Can Theists believe in one less god?

There is a common argument among atheists that 'we are all atheists', in the sense that they just disbelieve in one more god than theists do.

For example, we read:

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." Stephen F Roberts

Failure of Analogous Arguments

Ed Feser, arguing from philosophical point of view, replies:

While your average “Internet Infidel” seems to regard the “one god further” objection as devastatingly clever, it is in fact embarrassingly inept, a sign of the extreme decadence into which secularist “thought” has fallen in the Age of Dawkins.

Suppose someone skeptical about Euclidean geometry said:

When you understand why you regard all the particular triangles you’ve observed as having sides that are less than perfectly straight, you will understand why I regard Euclidean plane triangles as such to have sides that are less than perfectly straight.

Or suppose a critic of Platonism said:

When you understand why you regard the things of ordinary experience as in various ways imperfect or less than fully good instances of their kinds, you will understand why I regard Plato’s Form of the Good as being less than fully good.

Would these count as devastating objections to Euclidean geometry and Platonism?  Would they serve as fitting mottos for blogs devoted to “Common Sense Anti-Euclideanism” or “Common Sense Anti-Platonism”?  Obviously not.  They would demonstrate only that the speaker didn’t have the slightest clue what the hell he was talking about. The “one god further” objection is no better than these stupid “objections” would be.


Rebuttal in Theism

According to Theism, God is not just one being among many, but is being itself.  Atheists may compare God with other possible creatures such as Santa, Zeus, and the Flying Spaghetti monster, and claim that where is an equal lack of existence for all of them.

However,  God is the "I Am", is being itself, and is therefore in a different category. None of the other putative Gods ever claimed, or had it claimed of them, that they were 'being itself'. In philosophy, this is called aseity, because in latin a se means 'in itself' or 'from itself'.

All we need to note now, for our Rebuttal, is this attribute of God. Just from God being "being itself", we prove that there is only one God:

For consider the logical possibility of two Gods. They would both be being itself, since they are Gods. But God is being itself. Therefore they are both God, and hence identical.

So the nature of God as 'being itself' implies monotheism. It implies that there can only be one god. Not many, and not zero. One is a special number when it comes to counting God.

This is the reason for monotheism, why Gods more than one are rejected, as also are Gods numbered only zero. Theists disbelieve all God who are not being itself. That set includes Zeus, Santa, the FSM, and all those others that have ever entered into polytheism (except, possibly, just one).

More general discussion is here.

Two fatal flaws in Pandeist logic

Pandeism is a modern form of pantheism, and was mentioned briefly in my previous post.  Its advocates prefer the more modern term 'deism' rather than 'theism', in order to emphasize a connection with reason and logic, rather than the traditional theism of the Abrahamic kind.

My previous argument against pantheism,

We see that the Argument from Love has direct consequences concerning the systems of pantheism, nonduality and idealism. The necessity, if love is to function, of a deep division between divinity and us beloved beings is not allowed in pantheism. According to pantheism, we are all and entirely part of God, and that cannot be true if God is to love us unselfishly.

will not work with the pantheist, because they do not accept that God is Love in the first place, let alone Unselfish Love! Sad.

The logical heart of pandeism seems to be some 'theorems' which Robert G. Brown claims to have proved. His personal home page is here, and his university page is here. These theorems appear to prove that God must be identical with the universe. This has many alleged implications, such as that God cannot be a Creator, cannot Love the universe and its peoples, and theism (whereby God sustains the universe) must be false. 

The main theorem is quite simple. First we need to use Brown's definition of 'irreducible information':

We begin by mentally compressing the coordinate description - eliminating all redundant information. This leads us to an irreducible specification of the state of the Universe as a complete set of non-redundant coordinates (where a lot of the reduction will appear in the form of exact or approximate coordinate relationships, a.k.a. ``the laws of nature''). This information is self-encoded in the actual things that exist in the actual Universe.

Then we need to see his definition of 'omniscience':

God must possess a complete knowledge of the state of the Universe, right down to the last electron in the last space-time continuum, the last hidden dimension. 

with his definition of the Universe as 'everything that exists': our world and God.

Finally, then, his 'Pandeist Theorem' is:

If God exists, then God is identical to the Universe.

That is, the theorem is a statement of conditional pandeism. If God exists at all, God must be absolutely everything that exists.  It is therefore quite obvious that if God exists (has being), God must be either a part of the Universe or the whole Universe. God by the property of omniscience must have precisely the irreducible information content of the entire Universe.

His Proof is given as:

Let us call the irreducible information content of the non-God part of the Universe I_N, the irreducible information content of the God part of the Universe I_G, and the irreducible information content of the entire Universe I_U (where of course any of these quantities could be infinite).

It is obvious that:

as the irreducible information content of the whole must match the total irreducible information content of the disjoint parts. Also,

as the non-God and God parts are disjoint and cannot be mutually reducible. Clearly,

as that's the meaning of omniscience. Therefore:

The only way the irreducible information content of the non-God part of the irreducible information content of the entire Universe can be encoded in the irreducible information content of the God part is if the irreducible information content of the non-God part is null - no information at all.

No existing system has null information content (this is why we needed the principle that a physical systemis its own minimal encoding, that a system ``knows'' its own state in an incompressible way), so we conclude that if God exists at all, the non-God part of the Universe is (quite literally) no-thing, nothing. It does not exist.

Ian's Reply:


This is an unusual definition of the universe, since God is not usually assumed to be in the universe, but we can accept this as a temporary definition.


First Fatal Flaw in this Proof

1. Brown seems to take objects as composed of information. This is like a computer scientist, who takes  'bits' as the basic thing that exists. This is to treat 'form' as fundamentally existing. Plato would be happy.

