However, I can not help myself. Maybe its because I spent many years as an ardent atheist, or maybe its because of my ongoing interests in philosophy (particularly mystical and ethical philosophy, and their intersections), but I just can't seem to quit thinking about these kinds of questions. And while I accept the criticisms of my Sufi siblings, and understand that such speculation can lead to indulging my nafs as well as increasing my confusion, I also feel like its important given the current and ongoing discussions about the roles of belief, disbelief, secularism, etc. in our cultures, and in the emerging globalized culture.
With all of that in mind, I wish to offer a philosophical description of how I ended up with my current ideas on God: way back when I was an atheist, and in college as a philosophy major (so, 10 or so years ago), I was reading some book for class and came upon a maxim, something to the effect of "Anything you say about God is wrong." Though I had certainly heard phrases like this before, I'd never really thought about it. Eventually, my thinking naturally led to this realization: if everything you say about God is wrong, then saying "God exists" is wrong; similarly, saying "God does not exist" is wrong. Continuing, in the nature of the Buddhist Four-fold negation, I then came to: saying "God both exists and doesn't exist" is wrong, as is saying "God doesn't both exist and not-exist". Instead of rejecting this as illogical, I just asked "okay, how could all of these statements be 'true', even if only contingently?"
What I arrived at was this: God, meaningfully called, would of necessity wholly transcend while being imminent within any such dialogical notions as "existence" and "non-existence", "conscious" or "unconscious", "personal" or "impersonal", etc. This, of course, is reliant on the definition of God as of necessity being absolute and infinite, which sets up the pairs "being" / "non-being", "absolute" / "non-absolute", "infinite" / "finite", etc., while reliant on notions of "transcendence" / "non-transcendence", "imminence" / "non-imminence", etc. Altogether, this shows God as consistently retreating from any possibly conceptual category, leading our thinking about God into something somewhat like what Douglas Hofstadter has called a "strange loop". God, as such, then can not be objectified / de-objectified, conceptualized / de-conceptualized, or identified / unidentified.
Altogether, what this means that if you ask the question "Does God exist?" then any answer, in the affirmative or the negative, or even an agnostic shrug, are all contingently true and contingently false, but can not touch upon any absolute truth.
This, of course, is nothing new. Hegel tried (and, in my mind, more-or-less failed) to present a logic to this idea, its been speculated on at length in the negative theologies of Christianity (e.g. Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, etc.) and Buddhism (e.g. Nagarjuna's "sunyata", the emptiness that is empty of emptiness), and is rooted in scriptural text such as the Qur'an's wa lam yakun lahu kufuwan ahad (112:4, "and there is nothing that could be compared with Him" in Muhammad Asad's translation) or the Taoteching's dao ke dao fei chang dao (Chapter 1, "Tao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Tao" in John C.H. Wu's translation). Finally, of course, it is the philosophical explanation of the principle of Unity of Being, particularly as expounded in various ways by Ibn Arabi, Suhrawardi, and Mulla Sadra*.
However, it was new for me. I arrived at these conclusions through my own speculations, assuming that they were only really discussed in Eastern traditions like Buddhism and Taoism, which, in my total misunderstanding of them, I'd identified as "atheist". To find it rooted and explored in the whole of the Christian (let alone the Jewish and the Islamic) tradition, was a shock. So, the question is: why isn't this incredibly open and inclusive idea explored and discussed more, especially when discussions about God, religion, atheism, etc. are not only prevalent but explosive?
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*Another aspect of Unity of Being, as explained by these philosophers (among others), is rooted in the radical Oneness of God, wherein the dichotomy of Unity and multiplicity (e.g. Creator and creation, or again, Infinite and finite, etc.) is collapsed into God in the same manner as all of the other pairs under discussion. This is explained in multiple passages in the Qur'an, such as: walillahi almashriqu waalmaghribu faaynama tuwalloo fathamma wajhu allahi inna allaha wasiaaun aaaleemun (2:115, "And God’s is the east and the west: and wherever you turn, there is God’s countenance. Behold, God is infinite, all-knowing" in Muhammad Asad's translation) and inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un (2:156, "Verily, unto God do we belong and, verily, unto Him we shall return", ibid.). You can also find it in places like this humorous bit from the Zhaungzi (Chapter 22, in the Nina Corea translation):
Dong Guo Zi asked of Zhuangzi: "Where is this thing we call Dao?"
Zhuangzi said: "There's no place it isn't."
Dong Guo Zi said: "I hope you can tell me more than that."
Zhuangzi said: "It exists in crickets and ants."
"How could it be in anything as low as that?"
"It exists in common weeds."
"Could it exist any lower than that?"
"It exists in tiles and bricks."
"It couldn't exist any lower than that?"
"It exists in shit and piss."
When Dong Guo Zi didn't respond, Zhuangzi said: "Your questions didn't really touch on the substance of the matter. When Inspector Huo asked the superintendent of the market why he stepped on the fattened pigs, he told him that the further down his foot went the more he found out about the pig. If you keep pondering about where it can't possibly be, you'll never be rid of looking for more things where it can't be. Perfect Dao seems to be right, and so do expansive words. 'Entirely', 'everywhere' and 'all' are three different words for the same reality. They point out the unity of all things. [...] Things in relation to one another are joined without boundaries, but things do have certain boundaries, so it's said that things are restricted by those boundaries. There are no boundaries that can restrict and boundaries are non-restrictive. There are terms like 'fullness and emptiness' and 'submission and aggression.' What becomes full or empty is neither full nor empty. What becomes submissive or aggressive is neither submissive nor aggressive. What becomes introverted or extroverted is neither introverted nor extroverted. What becomes accumulated or scattered is neither accumulated nor scattered."
"They consider worrying about the existence or non-existence of God, the nature of God, or any other such questions as a distraction at best and an intellectual impediment to the experience of whatever It is at worst. Or in the immortal words of a friend of mine who's a Sufi Shaykh, when asked about God by a perspective darvish: with a dismissive shrug and a smile, "What the fuck is 'God' anyway?""
ReplyDeleteI think this is a relationship to who we are as people. For me, who got my degree in philosophy, and spent any years in Japan studying with more "academic" monks, the philosophy became a major impediment to my understanding of Unity. Your interest in philosophy was more organic, and connected to your own psychology.
I like academia, in a sense- I love reading studies and professional journals- but it terms of my spiritual growth, it was becoming an Ego activity and not a contemplative one. And for most people, I think that is a trap.
Interestingly I came to an appreciation of God as a reality only when I shed the academic nonsense and simply, literally, walked out into the world to experience. (Alamdulillah, one day I just woke up and decided to step out and experience the world.) A return to intense philosophical inquiry for me (in theology, poetry... perhaps in other ways) would now limit me, if I let it. So I focus my intellectual needs on my teaching, and allow myself to experience my spiritual path without clutter. Again, this is an aspect of my psychology, I think, and probably many others'-- but not everyone's.