Chapter 22: A Physicalist God
In which we attempt a rehabilitation of the supernatural
This is the twenty-second chapter of a book that currently has the working title Cataspectral. You can find the introduction and table of contents here.
Now that we have seen how physicalism can permit the kind of cataspect Christianity is, in which personhood is held sacred and death does not mean extinction, we can engage a more explicitly theistic language and ask whether God can exist under physicalism. Here, the syncretism of the Debunker Synthesis will become more apparent. God is the unification of everything we have discussed in Part IV up until now – IFB, nonegocentric respect for the particular, eternalism, nature religion and singulatarianism – with Christian theology.
Before venturing ahead, I need to emphasize that this is purely a model of God, not to be taken as a comprehensive definition, but also not to be consigned to the status of a useful fiction. The theologian Ian Barbour defends an approach called critical realism, which “takes religious models seriously but not literally.”1 Like the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, a model of God may be successful in making sense of some phenomena, only later to fail so significantly that it has to be replaced. The model I offer is just that – a model that may “help us interpret experience by imagining what cannot be observed.”2 To the extent it ceases to be helpful, it must be superseded.
The concept of God as we now have it in the modern West emerged over thousands of years, beginning with basic animism and evolving through the cult of ancestor worship common to tribal societies. Many small-scale hunter-gatherer societies believed and still believe in incorporeal agents, often ancestor spirits, who have limited powers to surveil and interact with people. The cults of ancestor spirits arise in a broader context of animism, in which all things are infused with a mysterious kind of soul energy. It is rarer among hunter-gatherers to find the presence of what anthropologists and sociologists call “moralizing high gods” (MHGs), which have unlimited power to oversee and compel behavior; these are more commonly found among agrarian civilizations. One theory as to why MHGs developed is that smaller-scale spirits and intra-tribal social pressure may not have been powerful enough to enforce social norms as societies grew from hunter-gatherer bands to large agricultural polities. Sometimes, ancestors were divinized as tales of their exploits grew ever grander over the generations, and they later took on such power that they could know all things and punish anyone who did not do their will. The pathway was similar for non-ancestral local spirits. As time went on, the theory goes, cultures with such MHGs outcompeted those with more traditional gods or ancestor spirits, as they were able to maintain social cohesion and enforce norms across a far wider range more efficiently. Whatever the truth of this theory, it does seem to be the case that the God of the Abrahamic traditions followed this path, beginning as a war god of a particular tribe in the Levant, growing into the ruler of a pantheon of multiple deities, becoming the sole god of the tribe with the gods of other tribes subordinate to him, and finally developing into the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent MHG we know today.
The entity most people associate with the term ‘God’ today is, crudely speaking, some guy that made everything, knows everything and doles out rewards and punishments on the basis of that knowledge. He’s a divine Santa on whose workbench sits the universe rather than the walking and talking dolls requested by Janice and Jen. This presents a lot of problems, all of which have been so successfully dealt with by Reddit atheists that it has become slightly annoying. If God is all-powerful, then why doesn’t He stop bad things from happening? If He is all-knowing, then He must know which people will eventually go to Hell, so why create those people just to allow them to be consigned to eternal torment? How is it fair to send anybody, even Hitler, to Hell, since any act by a human is limited in the extent of damage inflicted but Hell is by definition infinite? If God is all-good, why do some of his prohibitions seem so self-evidently hateful and/or arbitrary to us? If we can explain the universe’s operation and the evolution of life in entirely physical terms, isn’t God’s intervention ruled out by Occam’s Razor? Clearly, physicalism has no place for this kind of God.
From the outset, it is clear that certain steps along the road to the modern conception of God were erroneous from a physicalist point of view. There has never been any demonstration of communication with dead ancestors or the existence of incorporeal creatures of any kind, let alone at the heads of tribes or nations. These intermediate rungs on the ladder from animism to MHGs can therefore be dispensed with. We are left with animism and MHGs, which can take on many forms and so evade such immediate and wholesale defeat. If we are to find out what kind of God could make sense for physicalism, we will need to determine to what extent any interpretations of animism and/or MHGs stand up to scrutiny.