However, natural scientists since Aristotle, Galileo and Newton know that substances are made out of something that is not purely formal, but have mass or energy.  This should be obvious to a physicist.

This has the consequence that two distinct existing things can have the same information. Two things, such as a finger and a fingerprint on glass, may share the same information, the same form and the same bits, but be ontologically distinct substances.

The 'irreducible information' of a finger and its fingerprint will be identical. Aspects of both are describable by the same form. Thus, when we aggregate two systems, it may well be that the aggregate has an irreducible information is less than the sum of their individual irreducible informations. The shared forms may be in each part, but do not need to be repeated in the whole's irreducible information.


This should be obvious. If we copy a 1 MB jpeg file on a computer, we have it stored in two places in the physical memory, but the irreducible information is not doubled. It is not 2 MB, but only 1 MB combined with a very short instruction about duplication. (This is how zip compression algorithms work!)


Let us apply this to the G + N = U aggregation that Brown uses in his proof above.


If God G is to be omniscient, then there must be information in God which is a copy of forms seen in the non-God world N. We may think of God's perception as having images of the world that convey the same information as the world does. That is what true perceptions are obviously about.

This implies, then, that the aggregate U has information much less than the total:

I_U  <<  I_G  + I_N

because there is shared (common) information within G and N. Information is not additive between disjoint parts! Therefore his proof fails. 

Why did Brown make this mistake? Because he confused substance and form. In other words, he confused energy and information. He took the non-overlap of the God and non-God to be non-overlap of information, whereas it should be non-overlap of substance (energy, mass, or whatever). It is only this second non-overlap of substance which pertains to God and the world. It leads to egregious errors, we see, if we forget this fact.  God and humans may share forms: we may both know the forms of geometry, logic, mathematics generally, and many other formal things. Our disjointness does not stop us sharing information!

Second Fatal Flaw in this Proof

Brown says he accepts that any of  I_G, I_N, and I_U may be infinite. But he does not realize that adding a finite number to infinity leaves that infinity unchanged. This has been known for over 2000 years. Since God is traditionally taken to be infinite, then I_G=infinity and I_U=infinity. That is, we accept that  I_G and  I_U are equal in that sense, but Brown's (flawed) equality 

I_U  = I_G  + I_N

does not imply that I_N = 0 when I_U=I_G=infinity! In this case, the proof fails again, even mathematically.


Brown's Second Proof


Brown as a Second Proof of this theorem, but it begins by assuming that "entropy is an extensive quantity - all of the information carrying capacity of the 'God channel' is being consumed by irreducibly specifying the God state and there is none left over for specifying the not-God state."


We saw above that information is not extensive or additive. This means that, for the purposes of Brown's argument, we can not assume that information is simply negative entropy. If information were extensive, then compression algorithms could never work, but they do. Information is not extensive, even in computers.

The one thing we should know about God

God is Love

All the theistic religions teach that God loves the believers, who are those who follow his commands and love him in return. They also teach that God is continually producing goods and trying to give them to believers and unbelievers alike. This strongly suggests that God loves them all, in the sense of desiring good for them all. This love persists whatever may have been the reason for the unbelief and, hence, whether or not the love is even accepted or reciprocated by the person. God offers a ‘covenant of love’ to all.


Love Itself


It is another step now to assert not only that ‘God loves all’ but that God is Love Itself. This is certainly not an a priori or obvious truth, and it is most explicit in Christianity (notably in 1 John 4:16).  Many now seem to have gotten the message, and the identification of God with Love is now one of the central tenets of theism. We therefore adopt 

Postulate 6  God is Love.

To say that God is Love, is to say that God’s inmost nature is to be loving, however it may initially appear to us with recalcitrant wills and limited vision. If God’s inmost nature is Love, then, because he is being itself, that being must also be Love itself. As was discussed previously, this Love that is God is not a mere emotional state of attraction or feeling good but rather a burning desire to give all of his own to be used by finite beings, for their delight for a long as possible. It is an unconditional love and is not based on feelings or emotions. God loves us all because God is love. The idea that God is Love is not traditionally recognized in philosophical theology. It was not present in Aristotle’s concept of an Unmoved Mover who kept the world in motion. Aquinas allows that ‘in God there is Love’, but makes God’s loving to be unlike ours: to be an act rather than a ‘passion of the appetitive soul’. Most systematic theology starts by defining God as the omniscient and omnipotent being, and the connection between such and a God of Love takes a while to construct. Now, however, the identification of God with Love Itself is taken as one of the primary postulates of our theism. Pope Benedict XVI published “Deus Caritas Est" (“God is Love”) in 2005, asserting in its first sentence that “these words .. express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith.”

Sadly, this cannot be emphasized enough, since it is even denied in the more recent deist and pandeist views. Love is not just a biochemical response to certain stimuli, but the underlying nature of all spiritual beings. And of God, more so.

Love and substance


We now apply an  ontological power analysis of  to the case of God. In that analysis, we saw how the underlying power or propensity of a being could be identified as the substance of that being. That analysis dealt with physical dispositions since it was based on generalizing how science analyzes causes. Once we allow that non-physical beings can exist, exactly the same logic follows for mental, spiritual and divine beings.  We therefore argue:  

1. The underlying power or propensity is the true substance of that being.
2. The underlying power or propensity of God is love.
3. Therefore, love is the true substance of God. 

This is to conclude that divine Love is the substance of God. It is the substratum in terms of which he exists and is the subject of all his properties. We are not saying that ‘God was formed out of this substance (love)’, because there was never such a forming event in the past. Rather, God is love itself and always has been. We say that we can intellectually distinguish (in God’s present being) the Love that is the basis or substance of that being.   (You may perhaps feel qualms at using the same logic for all cases including that of God, but this is justified when we follow from the previous post that we are an image of God and hence have some functional and structural similarities. More of this later.)

