Stepping Back to Center Stage

Where do humans belong in the universe?  

The Copernican revolution de-centered humanity in the universe for the purpose of doing away with the increasing bizarre abstractions of the Ptolemaic system. The revolution we need now will bring us back to the center and rescue us from the alienating abstractions of a theology (or cosmology) that seeks to transcend its human origins and represent the mind of God.

Matthew Crawford in The World Outside Your Head and Adam Frank in  About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the End of the Big Bang come to remarkably similar conclusions even though one is a philosopher asking about human self-understanding and the other is a physicist trying to understand the beginnings of the universe. Simply stated: they both understand that the Copernican revolution and the Enlightenment project of objective knowledge have led us into vast new realms of knowledge and mis-led us in our understanding of ourselves. 

Both Crawford and Frank rightly note that the combination of de-centering humanity in the universe and adopting a idea that knowledge consists of mathematical representations of reality has placed humans as humans in an isolated and isolating position. Frank Tippler’s The Physics of Immortality compliments nicely Isaac Asimov’s  short story “The Last Question” in positing what AI fans seem to long for, the ultimate objectification of humanity into machines that busily calculate away until they become what we call God. 

These latter books represent a real insight; God has become identified as the objectification of the human mind in its purest and most comprehensive knowledge of reality.  So the physicist, as Stephen Hawking says in his Brief History of TIme, seeks to “know the mind of God.” And in this is little different from the post-Enlightenment theologian unleashing a full range of logical tools on philosophical problems while simultaneously operating on revelation with the compliment of historical critical analysis of Biblical texts. Theist or atheist, both seek an internally coherent, precisely formulated, and logically complete description of reality. Which is, at least theologically, the mind of God.

Now Hawking was almost certainly speaking metaphorically, and I won’t make him out to be a crypto-theist. But there is a real problem for Christians when our theologies become increasingly abstract representations of God, and God’s will, based on models created in the mind and articulated for our fellow humans in that great Enlightenment goal: Systematic Theology. Such a theology, at least as I learned it, was to tie together the sum of human knowledge of Humanity, Nature, and God into a dogmatic whole. In it the human mind and the Mind of God have become one and the same and who can say which has been elevated and which diminished.

Liberation theology was supposed to deliver us from all this by focusing theological attention on God’s subjectivity in the form of God’s “preferential option for the poor.” Orthopraxi would at least compliment, if not replace orthodoxy. Yet it seems to me that orthodoxy and orthopraxi have for the most part simply bi-furcated. Self-identified orthodox theology nerds continue their quest to know "that which was believed, everywhere, always;” surely the summa bonum of Enlightenment even if it is attributed to the church fathers. 

Activists in the meantime, build models of an activist God. The coherence of those models is ideological and their credibility is enacted rather than observed. Yet once created in the mind and articulated on a rally poster these models give us a God can trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored with oppressive zeal. Because humans, whether victims or oppressors, are central only in being at the bull’s eye in the site of God’s subjective concern, while it is the quality of justice that is at center of God’s heart. And thus it turns out that this most subjective God is understood in abstract terms of justice relating to a humanity understood statistically in terms of income inequality, homelessness rates, distribution of goods and services, educational opportunity, teen suicide, and so on. The Bible and the latest census data or UNHCR report become two sides of the same theological coin. 

Now the point of my caricatures above is show the extent to which humans as the makers of theology, the seekers of knowledge, remain de-centered in contemporary theology. In the new orthodoxy we continue to create of models of God in our heads using the classical tools of philosophy and theology while the new activists create such models out of ideology and statistics. Either way we remain where the Enlightenment put us, out of the center looking down on at the universe and formulating our models of God based on what we can see. We may test our models against the Bible and the church fathers, or against the Bible and latest social science data. Either way the pre-enlightenment world in which humans were both at the center where God was incarnate and in the heavens where the elect live in God’s eternal presence has been lost.

If you aren't grounded its likely that you're lost in space. 

So perhaps we should find the center again. Not in the naive physical sense. We can’t go back there. Nor in the naive metaphysical sense. We can’t go back their either. Rather we might consider, as Crawford and Frank suggest, recognizing that we are inevitably the center of our models and the experiences by which we test them. That old map was a poor representation of reality, but an excellent representation of the only way we can really see reality. 

With regard to the physical universe this is exactly what Stephen Hawking helped articulate with the concept of the “light cone” representing that portion of the universe which is available to us for observation. That cone spreads out, representing the distance light travels in different periods of time, from the human observer. Inevitably we are in its center, and there is nothing we can know for sure about what is outside it (most of the universe) without the questionable supposition (but fundamental to all science) that what is outside must look like what is inside. The problem for science is, as Frank details, that the cutting edge undercuts the supposition of uniformity in the universe.

The Christian analogue to the light cone is the effect of revelation. All we can know of God is what comes to us when God deigns to reveal God’s self within the world of human senses. When God revealed God’s self in Jesus our knowledge of God was both made possible and limited by that revelation and its subsequent record in the Bible. The writer of the gospel of John is well aware of the limits of what he can know even of Jesus. And we must be aware that as much as we know about what God was doing in Judea and Samaria in Jesus Christ, we know nothing of what God was doing a few hundred miles south in the Arabian peninsula. The light of revelation has its own cone and its own shadows beyond. To go beyond revelation (natural and special) requires assuming that God’s nature and activity is fully disclosed in a revelation limited by its human receptors: a theological absurdity. Better to acknowledge our own centrality and recognize the limits it imposes on all our statements about God including those that claim to be most inclusive. 

Ultimately I think the point of Frank's and Crawford’s works is to remind us that our task as humans isn’t to know the mind of God, which inevitably dis-engages us from reality, but to engage in an ongoing dialogue with reality and both realize and revel in the meaning that gives our lives. And that means, at least in part, that we realize and reject futile efforts to complete that dialogue with increasingly abstract characterizations of reality no longer in touch with any imaginable human experience. 

The Copernican revolution de-centered humanity in the universe for the purpose of doing away with the increasing bizarre abstractions of the Ptolemaic system. The revolution we need now will bring us back to the center and rescue us from the alienating abstractions of a theology (or cosmology) that seeks to transcend its human origins and represent the mind of God. It is, after all, ourselves that we must most urgently know and understand if we are to survive.