Introduction to God (part 2)
Let us recall some of the previous metaphysical arguments, particularly the Antipodal ones. There and elsewhere a case is gradually being assembled: once the intellectual fortress of materialism is breached, it is a very slippery slope from there to a radically different worldview. Once we have established the reality of any one conceivable immaterial entity, the entire bulwark of materialism is vulnerable to being subverted, of actually being sublimated, by this other nascent, immaterial realm. That is according to the inherently unstable nature of the mind-matter duality. We, oh so knowledgeable moderns, are just living in a house of cards. There is a fundamental incoherence to that world of nothing but atoms swerving in the dark. A mustard seed of coherence, immaterial though it may be, threatens to turn that wasteland into a mustard jungle, or perhaps even into the Best Possible World.
In thousands of years, under the intense scrutiny of the best minds in the world, we have been unable to conceive of a logical link between matter and mind. It is almost the case of the immovable object and the irresistible force. One of these two notions has got to give. The mounting conundrums of quantum physics are surely pointing the finger at matter. Once we loosen our death grip on our absolutist conception of matter, we will have a difficult time imagining how we ever managed to fall under the thrall of materialism in the first place.
If there is an immaterial realm, relationalism will be its foundation. In contrast with atoms, we no longer have the convenient receptacle of space for storage and configuration. The closest equivalent is the mind, and we can hardly conceive of a mind that is unaccompanied by a perceiving agent, or simply a self. The self is the relational nexus or matrix of mind.
In the biological realm, the relational foci are the cell and organism. Certain primitive organisms of the fungal class have phases of cellular dispersal. The common underlying theme of mystical experience is that our ordinary individual minds are but the dispersal phase of a cosmic mind that may be experienced in those mystical states. And, again, even from a strictly biological perspective, are our own selves not the constructs of the neuronal colonies that constitute the human brain? Given any sort of mental realm, it would be more than a bit odd if our individuated selves represented the limit of its organizational capacity.
If there is any reality to the self, and what could be more real to us than our own selves, it would be difficult to conceive of a prohibition on the existence of a mental matrix that included a supra-self.
Given the logical polarities of atom and cosmic self, we cannot automatically assign a metaphysical priority to the atom. Indeed, does not the weight of reason push the logical priority in the other direction?
It is only by an almost incomprehensible fluke of intellectual history that we have come now to the threshold of this stark and dramatic choice of cosmic gestalts. I doubt that I am the only one who is being drawn by the portents and prospect of this drama. The rest of history already pales by comparison. Are we not already feeling the organizational force of the matrix of the supra-self?
7/12/02