Then, because created objects are a kind of image of God, we can conclude that something like love is the substance of all things in the world. In a nutshell, ‘Love makes the World go Around.’ This is not to say that love is the direct mover of every natural object and the immediate instigator of every natural event. Rather that something like love does these things. For minds, the ‘something like love’ can be loves, desires and motivations that we know are significant in human life. For physics, the ‘something like love’ could be deepest principles of energy, force and propensity that keep the physical world moving. These are grand claims: that desires, propensities and energies are ‘images of love’, and that they respectively are the substance of humans as well as of all animate and inanimate objects. Fleshing out and understanding the details of these claims, especially concerning the relations between the mental and the physical, is the task of theistic science. This task, I take up in my new book "Starting Science From God".

Adapted from chapter 11 of Starting Science From God.

Images of God

We now have to establish principles that make connections between what God is and what we are. We saw previously that we do share ‘being’ . Now we look for more detailed relations that govern our interior constitution. The first thing to establish is whether there is any such detailed relation. Is there a principle in core theism which affords connections between Divinity and the mundane world?  Certainly, if God continually sustains our existence, then we would expect that there must be something about ourselves, and continue to be that something, that allows these acts of sustaining to have their effects. In Judaism and Christianity, humans are made ‘in the image of God, in His likeness.’ (Genesis 1:26) This imageo dei appears to tell us something about humans, and, perhaps, something about God. Some evolutionists take being in the image of God as not making ontological claims at all. It is generally interpreted,  however, to mean that humans are rational or have a rational soul because God is in some sense the Logos, the first principle of rationality. In this view, animals are not images of God and neither are plants or inorganic material. 

Apart from our rationality, we can see that we have many similarities with animals. The internal functions of our bodies are almost all mirrored in simpler forms in some animal or another. Even plants have nutritional functions within their physiology that are simpler forms of the biological functions that go on within our human bodies. Moreover, within the Bible story of creation, the processes leading up to the creation of man suggest that plants and animals were partial contributions to this making, not to mention that they can both be food for humans. There are a great many internal similarities of plants and animals with humans. Such similarities remain even though animals have sensation and locomotion that plants do not and even though humans have a rationality that animals do not.

All these similarities cannot be about size or shape since there is an enormous range of sizes from the smallest plant cells to the largest mammals. Instead, we must be talking of similarities of internal forms and functions. If the similarities concern the systemic organization of living organisms, then there are indeed similarities between cells and mammals, starting from metabolic, genetic and sensory structures. Even nonliving things have their own patterns of nuclear, atomic, molecular and chemical structures, which everything in the world is conceivably able to share in some way.

Humans themselves are, of course, more than just their rationality. It is common to say that a human is a whole and unified person which consists of one body-mind combination and to try in this way to obviate the problems of conceiving minds and bodies together without a ‘dreaded’ dualism. Our own theistic view of the unity of humans will be discussed later; for now we only insist that humans contain not just rationality in the soul, but also sensations, loves, affections, actions—and that all these have effects in the body as well as in the mind and/or soul.

Let us take a broader view of the constitution of humanity and of the structure and materials of which our bodies are formed. We should give a generalized formulation of the way in which we, with all the world, are images of God. This is to add to our set of postulates the assertion:

Postulate 5  All the world, and each of its parts, is a kind of image of God.

This formulation still allows that the rationality of humans is a special kind of image of God, namely a more complete image. To be a ‘likeness’ seems to imply a closer and more complete relationship than an ‘image’. This generalized principle implies that plants and animals are also in the image of God but to a lesser extent. The challenge to theistic science is to elucidate in each case what kind of image of God is involved and what ‘lesser extent’ is implied in connection with plants, or even conceivably, with minerals, etc.

We observe that present-day humans are not angelic in everyday life and that some fail to show even normal humanity, let alone glimpses or pictures of divinity. In such cases, the generalized principle, which allows for lesser images, seems entirely appropriate. We should also note that the ‘image and likeness’ comes at the end of a creation story, and hence that such similarities are more like the culmination than the starting point of our religious and spiritual life. It may therefore be that the creation story describes, by images and likenesses, the stages of spiritual regeneration in religious life, rather than of stars, planets, plants and animals.

The possibility, even widespread likelihood, of lesser images of God is in agreement with the eternity of God. That eternity implies that God is constant while the world varies. That is, variations in the ways that creatures are sustained must reflect the variations in those individual beings, not in God himself. Similar conclusions are indicated by Matt. 5:45: “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous”.

Since organic and inorganic non-living materials have extensive similarities in their atomic structures to living materials, we may conclude that physical materials are, in a weak sense, also made in the image of God.

The postulate of theism, that all things in the world (all the human and inhuman, all the good and the barely good) are each a ‘kind of image of God’, allows us to make significant progress in theistic science. The properties of God must be conceived in such a way that our being such images is a sensible claim. The non-trivial question is then to determine what kind of lesser image should be envisaged in each case. The following chapters will describe the structures of the world in such a way that they can be images of the divine. This is the heart of theistic science, which describes general structures for mental and physical objects. Our task will be to identify the specific parts of this structure. This is easier since fortunately many of them have already been discovered by science.

We note that the principle of imageo dei is often criticized as anthropomorphic, as if God were (to much amusement) the ideal creature of each group of humans or animals. However, we are proceeding in the other direction: we are starting from basic features of God and seeing how the world might be constituted and might function in the presence of such a God. In a genuine theism, this is not at all the anthropomorphic ‘God in the image of man’, but rather ‘theomorphic’: man in the image of God.

Adapted from chapter 10 of Starting Science From God.

