Maimonides and Spinoza and God...

oh my!

I've talked about the incomprehensible a lot in the past few weeks, which means it’s probably time to talk about god, because what is god if not incomprehensible?

Although my presentation hasn't been adequate to convince anyone, the conclusions about the universe I've been arguing for are utterly ordinary physics. In particular, it is very difficult to argue that there is not an aspect of reality that defies our comprehension to the point where--although it exists--it clearly violates the conditions that define existence.

That is, there is an aspect of reality that is: infinite, beyond space and time, singular, all-pervasive, and sustains all of what we like to think of as "reality".

That might sound familiar:

You are the most hidden from us and yet the most present amongst us, the most beautiful and yet the most strong, ever enduring and yet we cannot comprehend you. You are unchangeable and yet you change all things. You are never new, never old, and yet all things have new life from you. You are the unseen power that brings decline upon the proud. You are ever active, yet always at rest. You gather all things to yourself, though you suffer no need. You support, you fill, and you protect all things. You create them, nourish them, and bring them to perfection... even those who are most gifted with speech cannot find words to describe you.

Or how about this list of attributes:

1) Simple (having no parts)
(2) Perfect (incapable of being more)
(3) Infinite (not limited)
(4) Ubiquitous (in all places)
(5) Immutable (unchanging)
(6) Eternal (timeless)
(7) One (only one entity with all of these attributes)

Or back to the source, which I can't find a good link to (that is, with a translation from the Aramaic I find euphonious), so I’ll use this one from memory: "Split a log, and you will find me. Lift a stone, and I am there."

These are all descriptions of god in Christian theology, the first from Augustine (Confessions 1.1.4), the second from Aquinas, the third from the Gospel of Thomas, which although a nominally Gnostic text overlaps with the canonical gospels sufficiently to warrant its inclusion here, in no small part because encountering that quote help crystallize my own thinking on this question, which started out by dismissing the isomorphism between the Beyond of quantum physics and a particular philosophical view of god in the Christian tradition.

For a long time I struggled with this idea. I was an atheist, and still see organized religion as a largely pernicious force in the world. But having studied reality deeply, I had concluded that there really is this infinite, eternal, unchanging, singular, unified, thing, beyond space and time, underpinning all of reality. And I knew that if I described it to my more theologically-inclined Christian friends it would cause them to say, "Aha! See, god does exist!"

It was some years before I started asking if they would be entirely wrong to do so.

But...

The problem for the Christian tradition is that the god being described here, the god which is isomorphic with reality, is unequivocally not the god of the Bible or any other scriptures. This is a god that is by nature unknowable in an absolute sense: if it could be known, the universe would cease to work.

Unknowability is a necessary feature of god.

Which means god cannot speak to us, cannot perform miracles, cannot send his only begotten son to die for our sins in some bizarre torture ritual, cannot wander around the garden in a bit of a daze while Adam and Steve chow down on a pomegranate, cannot speak to Moses out of a bush that burns but is not consumed, cannot part the Red Sea, cannot send bears to tear apart annoying youths, and so on.

So: sorry Christians, you're out of luck. God--or at least something that sounds almost exactly like what your leading theologians call "God"--exists, so long as we’re willing to stretch the meaning of “exists” into some non-Aristotelian oxymoron. But by the same token, this is not and cannot be the god described in your scriptures.

Nor in anyone else's: Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists… everyone is equally out of luck, because in every case they claim their god is knowable via contemplation or revelation, that their god has communicated with human beings, and one thing we can be really sure of is that god cannot communicate with us by any means whatsoever.

But what about the Jews?

In physics, all really deep arguments always end up with thermodynamics: it seems to be where almost any foundational argument in physics leads us. Everything has thermodynamic roots.

In theology, Judaism seems to serve a similar function.

The two theologians who seem relevant are Maimonides and Spinoza.

Maimonides was the premier Jewish theologian of the Middle Ages, born in Moorish Spain and working mostly in North Africa, from Fez to Cairo, in the 1100's.

Spinoza, on the other hand, puts the "ish" in "Jew-ish": he was excommunicated from the Portuguese-Jewish community Amsterdam in 1656 for "monstrous deeds" and "abominable heresies", likely including denying the immortality of the soul and the possibility of divine intervention.

I recently saw a contrast between these two men to the effect that Maimonides said god was entirely beyond nature, and Spinoza said god is nature. While I don't think that's entirely fair to either of them, it lets me put my own views in a the context of this thread of Jewish theology:

God is nature, and nature is beyond us.

That is, I am not identifying god with the ordinary parts of the world that conform to the law of non-contradiction. That is how Spinoza is usually interpreted, particularly by physicists like Einstein: law-like, temporal, orderly, knowable.

I am identifying god with the part of nature that we know to be unknowable, the part that is beyond. This is the god of Heisenberg, who said, “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” What Heisenberg didn’t say is that Heraclitus’ dictum applies: “It is not the same god, and you are not the same man.”

This concept of the "beyond" or "boundless" from Taoism is in some ways a better fit to this idea of "god", were it not for those same Taoists then turning around and spewing a bunch of utmost gibberish about how to approach this unapproachable reality via meditation, breathing in one ear and out the other, and punching people in the face (as well as my own reading on Taoism, Mrs Wonders speaks Chinese and is an expert practitioner of various martial arts, including tai chi, and we have had any number of lively conversations on this topic from which my mature and considered understanding of the topic has grown.)

What I've sketched in the past few months are ideas that lead up to this point, but I've not really tackled unknowability, which is susceptible to strong proof. Unsurprisingly, this proof involves thermodynamics.

Given my positively chaotic approach to this topic of quantum physics and knowability and stuff, it seems only fitting that I'll now go back and demonstrate how we know there are unknowables.

I appreciate that this whole topic arc has been scattered as hell, and can only plead that attempting to write coherently about something which is by its nature beyond the bounds of language and thought presents unique challenges, with which I am struggling considerably. Rest assured that these foundational probings are leading me toward ideas that that should help explicate some of these thoughts more coherently in future (I hope.)