There are four key problems at play in trying to work out whether God fits into a physicalist outlook: (1) the distinction between nature and supernature, (2) pinning down exactly what is meant by the ‘anima’ – the “soul stuff” – in animism and whether that can make sense in a physicalist view of reality, (3) how an MHG might be defined in terms of the prior two conclusions as well as our broader physicalist understanding and (4) to what extent the MHG is actually “moralizing” given this understanding. This chapter will tackle the first three issues, and the following (and final) chapter will address the fourth.
Nature and Supernature
As defined at the beginning of this book, physicalism asserts that no claim can contradict the laws of physics as currently understood without providing predictive power superior to such laws. A certain kind of gadfly might respond that pretty much any concept of God could avoid such contravention, since you could always come up with ridiculous excuses for why God actually exists that would always evade scientific snares – perhaps God exists in some undetectable alternate dimension from which he set the universe rolling eons ago and now simply watches as all of it unfolds, never interacting with it except when scientists aren’t looking. While it is true that such gambits can artificially insulate the delusional believer from the results of scientific inquiry, this isn’t the question I mean to ask here. What I mean to ask is whether the laws of physics naturally end up pointing to something like God without need for any evasive maneuvering.
But if God is supposedly something above and beyond the physical universe, then how can He be investigated by the physical sciences? The answer stands or falls on our ability to resolve the dichotomy between nature and supernature, which has bedeviled theology as a discipline since the early modern era. In his pathbreaking book Surnaturel, the French theologian Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) made the case that Scholastic clerics including chiefly Cajetan (1480-1547) and Suarez (1548-1617) introduced the split by positing that there was such a thing as “natura pura,” that is, that is was possible to conceive of nature as a self-contained unit separate from God.3 These early modern Thomists saw divine grace – the salvation by which creatures are drawn to God, implying a felt need to have a relationship with God – as something that was added secondarily, but which might conceivably not have been added. In a world in which God did not extend grace to creation, rational creatures might achieve their worldly needs like shelter, food, drink and community and then rest content in them, rather than being spurred on by an innate need to be in communion with the divine. This is a view in which Eden was an artificially elevated state from which nature fell into a more normal state of separation from God - sin - in which death and decay prevailed, rather than the perspective from which sin was a deviation from the norm, a fall below the baseline. David Bentley Hart calls this a “two-tier” Thomism, which both he and de Lubac see as a serious misunderstanding of Aquinas’s theology. Hart, with characteristic piss and vinegar, takes it a bit further, calling natura pura an “atrocity of reason.”4
It was from this initial theological dispute, according to de Lubac, that the modern idea of the “natural world” came about. Only later did thinkers like Descartes and Galileo develop mechanistic ontologies on this model. Indeed, philosophical naturalism, which is another term sometimes used roughly to refer to physicalism or something like it, is actually just a rejection of the category of the supernatural. Without the concept of a separate realm of the supernatural, naturalism becomes vacuous. Two-tier Thomism and modern philosophical naturalism, then, are in complete agreement as to the bifurcation between ‘nature’ and ‘supernature’ – they only disagree as to whether the concept of ‘supernature’ applies to anything real.
I believe we can hold onto the idea that there is something “beyond,” a kind of supernature, without falling into the same trap as the two-tier Thomists or the garden-variety dualists that are their progeny. I also believe that this move is compatible with physicalism, at least as I have described it here. If to be real means to be in line with the laws of physics, if the most fundamental unit of physical reality is a measurement or correlation, if there are some correlations that propagate instantaneously, if such instantaneous correlations are only empirically investigable when the speed of light is respected, and if the natural is whatever is empirically investigable, then the realm of superluminal correlations can be said to be real but not natural. This realm would be real in that it would follow from the laws of physics and would be describable in their terms, but it would transcend what we ordinarily conceive of as the natural world in that experimental testing of it would be impossible; this would be the physicalist supernatural.5 Unlike two-tier Thomism, and much more similarly to Neoplatonism or Vedanta Hinduism, this understanding would see the natural as one aspect of a larger structure on which the natural depends for its reality. The status of the natural would be derivative from, or a special case of, the status of the supernatural.
