A rose is a rose is a Rose is God?
When God is conceived in personal terms, God is still thought of as being vastly transcendent of human nature. Do we know enough about the nature of all-nature and the nature of God to be able to distinguish their two characters, one from the other?
It’s true that nature as we can examine it through microscopes and telescopes appears non-affirming of our human lives, both individually and collectively – if you forget about the fact that its laws and properties allow us to exist. Setting that aside to focus on the fact that in natural terms, life ends with death as far as we can see… How far can we see? Do we already know the full extent of all-nature? Has science already grasped the fullness of the biggest picture to know that all-that-is does not ultimately affirm us in some way?
To paraphrase St. Paul: with regard to the One in whom we live and move and have our being, how do we know whether to call that one God or Nature? Would it make a difference?
It’s true that nature as we can examine it through microscopes and telescopes appears non-affirming of our human lives, both individually and collectively – if you forget about the fact that its laws and properties allow us to exist. Setting that aside to focus on the fact that in natural terms, life ends with death as far as we can see… How far can we see? Do we already know the full extent of all-nature? Has science already grasped the fullness of the biggest picture to know that all-that-is does not ultimately affirm us in some way?
To paraphrase St. Paul: with regard to the One in whom we live and move and have our being, how do we know whether to call that one God or Nature? Would it make a difference?
Posted by Paul at 5:09 PM Permalink
29 Comments:
Those realizations and epiphanies, I think, are transcendental in nature . . . best communicated, however imperfectly, through the arts . . .
As for St. Paul's question, I don't think it makes a difference . . .
I think we can wrap ourselves around the axle, and lose our simple grip on the spiritual path, by thinking about it too much . . .
Then again, there is a danger in thinking about it too little, as well . . .
Who knows?
Alfred North Whitehead reminds us that, "Religion is the reaction of human nature to its search for God.” People seek significance and they also create it to rationalize.
The rose strikes us as a symbol of purity and passion simultaneously. It represents heavenly perfection and many variations of earthly passion. This flower is a symbol of opposites and contradiction. Its tells us all we think and do is connected at the core by spirit and disconnected by human choice and perversion. It juxtaposes the purity of virginity with the miracle of fertility. You see different colored roses at weddings, baptisms, and funerals to signify life, rebirth and death. This flower symbolizes the love of goddess Venus but also the blood and chosen suffering of Adonis and of Christ. It engenders transmutation, and echoes how we create thoughts and shape them into things of beauty or twist them beyond heavenly recognition. The rose garden begins as Paradise. We get out of life and symbols the depth and spirituality we choose.
Which I don't think justifies me in playing amateur theologian.
How would we know that they are not?
OCEANSHAMAN: I agree. The most effective communications in this area don't happen by way of expostitory writing, and the arts are often a powerful medium.
LIARA: Sounds like you strongly identify spirituality with symbolism and believe that people choose the depths of their spirituality and also what they get out of their lives.
VINCENT: And now I guess you've raised another question - here I'd thought I'd only asked the one (or maybe the One...) But the way your comment juxtaposes "transcendent" and "immanent" makes me wonder if there's really much of a difference between these concepts as well.
Isn't the immanent just the transcendent "getting down" - breathing itself into the clay, so to speak? And isn't the transcendent just the immanent getting up to dance?
I wonder if nature would be in some of the predicaments it is in if humans revered it as much as they claim to revere God. Surprisingly I think it might be.
We humans are a challenging lot.
God/religion is different in that God is not morally neutral, like nature, but thought to be Good (and True, and Beautiful - the 3 theanscendentals). God is love, John says. Nature doesn't love.
If you believe God is with you and speaks with you all the time, then its conceivable you sense you're at one with something greater than yourself. As you connect with the energy, serenity and sense of rebirth that is being in Nature, you discover inner peace and a mysterious synchrony. You can call it Grace or heavenly light. Whatever it is, seeper reflection reveals that it shines from within.
We Humans are incorrigible in our quest to make everything about us. We live in a metaphorical delusion.
Flowers evolved as an adaptation to take advantage of flying insects and transmit reproductive material. All of the beautiful colours and scents were designed for them not us...and they certainly didn't appear before the Sun was created.
We seem to desperately need to find ways to define Nature as an afterthought designed to enhance our temporary visit on Earth, instead of accepting that we are a byproduct of billions of years of trial and error. This view doesn't sit well with us but it is time for us to start smelling the roses.
The reality of the situation doesn't make our arrival any less miraculous.
Then again for me, I think the vastness of the universe and God are one in the same.
