MT02 Version
Date: 24 December 1993
GOD
THE WORLD-AS-A-WHOLE
by
Kevin
Sharpe
The Graduate School of The Union
Institute
Mailing Address: 65 Hoit Road, Concord,
NH 03301, USA
ABSTRACT.
This essay seeks to understand the interaction between God and the world. I
first look at the idea of the world-as-a-whole and how it might interact with
the parts of the world. Then I propose and briefly develop the image of God as
the world-as-a-whole. John Polkinghorne criticizes embodiment theology as
threatening either God's impassibility or God's vulnerability. I conclude by
answering this issue for the world-as-a-whole theology.
KEY
WORDS.God-World Relation, Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, Impassibility,
Science and Theology, Wholism, World-as-a-Whole.
I'm
not one for rapid tours. Two days' sightseeing of Germany touches very few of
the beauties and treasures of this large and culturally rich nation. Writing
wise, I'm in the midst of a major project and I want to report on it in this
three minute sprint of an essay. I can only touch on one aspect of one point.
To understand the interaction between God
and the world in a way that satisfies mesthis forms my goal. By world, I include especially physical
and biological nature as well as the subjective world of persons and souls and
spirits. I mean the scientific universe beyond the realm to which most theology
has retreated.
Two current heroes in science and
theology, Arthur Peacocke and John Polkinghorne, form the launch pad for this
exploratory essay (Sharpe Forthcoming; Preprint b). Like Polkinghorne, I would
rather speak of the interaction between God and the world than of the
intervention of God into the world (Polkinghorne 1989:6). God's no whiz-bang
magician, but honors the world's regularityswhich, of course, comes from God in
the first place.
Now
to find an adequate picture for how God and the world interact. I turn to Peacocke. He supports a
wholistic understanding of the God-world relation in which God transcends the
world-as-a-whole, which in turn transcends the parts of the world (Peacocke
1990). God relates to the world-as-a-whole which in turn acts wholistically on
the world humans experience. If I spray the outside of an apple, it takes the
chemical to every cell inside. I deal with the apple-as-a-whole which then
works with its parts. Similarly for God's interaction with the
world-as-a-whole.
In my search, I follow the idea of the
world-as-a-whole. It raises
many questions to explore. For starters, does the world-as-a-whole exist? The
idea doesn't rally support as a regular entity subject to normal scientific
laws. So what can I and what can't I say of it? For instance, is the
world-as-a-whole silver with orange spots? Further, a lot of work's needed on
the nature of wholes. I should look at how they act on their parts and what new
comes with the whole, for instance.
I have several suggestions on how the
whole could act on the parts of the world. Each model for this activity
starts with a wholistic action within the world, then extends it to cover the
whole.
Polkinghorne offers a model for how God
might interact with the world and I could use it to say how the
world-as-a-whole interacts with its parts. He holds that God supplies
information to chaotic systems and this can alter the ways the system
develops. Since he thinks such systems lie under much of what happens in the
world, he concludes that God can interact with it by supplying this
information. Similarly, the world-as-a-whole could act on its parts by
supplying information to chaotic systems.
A second model comes from Sperry's
understanding of how the mind, brain, and body relate (Peacocke 1990:207 n.62;
Sperry 1988, for example). The mind, he says, equals the brain-as-a-whole. It
acts on the parts of the brain, the neurons for instance, which in turn affect
the body. One could say the world-as-a-whole acts on the world as the
brain-as-a-whole acts on the body.
The third examplesand by no means the last
possible wholistic modelscomes from David Bohm and Basil Hiley (Bohm and Hiley
1993; Sharpe 1993). In their picture, "active information" carried by
the "quantum potential" guides the behavior of an elementary particle
such as an electron. They compare it to how the information in radar waves
guides the course a ship steers. The potential not only acts in a wholistic way
on the electron and its surrounding particles, but on every particle
everywhere. The model says what the information is physically and how it
influences the electron. The world-as-a-whole could use a medium like the
quantum potential to influence the behavior of everything in the world.
As I said, the idea of the
world-as-a-whole needs a lot of thought. What supports the suggestion that the
world-as-a-whole does act on its parts? If it does, how can I judge between the
different models for this?
For the moment, I put these concerns
aside and explore the relation between God and the world-as-a-whole. Peacocke
has God transcending the world-as-a-whole and Polkinghorne starts with the
belief that God lies outside the world. God has to get from the outside to
the inside. Polkinghorne sets out to understand this without having God
intervene in the world. He also thinks that the inside, the world, doesn't
depend on God's actions to function. God may enhance it, but its day to day
operation doesn't need God. I suspect that, in this picture, God can't get from
the outside to the inside.
Similarly, I couldn't teach any of my
children to crawl. They crawled because their biology made them and told them
how. And I can't get to their insides. Yet, in another sense there's no outside
and inside. I'm inside my children for they have my genes. When her mother
tells my older daughter that she's like her father because she studies hard and
has scholastic gifts, it's not that I taught her. Half the planet has separated
us for many years. The connection between us lies beyond the ideas of outside
and inside.
Neither do I accept the outside/inside theology.