Combining the Arguments from Being and from Love

We now look at the consequences of combining the Arguments from Being and from Love within theism. The first argument from Being concluded that all our being is because of God’s being:

1. God is Being itself (Postulate 3)
2. We (as individuals) have being (as, we exist).
3. Therefore, our being either is, or depends on (derives from), God (Being itself).

The second argument from Love concluded that we are distinct from God:

1. God loves us unselfishly (from Postulate 3), 
2. Unselfish loves cannot love only themselves, 
3. Therefore, we must be separate from God in some ways: God is not us.

There is a prima facie problem here. How can we share God’s being if we are necessarily distinct from Him?  If we are other than God, it would appear that we are separate beings. How can that be true, if the essence of our being (namely being itself) is identical to God?

The resolution of this paradox is the key to understanding theism from the philosophical point of view. We can verbally affirm both Arguments, but if they contradict each other, then we would have a logical set of statements containing a contradiction. Since from such a set any statement could be derived, and we understand nothing, our task should be to offer a resolution to this paradox. This paradox is particularly poignant because it is one that God himself had to resolve before he could create anything. How could he create beings whom he could love?  It is a real problem, not just ours, so we look at how God solved the problem.

Part of the solution will be to find a way that we can be close enough to God, without become identical with him. This talk of being ‘close enough’ is in fact a spatial metaphor, and such metaphors may not strictly apply in reality. However, as an aid to understanding, we can give several more visual metaphors which begin to suggest how a solution may be possible, indeed implemented, in our world.

We may imagine that we are ‘adjacent’ to God and maybe even ‘touching’ him. This equates to our not being continuous with God, but rather contiguous. There must be very close connections between God and us, connections sufficient to transplant being from God to ourselves but with still enough differences remaining that we are not part of God.

Another metaphor is that ‘God is within us,’ but this is a metaphor often open to multiple interpretations because of multiple meanings of the word ‘in’. My own favorite here is to think of us creatures (all of the finite world, in fact) as ‘hollow inside’, and as God filling up that hollow in a way that keeps him distinct from us. This is again a touching metaphor, but is now restricted to an interior space which is only vaguely conceived. The concept of interior spaces is one which will recur later.

Whatever spatial metaphor we use to picture our relation to God, it must include that, despite our existence being distinct from God, we are still in some way connected with the divine. This is possible if God sustains our being, even though we have some separation. What is the meaning of ‘sustain’?  Is this something that God does once at the start of the universe or something that happens all the time?  And is it something that God does automatically just by existing, or does it require some continual active contributions from God?  Does it require contributions from us? There is much to discuss further.

Adapted from chapter 9 of Starting Science From God.

The Argument from Unselfish Love

We are now in the position to draw a very important conclusion about the way God and the world are related. I frame this as 'the Argument from (Unselfish) Love': 

1. God loves us unselfishly (from Postulate 3), 
2. Unselfish loves cannot love only themselves, 
3. Therefore, we must be separate from God in some ways: God is not us. 

This Argument from Love has a number of important consequences. From an essential aspect of core theism, we see that there must be an irreducible distinctness between us and God. This must be an absolute distinctness, not just an apparent one, because it must be a difference which appears so to God, who presumably sees things as they really are and not just as they appear.

This need for an ‘otherness’ between God and all those loved by God has long been recognized as essential to theism, but it is rarely given a logical justification. It is usually assumed by religious writers that creating independent and freely-choosing humans is a ‘great good’ which justifies many other things. Now we have gone back one step in the logic and can see that there is a reason for some kind of independence. That reason stems directly from the kind of love that God has for us.

Another consequence is that, though God could conceivably create those creatures who are continuous extensions of his divine being, there would be no point in his doing so. God could not love those creatures unselfishly, since they would be entirely part of himself. It may not be that God is lacking in omnipotence, but that there are consequences of the nature of God that directly limit what is good to do. Think how cruel it would be to make a creature who could not be loved by God!

This otherness is dramatically expressed in the writings of many theists, especially those who have had spiritual or mystical experiences. God is like a mighty brilliant sun—it is as if God is brighter by millions than the noon-day sun—and we are minor creatures walking on the face of the earth. Others have described how the numinous sight of God induces fear and trembling, and a feeling of great humility arises from the enormous differences immediately apparent.

To deny this otherness is a serious mistake from the theistic point of view. However often mystics may experience temporary oneness with God, they are still distinct and lovable-by-God creatures, and, as such, they return to their individual consciousness afterwards. Others may want to deny this absolute distinction and want to become ‘as God’. The Judaic bible in Genesis chapter 3 has a story of creatures wanting to become as God. They suffer badly because they want what is impossible.

We see that the Argument from Love has direct consequences concerning the systems of pantheism, nonduality and idealism. The necessity, if love is to function, of a deep division between divinity and us beloved beings is not allowed in pantheism. According to pantheism, we are all and entirely part of God, and that cannot be true if God is to love us unselfishly.

The problem with strict nonduality is even simpler. If God is to love us, we have to exist. This requires that our finite existence have some reality, and that it not be an illusion like maya. It can not be that our soul (Atman) is actually identical with the divine being itself (Brahman), no matter what the sages may have written. There must be some relation between them, but not one of identity.

Adapted from chapter 9 of Starting Science From God.

God loves us Unselfishly

We need to determine whether what exists is one or whether it is many. Having postulated that God exists, and that he exists as the being itself that we individuals have, we next need to know whether we form many beings or just one large being. We may conceivably be creatures who are continuous extensions of the divine being. Such creatures would be wondrous beings and feel wonderful, but it does not appear that we are that kind of creature. Why?  Is there any reason why we should be distinct from God?