Love,
Suzy
As for my simple answer..I think God and Nature are the same. We are part of that SAME, from that SAME, as powerful and vulnerable as that SAME.
Thanks for introducing me to your blog.
Lisa
CRYSTAL: Your comment raises the large question of what religious experience is. What is the experience of being loved by God? How do we know when we are really having that experience? Do we experience God’s love in pretty much the same way as love from another person?
What are the categories of religious experience in addition to being loved by God? What are these like and what is their significance? For example, response to the natural world can go beyond esthetic responses.
Nature displays struggle; nature also displays serenity and doing what needs to be done without the sort of agitation and unwillingness that people often display.
It seems to me that nature in its broadest and most complete sense is what is. This would include what’s been traditionally depicted as Creator as well as creation. God is; creation is. Isness, so to speak, would be the larger and more comprehensive condition, which might be seen as eliminating the absolute distinction between God and nature. God might be organic to being itself and not something ontologically separate and distinct from it.
LIARA: “Mysticism” (imo, a misnomer) is indeed an important dimension of religious experience and one that’s central to the world’s contemplative religious traditions. As you say, to be in touch with this aspect of experience is to connect with something that – like love – runs counter to egoism.
This kind of experience is ineffable; most of its content is truly more than words can say. It’s worth noting that many of the words that people do wrap around it appear to relate more to the belief systems they hold than anything intrinsic to the experience itself. Also, that atheists and agnostics are as fully capable of having such experiences as those who believe in God or any variation of God – divine energy, light, force, etc.
In brief, people can place different interpretations on experiences of this kind. I agree with you that one of the few features we can articulate that appear essential to them is their ego-undermining quality.
VISHESH: True – and also true that words most often have referents beyond other words.
DONN: Without being too sure about just what on earth (or elsewhere) is a product and what’s a byproduct – these may themselves be anthropocentric metaphors of the kind you tend to be suspicious of – I agree with your overall thought. I don’t understand how science is supposed to detract from the awesomeness and essential mystery of being itself. Because science can describe how some things work, interact and are structured doesn’t make the fact of them being here and us apprehending them any less mind boggling.
Familiarity not only breeds contempt but breeds the illusion that we have some special insight into just why things are as they are. We see the sky, the ground, the beer can – no, I haven’t done anything like that, not for a long time, this is only a made-up example… Anyway, we see stuff we’re used to seeing and go “Yeah, of course” – as if we know it just had to be that way when in fact we have no such insight.
CARRIE, I appreciate how you and others are open to thinking about things with each other. I guess we’re sort of a self-selecting group. Anyone who can’t stand looking at such matters with people who don’t necessarily already think exactly the way they do wouldn’t be here, or not for long anyway…
SUZY: Me too…
LISA MCGLAUN, welcome, thanks, and as per my reply just above to Carrie, it seems to have been a matter of self-selection.
It could be argued that apart from what you maintain, “monotheism” is actually bifurcated.
But then, “Bifurcated Theism” – the mere name . . . I can’t see that it ever had a chance of catching on . . .
That's the argument of the "naturalist" but I'm a supernaturalist, I guess, because I don't think it's all that is.
If God and nature are completely the same and interchangeable, then you have a God like Vishnu, both a creator and destroyer. You'll see the face of God not only in the beauty of the stars but in the remorseless destruction of thousands in the recent tsunami.
I keep mentioning David Hart because he wrote about God and the tsunami after it hit - tried to express why he felt God didn't make that terrible thing happen, why he saw God as transcending nature - link
Meanwhile, either way, you’ve got those tsunamis; meanwhile, either way, the picture is far from completely benign. For now, natural beauty/brutality and human goodness/evil all exist – whether on God’s watch or Nature’s watch or on the watch of One who could possibly just as well be conceived of as one as the other.
What you describe as the naturalist position – and I think that how you present it is, in fact, how people generally think of naturalism – is a naturalism that assumes that pretty much all there is to know about nature is how it now appears to us and what we've learned about it to date. But just think, for example, of how for eons, the universe consisted of scattered clouds of hydrogen gas - not even planets or stars, let alone life.
If there could well be a lot to the nature of nature that we don’t know about, why isn’t that enough space, so to speak, for the existence of a personal and yet transcendent God? Why is it important to understand such a God as supernatural? What attributes would this give God that God can't have if {S)he's natural?
