Ultimates: Philosophical Theology, Volume One

Introduction

1 I. The Hypothesis The complex metaphysical hypothesis to be elaborated throughout the volumes of Philosophical Theology is that the ultimate reality of the world consists in its being created in all its spatiotemporal complexity by an ontological act of creation. Everything determinate in any way is part of the world so created. The ontological creative act is a making and its only nature comes in the determinate character of what it makes. Apart from creating the world, the ontological creative act is indeterminate, that is, nothing, not something rather than nothing nor something rather than something else. Without creating, the act is not an act. This ontological act cannot be modeled in any literal sense because a model supposes some isomorphism with what it models, and the creative act as such has no form to model save in its terminus (I, 13, i). Making cannot be modeled except in what it makes, which of course prescinds from the making itself. But human cultures have taken familiar elements within the world and transformed them so as to serve as tentative or “broken” symbols of that ontological creative act.1 Three such models are vastly influential, each with many variants. One is to turn conceptions of human personhood (of which there are many) into concepts of gods or God (of which there are many). A second is to turn the experiences of consciousness in relation to objects of consciousness (of which there are many kinds) into concepts of absolute consciousness, mind, Shiva, Buddha-mind, mystical union, Brahman, or the like.2 The third is to turn familiar instances of spontaneous emergence, as in budding trees, maturing people, gushing springs, and many forms of spontaneous decision and creativity into sophisticated models of the Dao, yin/yang transformations, and the like.3 Although nearly all major cultures use versions of all three, the first, Introduction 2 v Ultimates the model of God or gods, characterizes the dominant rhetorical symbology of West Asian monotheisms, paganism, and some South Asian communities. (All cultures have symbols of supernatural agents, but not all cultures ascribe anything like ultimacy to them.) The model of consciousness characterizes many South Asian religions, often in relation to the god model. The model of emergence, especially spontaneous emergence, characterizes East Asian religions, although with a popular cosmology populated by gods and with a strong Buddhist “consciousness” motif affecting some ideas of emergence.The conception of ultimate reality as the ontological act of creation that results in the world as its terminus thus excludes theism, consciousness-oriented Brahmanism and Buddhism, and emergentist notions such as the Dao as literal renditions of ultimate reality (I, 13-14, especially I, 13, i).Any approach to characterizing ultimate reality in determinate terms requires mediation through a theory of religious symbolism that sets conditions under which the determinate symbols do and do not apply. Philosophical Theology thus is not a theism that takes the symbolic rhetoric of God as the basic or controlling rhetorical center, only as one possible rhetorical center under the qualifications of broken symbolism. “Divine” symbolism is on a rough par with “consciousness” and “emergentist” symbolism, although we need to bear in mind that there are many variations as well as combinations in all these symbol systems. Therefore, the aim of Philosophical Theology is not primarily a defense of or elaboration of a theory of God (or divinity or other cognates), but rather a defense and elaboration of a theory of ultimate reality as the ontological act of creating a radically contingent cosmos. It defends the symbolic validity of God-language under certain hermeneutical restrictions. But it also defends the roughly equal validity of consciousness-motifs and spontaneous emergentist-motifs under parallel hermeneutical restrictions. As a result, the appropriation of this philosophical theology for confessional purposes needs to accept the theory of symbolism that breaks the literal reference of the symbols and shows how they still can convey what is valid under certain conditions (I, 3). Personal theism is not literally true, nor is Brahmanical or Buddhist consciousness language, nor spontaneous emergentist symbolism. At the same time, we can say that they are validly employed as symbols of the ultimate reality of the ontological act of creation, each in its own place and under appropriate restrictions. These valid employments are crucial for the guiding symbology of religious communities. This apophatic point of Philosophical Theology has long been recognized in all major world religions. The principal hypothesis of Philosophical Theology argues for the ultimate reality...