Soul Stuff
Unlike the top-down theologies of the MHGs, animism focuses on the supernatural as it bubbles up from the very foundations of nature. Animism, as noted earlier, holds that nature is permeated by animating forces or souls. Even non-living things like mountains or rivers are seen as having associated spirits. Many types of animism see the spirits of the natural world as persons inhabiting natural objects, such as nymphs, while others view nature as full of a more depersonalized spiritual energy. But if we must hew to a physicalist outlook in which there is no separate soul or spirit substance of either a personalized or depersonalized form, can we still say that non-living matter nevertheless has a kind of… what? Effervescence?
The philosopher Jane Bennett offers a promising solution in what she calls an ontology of “vibrant matter,” which sees non-living matter-energy not as a passive “substrate of brute matter,” but as “an active becoming, a creative not-quite-human force capable of producing the new” (italics hers).6 Nature is generative from the foundations up. At the quantum level, particles and antiparticles pop into and out of existence constantly, creating what physicists call “quantum foam” and representing an inherent energy supply even in a vacuum – the “vacuum energy.” Scientists can observe the effects of these quantum fluctuations in the laboratory by aligning two non-conductive, uncharged plates in a vacuum. Ordinarily, these plates shouldn’t move, since there would be no force between them, but under these conditions, the plates exhibit a small attractive force, which appears because the amount of vacuum energy outside of the plates pushing inward is greater than the amount between the plates pushing outward. This is known as the Casimir Effect.
Nature’s tendency toward spontaneous generativity appears across all levels of organization. Water molecules lock together into ice crystals, in turn tracing the beautiful fractal patterns of snowflakes. Heat gradients in the atmosphere and ocean form convection currents, creating weather. Starlings in Rome’s dusky skies form amoeba-like shapes, transfixing evening commuters. Neurons fire in bafflingly complicated recursive patterns, reflecting on their own outputs even as they formulate new actions. Solutions of commonly occurring substances subjected to electrical charges produce amino acids, lipids and nucleic acids, a process that is theorized to have produced self-replicating molecules and ultimately life, in a process called “abiogenesis.” Matter is anything but “inert” or “passive.” Matter is a blooming, buzzing embarrassment of novelty. On what grounds do we say that matter is “dead” or “dumb?” After all, it created us, and we are it.
A basic creativity suffuses nature, from the energy constantly boiling up from the vacuum to the forms that spontaneously weave themselves into complex patterns. The rudiments of intelligence are foundational to the cosmos even at the smallest scales. The MHG in the commonly received, two-tier Thomist sense is a personage not too different from a human, just with greater (that is, infinite) power and knowledge. On this understanding, the fecundity of nature could be useful to God in creating a universe – would, in other words, be a helpful feature of the world-machine on his workbench – but it would not necessarily tell us anything about God directly. Rejecting two-tier Thomism eliminates such a conception, and it leaves us with a theism significantly more open to animist notions of divinity, in which the creative intelligence of nature just is the creative intelligence of God.
God As “The Outside”
Nature is a special case of supernature; it is what supernature looks like from the point of view of beings who live along a gradient of entropy defined by physical processes propagating at the speed of light. I have earlier suggested that the supernatural is an implicate order, a totality in which all events, past, present and future, are deeply interconnected. From the theoretical point of view of this totality, all events that appear to us as separate would be more like the facets of a jewel, equally available to direct scrutiny. Since quantum entanglement proceeds faster than the speed of light, correlations between events that would appear retrocausal to us would be just as common as correlations moving in the “forward” direction. This is suggestive of some features we might associate with Godhood, but it leaves at least two significant questions. First, what reason do we have to think that Archimedean points of view “from the outside” could actually be real? Second, even if we could be assured that such points of view really did exist, how could we know that only one “outside” observer existed, and not a multiplicity?