Unselfish love

To answer that question, we need to understand another component of core theism. This component is not something obvious from the philosophical point of view, but is, rather, very personal:

Postulate 4  God loves us unselfishly. 

To understand this, we need to know what ‘love’ means, and what ‘unselfish’ means. These will be discussed in more detail later, but for now let us just remember some of the basic facts about these two matters.

Some may think that love is merely a warm sticky emotion in the presence or touch of loved ones such as babies or kittens with big eyes. Others may think it is the persistent feeling of longing for the beloved. Others (more scientifically oriented) may think it is a byproduct of the neuro-chemical and/or information-handling processes in the brain. Here, we are going to distinguish four things, all connected to love:

1. Love, as the underlying motivation or disposition that generates all relevant intentions and actions, 
2. Desire, as the presence of love in our intentions, 
3. Delights, as the sensations and joy which are the final manifestation of loving actions, and 
4. Affections, as the feeling of persistent loves and desires that arise after experiencing delights. 

For a given person and given motivation, these four things are all related. For now, we are going to focus on the love (1.), namely the underlying motivation for our actions. I am using the word ‘love’ in a very general sense here, to refer not just to what we think of as good loves but also to the underlying motivations in all our activities. In this general sense I include each of the varied motivations for survival, such as sex, competition, and selfishness, as being different kinds of loves.

To love unselfishly means to love another person equally to or more than oneself. Its opposite is selfish love, which means to love oneself more than others. This may seem a too-quantitative definition, referring to ‘more than’ with respect to love, when love is well known for being difficult to quantify!  I am trying here to explain ‘unselfishness’ without using the word again in the explanation. We certainly have in our loving a kind of ordering of priorities. What we love more takes priority, precedence and time over what we love less (especially when we are free of constraints). We prioritize from the delight we feel about that activity. Later I will discuss how we might come to know about our loves. In that coming to know there is also a coming to know of ordering, priority, and relative delightfulness.

That God loves us unselfishly, and that we should love each other unselfishly, is the import of the most basic religious injunctions, including those of theistic religions:

• Judaism: “the LORD your God is God, he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love” (Deuteronomy 7:9); “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made." (Psalm 145:9) 
• Christianity: “God so loved the world" (John 3:16); “Love your neighbour as yourself" (Matthew 22:37-39) 
• Islam: “No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself." (Sunnah) 

The love of others makes you want to give them what you have, to make them happy and enjoy their life. An unselfish love, such as we attribute to God, promotes our being happy as much and as long as possible, and delights if we delight in our life.

Such unselfish loves are to be contrasted with selfish loves. There are many other names for them, but here note only that our selfish loves want others to delight in what pleases us. We can imagine a good king who is happy because of the fact that his subjects are enjoying their life. He can be contrasted with a tyrant, who has his own ideas about what is delightful (probably involving much slave labor by others), and who wants others to become happy by making him happy. Unselfish love has the essential characteristic of wanting to give to others what they find delightful. Most of us agree that is good to be unselfish, even if we do not always ourselves live up to this standard.

I believe that God is completely unselfish: that he cannot love himself at all. Such a 'strong unselfishness' is however difficult for us humans to comprehend.  It is, however, not necessary to go this far to draw the conclusions to be made in future posts.

Selflessness and personal unselfishness

One way of understanding the postulated unselfishness of God would be to imagine that God is a universal being who does not have a proper sense of self to start with. In this scenario God would have more ‘self-less-ness’ than unselfishness, since the boundary between God and the world could not then be rigorously defined. This comes from pantheistic inclinations and in it God is not a full person. This is an impersonal view of God.

We will see however, that the God we are talking about does have the existence and properties needed to be a person. I am not referring to a person like us and existing among us, such that we might possibly exist without him because such a God would not be metaphysically necessary. Instead, I am referring to God as Being itself, and also as Love and Wisdom themselves. These together are sufficient to make God a person, with a sense of self and a sense of consciousness as a particular person. Then we can say that God loves us unselfishly and not just self-less-ly in an impersonal manner.

Some theologians dislike this view because they formulate their postulates differently. That "God is Being Itself", for example, is taken by Paul Tillich in 1951 to imply that God is therefore not himself a ‘being’, since he is more the prerequisite or condition of possibility for any entity to exist. If God is not in fact a being, this has the consequence that God is incommensurate with human experience and cannot act in creation and hence not even love us in a way we would recognize as love.

Such a view is rejected in the theism postulated here. I argue that the Postulate that God is being itself, has a strict positive sense, and that it implies that God is the ground of all being, while still keeping God a necessary being and a person.

Arguing from 'God is Being Itself'

We want to know the basic principles that operate now, which govern all connections between God and the individual finite beings that are us. That is what useful knowledge -- science -- needs.

We will use one of the standard arguments of philosophical theism: the Argument from Being. We are arguing from 'God is Being Itself'. The argument uses Postulate 3 above, and proceeds as follows:

1. God is Being itself (Postulate 3)
2. We (as individuals) have being (as, we exist).
3. Therefore, our being either is, or depends on (derives from), God (Being itself). 

This argument uses the metaphysical principle that being can only come from being and not from non-being (which is nothing). It uses the empirical fact that individuals in the world do exist. At least I exist, Descartes would claim. That is, there are some objects that are being in existence, so that we say that they ‘have being’. Then, since God has just been defined as ‘being itself’, we say that God must have some role in our existence. Simply put, we say that “We are, because God is."

This argument establishes an ontological dependence of us individuals on God. We appear to be beings; God is Being itself; therefore we appear to depend on God. Some essence of our being (namely Being itself) is identical to God. A corollary of this argument is: we cannot have our existence separately from God or derived originally from anything other than God. If we had some other kind of being, then we would still have being itself, which is God. Postulate 3 establishes that just by existing, we are dependent on God.

