to wonder, to introspect, to abstract, to explain—for technological intelligence is a preeminently evolved agent of the Universe.     

Is Philosophy All About the Meaning of Life?

This article defends a conception of philosophy popular outside the discipline but unpopular within it: that philosophy is unified by a concern with the meaning of life. First, it argues against exceptionalist theses according to which philosophy is unique among academic disciplines in not being united by a distinctive subject matter. It then presents a positive account, showing that the issue of the meaning of life is uniquely able to reveal unity between the practical and theoretical concerns of philosophy, while meeting a range of desiderata for a typical specification of subject matter. After showing how recent analytic work on “the meaning of life” has conflated the traditional question with issues of social meaningfulness, it offers an explanation of why the traditional question has become marginalised in philosophy. The reasons are not good, however, so it concludes that philosophy should embrace its popular image.     

New Grounds for a Re-Union Between Science and Spirituality

Science is recovering its basic mission of making sense of the world. As a search for meaning it is similar to spirituality. The difference between science and spirituality is not in the end they seek, but in the way they seek it. Science uses rational thinking in analyzing and interpreting what experience and experiment discloses, whereas spirituality combines experience with the immediacy of an intuition that speaks to a reality that underlies the world conveyed by the senses. In our day science and spirituality, the great streams of human endeavor, are on a converging course. They share the realization that the cosmos is not a domain of unconscious matter moving about in passive space; it is a dynamic, self-evolving whole, integral at all scales and in all domains. This convergence is important in itself, and it is also important in regard to its consequences. On the one hand it tells us that our intuitive insights about the nature of life and reality are not illusory: they are confirmed in their essence by cutting-edge science. On the other, it offers motivation for entering on a positive path to our common future because wholeness is a defining characteristic of the kind of civilization that could overcome the problems created by the mechanistic manipulative rationality of today's dominant civilization.