GOLLYGEE: Believing in nature must require a particular understanding of nature? (A lot of people see nature as our undoing both as individuals and as a species...)
whether we are totally evil or lovely and fluffy. Its standing still long enough to FEEL a part of it, and to dare to stop swimming against the tide for
a minute,It's very elusive and I dont
feel loved by god/nature at all
but rather joining in with it and to
really be coming from that place even for a split second then suddenly realise I'm chasing my tail most of the time. But maybe it's the same thing as the personal God but
experienced in a different way.It's
not going to stop the tsunamis though could help to get our priorities right perhaps and that's where the "good" bit comes in.
What I dislike about God and nature being the same thing is that it makes God responcible for natural disasters, and not even because someone was "bad" and needed to be punished by having their baby drowned in the tsunami (that weird idea is bad too) but just because that's nature's way, God's way - a God whio is indistinguishable from nature is indifferent to suffering.
David Hart would say, I think, that God hates suffering, that nature, while good, is "fallen" (not acting correctly), that God will comfort you in your suffering and someday put things right. Hart writes in The Doors of the Sea ...
"The Christian eye sees (or should see) a deeper truth in the world than mere "nature" .... should see two realities at once, one world (as it were) within another; one, the world as we all know it, in all its beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, deloght and anguish; and the other, the world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply "nature" but "creation", an endless sea of glory, radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see it in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once, to regard the world as a mirror of infinite beauty, but as glimpsed through the veil of death; it is to see creation in chains, but beautiful as in the beginning of days."
CRYSTAL: Tsunamis occur. You’re saying that this sort of thing makes nature indifferent; therefore, by equating nature with God, you get an indifferent God.
Tsunamis occur as a matter of fact in life as we know it, regardless of whether or not a supernatural God exists. How is it that it’s only conceivable that things ultimately turn out well with a supernatural God?
Again: do we know so much about the nature of nature as to know that it’s incapable of turning out right apart from some Other Nature that effects a positive outcome?
And of course, many people would see the tsunamis as making Supernatural God appear indifferent - which, of course, is the traditional “problem of evil:" how to reconcile suffering in the world with a loving and all-powerful God.
An all-powerful/all-loving God as the world’s creator and the world as we know it... both can’t be true. Any resolution of this problem can only work by making God less than completely loving or less than completely powerful. Since nobody wants to detract from God’s goodness – an immoral God just doesn’t work – every resolution that I’ve seen subtracts from God’s power.
To me, your quotation doesn’t seem to address the problem of evil aside from your paraphrase at the outset of Hart saying that God hates suffering. It’s basically talking about life as we know it and heaven, and about trying to understand and perceive life as we know it with the idea of heaven in mind.
With regard to the paraphrase: if God hates suffering and we suffer because the world is fallen, who is it that laid the shaky foundations of the world? Who created conditions such that the only way to heaven is to go through hell on earth first?
The usual answer about how God had to create the world as we know it so that we could choose between good and evil A) doesn't address the tsunamis, since we don't choose natural disasters, B) in fact already posits a God who’s less than all powerful (“had to” create the world as we know it means that God was constrained or imposed upon by conditions of some kind) and C) isn’t truly satisfactory for any number of reasons.
For example, it’s easy to conceive of a world set up so that our choices would not have been between good and evil but good and better. You can let a child have a choice of toys that doesn’t include, say, a couple of loaded pistols and a knife…
Personally, I’ve never had a problem with “process theology” or other approaches that affirm faith while maintaining that you just can’t get from here to there without going through a process that involves a lot of struggle, pain and suffering that God/Nature/One and the Same did not allow for from out of indifference, but is required to work through simply because there’s no way around it.
It seems to me that this avoids the essential logical contradiction involved in the problem of evil.
Thanks for your comment on Peripheral Vision!
it seems to me that it is equally necessary to suggest that it requires a particular understanding of god.
I don't pretend to understand either.
It seems to me that Nature is Life itself.... both an absolutely simple and unendingly complex equation. I don't think that Nature plays favorites among her life forms, though She is certainly giving us enough rope to hang ourselves.
I'm obsessing on life-in-a-clump-of-earth right now, and reeling with complexity.
What I meant was that, in general, it seems to me that to equate nature with God would require a view of nature that allows for having faith in it.
Invisibility would require faith that it was there anyhow.
I find two aspects of Nature: (1) what is visible to the naked and subjective eye (2) what is visible to science through instruments and theory.
It is part of scientific method to demand evidence sooner or later, and not rely on faith.
As for the subjective view of Nature, this to me is the great and wonderful mystery - parts of a whole contemplating one another. "Faith" is not the word I would use in this context, and yet I find in the interaction with Nature (including with Man and all his artefacts) a sense of the ineffable that others, having a similar sense but in different contexts (e.g. prayer in chapel, temple or mosque) might call communion with God.
I think I'd better stop, lol..
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