We probably won’t ever be able to test empirically whether supernatural points of view exist, but it seems at least plausible, if not probable. Per our IFB ontology, we take reality to be fundamentally perspectival. Two entangled quantum particles have an extra fact that is inaccessible to any system not entangled with the pair. Measure one of the pair, and the fact appears (for you). But we have also seen that complete bottom-up perspectivalism lands us in bizarro-maya, a dead end. Our answer to bizarro-maya was to import a Bohmian holistic element, in which the collectivity of instantaneous quantum measurements keeps every particular measurement aligned with the others in a lawlike manner. But it is not only the “natural” subset of quantum measurements – those that appear to creatures like us as the generation of new information from past to future – that are perspectival. If all particles have been, are or will eventually become entangled, and entangled particles have superluminal correspondences, then any interaction corresponding to any point in spacetime will always already have been registered by all others. If a measurement implies a point of view, then such a global state must also have at least one associated point of view: the collection of all data about nature laid bare.
What we are calling supernature here would probably be a unity, since there would be no mechanism for establishing separation between points of view. We think of two labs each measuring the state of one particle in an entangled pair as separate because the new information each gains is still hidden to the other. From a holistic “outside” perspective that encompasses all qubits, no such communication barrier would exist. As we saw in earlier in this book, selfhood is a zone of ignorance, accessible only to a single system and subsisting only as long as it maintains its distinctness from others. To become fully known to another system would be to merge into that system and lose one’s selfhood. The Apple TV series Pluribus provides a creepy illustration of this principle. The realm of superluminal connection would have no lacunae – everything that appeared as separate from the point of view of nature would appear as connected from the supernatural point of view. Different areas would have disparate levels of entanglement between them, but all information in those areas would be equally accessible from the level of supernature. Perhaps it would be something like remembering different events in your own life – you’re able to see different events as being more or less connected, but all are directly available to you. Living creatures are sets of measurements strung together in the direction of increasing entropy. Each new measurement is differentially entangled with other measurements, meaning that certain information is accessible at such points and certain information is not, since in nature information sharing is limited by the speed of light. This is what we see as the passage of time and the expanse of distance – different levels of entanglement encrypted by the speed of light. In this way, we could imagine full personhood coming to fruition in time while simultaneously being part of a larger totality in eternity, avoiding the Pluribus situation in which no distinctness is permitted.
Every photon we see is already entangled to an unimaginable degree, but we can’t use any of those entanglements to predict the future, since the ‘future’ is by definition a region about which we lack information that could be used to confirm the entanglements. The totality already “knows” the states of all entangled particles – from our perspective, it would be a “surface” far away in the future at the very end of the universe – so it would not have such problems. Not organized on the basis of increasing entropy and not mediated by photon communication, it would not experience time or space and would thus not have any way of splitting into separate entities that each lack information about the other. The totality would be a unitary, timeless entity of effectively infinite (perhaps even literally infinite) complexity. On this basis, the word ‘supernature’ can be taken to be equivalent to the word ‘God’.
If our MHG is the top-down, unitary perspective of the broader reality encompassing nature, then our version of animism is the bottom-up creative activity of God operating constantly at all levels of nature. Animism is the sense that the whole potentiates and forms (or, better, informs) the parts. So far, so good. But the MHG isn’t just a “high God,” it is also a “moralizing God.” Morality deals in values, which, as we have seen, are matters of semantics and thus require interpreters for their existence. For the MHG truly to be recovered, it is not enough to posit a rarefied totality of entanglement sitting on a distant surface in de Sitter space, undergirding the four-dimensional spacetime in which we live. What is needed is for God to care.
Barbour, Ian. Religion and Science. HarperOne, 1997. p. 119.
Ibid.
Unfortunately, Surnaturel has not been translated into English, et je ne parle pas Français, but I was able to track down a translation of one chapter: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/surnaturel-the-system-of-pure-nature/. Further, this Aeon article provides excellent explanation and background https://aeon.co/essays/investigating-the-roots-of-the-natural-supernatural-dichotomy.
Hart, David Bentley. You Are Gods. Notre Dame, 2022. p. 31.
There could, of course, always be additional supernatural facts that wouldn’t depend on quantum entanglement and are completely unknown to and unknowable by humans. This is the timeless truth articulated by that great sage Donald Rumsfeld: there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns (which, as an unrelated aside, implies the existence of unknown knowns – I guess this would be the psychoanalytic unconscious?).
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke, 2010. p. 118.