Of course, this does not explain the manner in which we depend on God. I state an alternative formulation (‘derives from’) in the conclusion above but do not explain that. More details will come later.

Consequences

The Argument from Being does not establish that we are distinct from God at all. If we were somehow identical to God, then our being would be being itself, and our continued existing would be obvious. This argument, by itself, can lead to several non-theistic accounts of the manner in which we depend on God. For now, I only explain what these other accounts are. Only later will we have the logical means to discriminate between the other accounts and core theism.

The first non-theistic account says that all things of creation—all of us finite individuals—are in fact equal to God. This appears to solve the problem if all of us really are God (or Gods) though we simply never knew it. This is pantheism: that everything is God. An equivalent formulation is to say that “God is All That Is." Every smallest atom, every last bacterium, every planet, every galaxy, would then in fact be God. Religious life would then consist of learning (or remembering) this fact, which on the face of it is not obvious. It might be justified by Jesus saying that “the Kingdom of God is in you" (Luke 17:21) or Sankara saying that “everyone is in fact Divine." (The “I am Brahman" of Sankara (Sankaracharya).)  Certain mystical experiences, such as those arising in nature mysticism, certainly appear to show that the Divine is present in all of nature, and these can be used to support pantheism. Later I will dispute pantheistic belief. Here I only note that its simplicity seems attractive intellectually. However, most of us, on practical reflection concerning our state in the world, cannot bring ourselves to believe that we are identical with God. Our everyday world certainly seems to be far from God.

A second non-theistic account states that the everyday world is an illusion: a false appearance produced by imperfect perceptions. Reality—if only we realized it—is actually the Infinite glorious God and only that God. This account is called non-dualism, and asserts that our everyday world is maya, a veil or an illusion. There appears to be a duality between the Eternal Brahman and the world of finite creatures, but reality is actually non-dual. Only Brahman exists, and the religious task is to acknowledge that in our souls.

There are further accounts which develop some kind of monism about what exists. In Idealism, God is taken as some kind of thought (or thinker) that includes all our individual ideas that appear to make us separate. There is even a way to bring in materialism, if we take energy as eternally existing and therefore divine. In that case, God (as being itself) is identified with energy, and then, according to our Argument from Being, is the being itself of everything that exists. We see that it is sometimes strangely difficult to distinguish pantheism from materialism.

Finally, a claimant such as myself has still, with assertions like these, the responsibility of showing that God identified in such a way is identical with the traditional God of the theistic religions. From the religious point of view, it would be a failure if God turned out to be identical to eternal and immutable atoms!  Strictly speaking, logically if not theologically, that would be consistent with what has been asserted so far. In that case we could still define God in the manner of this chapter, even though God would not be a single being, and God would be distributed around all the individual atoms that somehow ‘participate’ in being itself. Individual atoms would have, say, instances of ‘being itself’ within themselves and hence be part of God. Further assertions may discount this possibility, but that will have to be the subject of discussion. Any ‘proof of God’, therefore, is not complete until we are satisfied that it is ‘our’ God who we are talking about and not other things such as microscopic atom(s). This is usually the non-trivial part of the argument. It will have to contain a demonstration of how God can be a One and yet multiple objects exist in the world.

Adapted from chapter 8 of Starting Science From God.

God is Being itself: the ‘I am’

Let is continue further into theistic science: the theory of what we can know about God and how God relates to the universe. Two previous postulates are listed here: that God exists and that God is One. Now we coming to the next step in setting out the basis of theism: this is:

Postulate 3  God is Being Itself. 

This postulate immediately puts God in a different ontological status compared with us. We are beings, but we are not being itself. That God has that special status is distilled from Judaism in the saying that God is “I Am” (Exodus 3:14), and, from Christianity, in similar statements by Jesus (John 8:58). This distillation has long been part of classical theism. God is Necessary in comparison to us mortals who are contingent. God can thus be the necessarily-existing original cause of any finite thing that comes into being.  Before considering the consequences of this postulate, let us make sure we understand it in more detail:


Assertions that ‘God is X itself’

Postulate 3 is the first in a series of claims that God is X itself. Here X is ‘being’, while other features (such as ‘love’, ‘life’ and ‘wisdom’) will be attributed later. Such assertions have important roles in theistic metaphysics, and these roles need to be defined explicitly.

Consider a generic assertion of the form “Object G is X itself”. It first implies that, if G exists, it has description X necessarily. It is then part of its nature that G does not merely have description X, but that it does so at all times and in all counterfactual circumstances originating at any time. This does not imply immutable or fixed existence, only that property X is attributed at all times. That is a minimal requirement for any kind of eternal existence, though the actual manner or form of existence could be variable or fluctuating as long as it is always present.

A second component is to state that such a G is not an X exactly like other objects which are Xs, but that G is still essentially involved in the way they are Xs. Here, for example, God is not a ‘being’ precisely like the rest of us are beings, yet (as being itself) God is intimately involved in the way we are beings. God is still a being and still exists but in a different way then we.

From the existence of X-itself, we may deduce that every instance of X is either

(a) identical to X-itself, or
(b) dependent on X-itself. 

We conclude that if an object with property X exists completely independently (or ‘in itself’), then it must be identical to X-itself, since (by construction) it cannot be dependent on anything apart from itself. The present case, with X=being and God as being itself, implies that any existing object is either identical to God or dependent on God. If anything exists at all, we could conclude that God exists, but we already postulated that in Postulate 1. What this postulate adds is that God exists eternally and necessarily.

