Our god, randomness

In the previous entry I explained how liberals reduce the number of Islamic terrorist acts:

If a jihad-believing Muslim, shouting “Allah is great,” slaughters infidels on his own, well, that’s just another random event in a universe filled with random events.

That last phrase made me realize something about the modern Western world and its rejection of God.

As Eric Voegelin put it, all ancient civilizations, that is, the civilizations prior to the Hebrews and the Greeks, believed in a “cosmos full of gods.” Then the Hebrews made what Voegelin calls a “leap in being” and discovered the transcendent God who creates the universe from outside the universe. This leap in being is announced in the first sentence of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” It was the single most revolutionary transformation in human history. Instead of seeing the celestial bodies and animal and plant life and the cycles of the seasons and the phenomena of fertility as divine, which was the way all previous cultures had seen them, the Hebrews said that these things were created by a divinity who stood outside all of them. The things and phenomena of the universe were no longer gods themselves, but rather were the creations of God.

Furthermore, as the creations of God, they had an order that was intelligible to man, as explained in the opening passage of the Gospel of John, in which Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is merged with the Word, the Logos, the principle of intelligibility:

In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God….
All things were made through him; and without him was not any thing made that was made….
No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.

The Son, born and entering the world in human form, makes manifest and understandable to men the invisible, transcendent Father. But the Son is not only the personal Son of God and the savior of men, he is the Word, the principle of intelligibility. And since all things were made through the Son, all things are intelligible. There is an order in all things that can be understood.

Thus the Hebraic-Christian revelation, supplemented by Greek reason, revealed not only the transcendent God, but the nature of the world as God’s intelligible creation.

But, Voegelin continues, there has always been resistance to the leap in being with its articulation of reality into the transcendent and the immanent. The replacement of the intra-cosmic gods, embodied in natural processes and knowable through sensory experience, by a transcendent and spiritual God knowable through faith and inner experience (“I am the almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect” [Gen. 17:1]; “Abide in me, and I in you” [John 15:4]) meant that a distance had been opened up between the natural man and the spiritual God, which inevitably brought about frustration, dry spells, a sense of one’s unworthiness, and even doubt about God’s very existence. In the early Christian centuries, the discomfort with transcendence took the form of a variety of gnostic beliefs, which said that there is a true god who can be completely known, completely embodied, and completely experienced by man, thus ending what for many people was the unendurable distance between man and God that biblical religion had unhappily introduced. In the modern period, the discomfort with transcendence has taken the form of an outright rejection of God. However, this rebellion against transcendence doesn’t mean a simple return to the primordial experience of a cosmos full of gods. It means the rejection of the divine altogether.

Further, as the divine is rejected, so is the notion of any intelligible order in the universe. This happens in two steps. First, the divine order is cast aside, as a false superstition and a deadening imposition on human freedom. Second, since any order that doesn’t come from man implies, ultimately, a divine order, it’s not just the divine order that must be rejected, but the idea of any inherent order at all.

We thus see the progression, taking place over the last 4,000 years, from a universe filled with gods, to a universe created by the transcendent God, to a universe filled with random events.

— end of initial entry —

Ben W. writes:

LA: “We thus see the progression from a universe filled with gods, to a universe created by the transcendent God, to a universe filled with random events.”

Isn’t this the essence of Darwinism? The concept of randomness becomes one of the essential pillars of “science.” One even sees this in quantum physics. The creativity of the transcendent becomes the creativity of the random. The political, the scientific, and the cultural worlds form one, unified world view…a universe of randomness.

Academic discourse becomes an exercise in applying an intellectual grid over the random nature of existence through the prisms of political, cultural and scientific “speech.”

How about the “Brownian motion” (hehehe) of the Obama set of agendas and reactions?

Daniel B. writes:

“We thus see the progression from a universe filled with gods, to a universe created by the transcendent God, to a universe filled with random events…”

… in which, ergo, man himself must impose some sort of order on. This order is the state which governs and directs the otherwise meaningless populace. Without the ever present direction of the state men can have no significance.

Jeff W. writes:

I disagree somewhat that the elites of the West view everything as a random event. [LA replies: I didn’t say that all members of the elite have this view; I was describing a paradigm.] The New York Times article that you linked to yesterday showed liberals trying to fit the Fort Hood massacre into their absurd belief system.

Western elites have a belief that violence is caused by “climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair,” as Obama said after 9/11. Thus any occasion of violence indicates the need for more socialist redistribution. [LA replies: Yes. See my subsequent blog entry, “The root cause that Obama will reveal to a waiting world.”]

They also have a belief that violence is caused by racism. This means that any violence perpetrated by a non-white is likely the fault of whites.

Taken together, these two beliefs mean, basically, that white conservatives are to blame for all violence: first through their stinginess and mean-spiritedness, second through their racism.

It is only when the facts cannot be bludgeoned into this template that the violence becomes a random event. Hasan was not poor, and real evidence that he was the victim of racism will be impossible to produce. That is why the Foot Hood massacre is being described as a an inexplicable, random event. It’s because the explanation that the New York Times tried to peddle yesterday is not believable in this case.

LA replies:

Very good comment.

November 8

LA writes:

Here is the original version of a paragraph in this entry that I’ve substantially revised. I revise posted entries all the time, and have never before posted the discarded text. But in this instance I felt that it was called for, so that readers who are interested can see what was wrong in the original version and why I needed to change it.

But, Voegelin continues, there has always been resistance to the leap in being which articulated reality into the transcendent-divine and the immanent-secular. There are always people who are uncomfortable with the idea of a transcendent reality that is not the direct object of sensory experience, and of a transcendent God who is separate from and above us. In the early Christian centuries, this discomfort took the form of a variety of gnostic beliefs, which said that there is a true god who can be completely known, possessed, and experienced by man, thus ending the unendurable distance between man and God. In the modern period, this discomfort has taken the form of an outright rejection of God. However, this doesn’t mean a simple return to the primordial experience of a cosmos full of gods. It means the rejection of the divine altogether. Further, as the divine is rejected, so is the notion of any intelligible order in the universe. This happens in two steps. First, the divine order is cast aside, as a false superstition and a deadening imposition on human freedom. Second, since any order that doesn’t come from man implies, ultimately, a divine order, it’s not just the divine order that must be rejected, but the idea of any inherent order at all.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 07, 2009 11:46 AM | Send