The idea that God somehow lies outside the universe doesn't make sense. Rather,
I think of God as the world-as-a-whole that interacts with the world in
a wholistic way. I try to solve the problem of how God acts by saying God
contains the world and that natural laws describe some of God's activity. No
longer does God stand on the outside trying to act inside a self-contained
world. And God doesn't relate to the world at particular places, for they
interact at every place.
The world-as-a-whole is God. Then God's
actionssmodelled perhaps on one or more of the wholistic mechanisms discussed
abovesconnect intimately with what happens in the world. To research this helps
create a theology best described as the science of the whole. It works out the
nature of the world-as-a-whole, and how it relates to people and the rest of
the world.
This God image quickly leads to several
theological topics. I do not elaborate them further here, but I can say it
suggests a sense of mystery that points to God's transcendence; that God does
everything and yet the world and people experience freedom; a way of
understanding the problem of evil and human morality; that God is personal; the
idea of incarnation; and so on.
My
suggestion also raises problems. Polkinghorne raises an important one when he
discusses embodiment theology, the model that pictures the world as God's body
(Polkinghorne 1989:18-23). I close this report by looking at his point for the
world-as-a-whole theology.
Polkinghorne thinks embodiment theology calls
into question the beliefs in God's impassibility, or that God is vulnerable.
What happens in the world does affect God, who suffers with people and isn't
completely isolated. But the depths of God don't depend on anything created.
This is what Polkinghorne means by impassible. Then, by vulnerable he means
that God accepts the creation as different. It goes about its existence freely
making its own choices.
Think of the end of the universe: it will
final collapse into the big crunch or slide out in an eternity of cold death.
If the world is God's body or if the world-as-a-whole is God, then these events
must affect God significantly. But God's impassibility makes this impossible.
So something must occur to prevent the universe undergoing such dramatic changes.
This could only happen if God unleashed naked power, Polkinghorne insists, to
avoid "being swept along in the changes and chances of [t]his fleeting
world" (Polkinghorne 1989:21). But then this means the universe can't
freely carry out what its inbuilt laws would allow it to. God's impassibility
removes God's vulnerability. To escape this, Polkinghorne rejects theologies
that tie God closely to the world.
To respond, I accept Polkinghorne's scene
with God as impassible, vulnerable, and the universe, left to its own laws,
suffering a miserable fate. What would we think of a devoted mother who watches
her son freely take poison and die in agony, and who could stop him from doing
it? What, then, should we think of Polkinghorne's God? The case against God
tightens if we remember that God gave the universe the laws leading to its
wretched end. Without an embodiment theology, there's a problem with
Polkinghorne's scene.
The weakness lies in impassibility. How
might the theology I propose change Polkinghorne's argument? It accepts the
forecast for the universe. It also accepts God's vulnerability, meaning God
doesn't stop the world going where its laws lead. My theory suggests this freedom
because it pictures the interactions between God and the world as Polkinghorne
does. God interacts with the systems of the world wholistically. Consider how
the body usually acts free of mental direction. So the world usually behaves
without God appearing to direct it. It is free.
My approach accepts the freedom of the
universe and its dismal future. What now of impassibility?
The world-as-a-whole theology does sense God's
separateness from the universe. In another essay, I depicted the universe's
existence coming naturally from two properties of God: God's reason and God's power
to make things happen (Sharpe Preprint a). God exists independent of the
universe in the sense that the universe comes from God. This doesn't contradict
the idea that God is the world-as-a-whole because from God comes the wholeness
of the world-as-a-whole. The whole exceeds its parts, everything in the
universe. This wholeness separates God from the universe.
Further, while I say God is the
world-as-a-whole, I also could say God contains the world-as-a-whole. This
would further help protect God from the fate of the universe. I hesitate with
this God idea because the world-as-a-whole contains all that humans can know of
God. No one can know of anything outside it, not even if there's anything
beyond it. I shouldn't apply the words outside and beyond to the world (Sharpe
1993).
What do I conclude? Polkinghorne thinks
that embodiment theology challenges God's impassibility or vulnerability. My
response says this problem arises traditionally too. The world-as-a-whole
theology supports a sense of God's impassibility and upholds the freedom of the
universe to go about its business.
This
brief essay can, of course, only glimpse at world-as-a-whole theology. My hope
is that this introduction begins a discussion of the merits and problems of the
approach.
REFERENCES
Bohm, D., and B. J.
Hiley. 1993. The Undivided Universe. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Peacocke, Arthur. 1990. Theology for a
Scientific Age: Being and BecomingsNatural and Divine. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Polkinghorne, John. 1989. Science and
Providence: God's Interaction with the World. Boston: Shambhala.
Sharpe, Kevin. 1993. David Bohm's World:
New Physics and New Religion. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press.
------. Forthcoming. "Nudging John
Polkinghorne." In Bridges Between Theology and the Natural Sciences, ed.
Mark Richardson and Wesley Wildman.
------. Preprint a. "The Divine
Origin of the Big Bang Universe."
------. Preprint b. "Theology and
Science as Different Levels of a Hierarchy: A Caution."
Sperry, R. W. 1988. "Psychology's
Mentalist Paradigm and the Religion/Science Tension." American
Psychologist 43 (August):607-13.