You may dispute these kinds of arguments. You could ask: since this stone is brown, does that mean that brownness-itself exists?  Does redness-itself exist?  Or evil-itself, since there are many things thought to be evil?  And if redness-itself did not exist, why is being-itself treated differently in theism?  Theists reply that our argument for X-itself existing is not valid for every X. The argument depends on Postulate 3 for X=being and on later postulates for other Xs. These Postulates are not logically necessary for every possible X.

Alternatively, you could argue that since this stone is a being, and since God is being itself, we should conclude that this stone is God. Theists do not deny the validity of an argument like this. They insist only that it proceeds if the stone is in fact being, itself. That is: the argument is only valid if stones exist independently, eternally and necessarily, since being itself is eternal and necessary. Theists agree that if atoms in the world exist eternally and immutably then they could be said to have or be being itself. In that case, on the basis of Postulate 3 at least, they could be identified with God. This is the sense in which the atomic materialist makes atoms into his God. But we will understand theism differently.

Adapted from chapter 8 of Starting Science From God.

Can we know the nature of God?

There are several ways of describing how much we can know about God.
1. Apophatic or ‘negative theology’: We can know nothing of the true Divine nature.
2. Cataphatic or ‘positive theology’: We can know something of the nature of God.

Within the positive approach, there are two options:
2a. Our knowledge refers only by analogies
2b. Our knowledge (at least in part) does truly refer to God.



1. Apophatic Theology
One well-established religious tradition—apophatic or ‘negative theology’—that refuses to make statements about Divinity. This is the via negativa.
This is almost self-contradictory, like saying "Nothing can be known about God". Not even that statement itself!

2a. Knowledge by Analogies
There have historically been many analogies for how we might be related to the divine, and the bible is nearly full of metaphorical descriptions of divine and spiritual things.

Aquinas uses the negative approach in part when he says that common terms such as ‘life’, ‘wisdom’, even ‘existence’ can only be applied to God analogically. He combines the via negativa with an analogical account of the way we know God. According to him, God does not have wisdom but has something analogous to wisdom. We talk about love with humans and love with God, but these are not strictly the same thing. Rather, God has something that is like the love that we know. It is sufficiently like love that we do call it love, but it is strictly distinct. Terms in his theology are not univocal, but analogous. According to Aquinas, this is all that can be given.

This would make establishing a theistic science difficult. None of the terms we might want to use in our arguments actually refers properly to God under the negative or analogical traditions. I, therefore, do not follow it.

2b. Unequivocal Knowledge
Duns Scotus (1265-1308) was one opponent of Aquinas on this issue. Scotus holds, for example, that ‘being’ is a univocal notion applicable to everything that exists without restriction. This to return to the position of Parmenides, for whom being is the central concept. According to Scotus, we should be able to unequivocally describe God with terms such as being, love and wisdom. Scotus’ view has become the dominant view in later Western history, and we will need it within theistic science. That is, we should try to avoid using analogies at the most fundamental level of explanation.

So I will attempt to form a cataphatic or positive theology and one, moreover, in which we can actually describe God to some extent.

I want to start with whatever can be truly attributed to God and then use well-specified analogies and similarities to deduce what attributes can then be truthfully attributed to us. I believe we have sufficient concepts given to us via revelation that we can make statements about God that are mostly true. We do not, of course, claim to make statements about all of an infinite God. We only claim that our terms do properly refer to God and at least approximately describe the nature of God.

That should not blind us, however, to the crucial role of analogies in learning new ideas concerning nature and divinity. In fact, some analogies are so important that they link not just our ideas, but also nature and divinity themselves. We call these relations correspondences. Later I will discuss how such relations are more than analogies and how they are important descriptions of structures and dynamics within theism. And, using theistic science, we will unequivocally describe things related by such correspondences and then see why the various analogies do hold. In this way we will have the univocal language of Scotus, while simultaneously agreeing with Aquinas that particular analogies are essential to understanding the relations between divinity and created things.

Adapted from chapters 7 and 11 of Starting Science From God.

Is God physical?

The God of theism supports nature and can act within nature. Does that make God natural or even physical? How do we know God is 'beyond nature', in order to be come supernatural?  If we think that everything that has a physical effect is itself physical, then God would be physical.

We rightly think that everything has a nature, namely a description of its substance and of all its essential properties and powers. In agreement with this general sense of the word ‘nature’, Aristotle's original Greek meaning of ‘physical’ is that which has its source of change within itself. If theism is true, and God is the source of our life and therefore the only thing with life in itself, then, strictly speaking, only God is physical!    In this line of thought, Victor Reppert posts

I wouldn't even necessarily call God supernatural. There could conceivably be a science studying God's actions, based on which we could make predictions. If God would let us, we could even perform experiments on Him. What's wrong with this idea?
Actually, if you say that what we mean by supernatural is that it won't fit in to a mechanistic order, then of course God is supernatural. That's how Lewis defined it. But does everyone understand the term "supernatural" in that way? It seems like a lot of baggage is brought into the use of this term.

Aristotle's aim was to distinguish it from what is artificial, which are those things that have sources of change outside themselves.  Applying this principle as above would make all of the the rest of us beings as therefore ‘artificial’ (in some sense).

Some people do indeed view the world as an artificial tool or instrument of God, like a musical instrument which God plays to make music (us). Some think of God as like the author of a book in which are the 'artificial' characters, as I discussed previously.

However, this is not the everyday use of these terms. Since we commonly use the word ‘naturalistic’ or ‘physical’ to describe the basic sciences of today, we need to invent a new name such as ‘generalized-natural’ or ‘generalized-physical’ for the above sense of everything with a source of change within itself.

A ‘generalized physics’ would be the study of those things, and, when theism is assumed true, it will coincide with our theistic science. Both will be the study of everything that has a causal influence on the things in our world. In another variation on definitions, some philosophers define “physical things [as] those things that are postulated by a complete physics.” Theists claim that this must refer to the generalized sense of ‘physical’ which includes minds and even God.


So I am not going to use such a 'generalized' terminology, delightful though it may be.

I am therefore going to use ‘nature’ to refer to what is currently known as physical, including all material things and also whatever virtual or pre-geometric processes may be surmised in quantum gravity. Then, everything natural may be taken as itself dead and not living, however active or ‘subtle’ it may be. We will later see that natural things are energized and enlivened by something spiritual within them, but we will never need to identify spiritual as the ‘inmost of the physical’ and hence itself essential natural. The term physical, as I and most people use it, excludes what is mental or spiritual. And, of course, I will have to explain how they are related.

Adapted from chapter 7 of Starting Science From God.

Can we understand Theism scientifically?

Many people think that science and religion are completely separate activities, as Galileo did when he exclaimed , “Scripture teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go!” Steven Jay Gould more recently took science and religion to be "Non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA). That is one way for accommodating religion to science.

Religions, however, should (and most do) make claims about what exists (God, spirituality, etc.), and how what exists  influences our life. Let us call theism the knowledge of the claims about the reality of God as made by religion, or presupposed by religion. I want to concentrate here on the core claims that are central to religion, and to focus on monotheism.  And I want to elucidate those claims in a rational manner. This is to take theism just like a scientific theory, and spell out & explain its basic principles as clearly as possible.

That there is a God, and that God is One, are the primary assumptions of a rational monotheism:

Postulate 1  God exists.

Postulate 2  God is One.

These are the postulates needed for further constructive work in theistic research. Not everyone may be willing to make such assumptions. The a-theist, for example, assumes that God does not exist. He or she is free to do that, to make that hypothesis, to see what further ideas follow, and to see what explanations may be produced. In our investigation, however, we begin with the theistic postulates above. May the best explanation win.

Such a pair of postulates is not enough to generate deductions and is hence nowhere near enough to produce all the explanations that we seek. We need to combine it with further postulates to be described later. 

Discussions with friends have shown me that there are many differences and uncertainties concerning theism. Even within theology the question of the powers of natural objects has been commonly divorced from the question of how God sustains those objects in existence. Because I understand that the behavior of objects does depend on the details of theism and on how they are sustained in existence, I will now present expositions to elucidate the needed principles of theism. The primary function of these posts is to outline the core principles that will be needed as foundations for the later scientific theorizing. The postulates listed are not arbitrary but were carefully chosen from what I think of as ‘vanilla theism’. These are the core beliefs of the main theistic religions of the world: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Those are the three religions or peoples ‘of the Book’. Those religions often make further additional assumptions that are not shared by all. Sometimes I may append brief mentions of the content of those additional ideas, but I do not have the space in this book to explore all their separate consequences.

The core beliefs of philosophical theism are typically that God is eternal, infinite, necessary, one, immutable, impassible, transcendent and immanent. Then, for religious purposes at least, we add that God is good, loving, a divine person, worthy of worship, worthy of praise, righteous, just, awe-inspiring, and always merciful and forgiving. However, it is not entirely clear how these last attributes are related together or even how they follow from the first (philosophical) group of attributes. A difficulty for many people is that the philosophical attributes above hardly allow that God be living. That is because it is doubtful that an ‘immutable, impassible One’ can be loving and merciful. God may well be both, we believe, but the rational understanding of the connection is weak.

The coming postulates are chosen, therefore, to emphasize the life and loving nature of God. They assert that God is eternal, infinite and transcendent, but insist, in addition, that God is living and that God is loving. These postulates about life and love are certainly not known a priori. The philosophical proofs of the existence of God never conclude by proving those particular hypotheses about the living nature of God. Nevertheless, they are core and central beliefs of religious theism. I strongly believe that they come come from revelations from God. I believe that God’s input into the religious books over the last several thousand years has lead to a general awareness that God is living and loving. He is living and loving in his Divine way, a way that we forever struggle to understand.

I am not going to discuss particular revelations or particular books because I believe that the core claims to be made can be distilled from religious thought. Let us therefore continue with introducing the core theistic postulates to see what can thereby be derived as a basis for the principles of our world.

Adapted from chapter 7 of Starting Science From God.

Is it All In The Mind?

It is commonly believed that quantum physics tells that 'all is in the mind', that 'we create our own reality', or that 'that everything outside our consciousness exists yet has no reality except in what we are making of it'. A recent film 'What the Bleep Do We Know' popularises this view, but makes many mistakes.


Physics motives for saying this:

A big problem in physics is that the wave functions that are spread out have a shape which satisfies well-known equations, but it is still not clear, when and how physics gets just one actual outcome. The electron may have a wave function spread out over the whole room, for example, but if you have detectors in the room, only one of them, at random, will detect the electron. In quantum physics, we do not have a good reason why an electron can only be found in one detector and not somehow in all of them. So there has been a lot of discussion in the past 70 years of how in physics the standard theory with waves just leads to one outcome. This has given rise to very many alternative ideas:.

1. Only an appearance	Everett,
2. Occurs to a good approximation	Decoherence theory,
3. Classical apparatus	N. Bohr,
4. Experimenter looks	W. Heisenberg,
5. Effect of consciousness	E. Wigner,
6. Consciousness creates an actual result	H. Stapp,
7. Consciousness produces nature	S. Malin,
8. Spirit produces nature	E. Swedenborg,
9. Nature is essentially spiritual	‘New Age’,
10. Nature and spirit are identical	C.J.S. Clarke,
11. Quantum physics shows us religious roots	E.H. Walker

Suggested means for getting one definite actuality

Those of you that have read some popular physics will recognize some of these alternatives, and they are all designed to answer the same measurement problem. The first suggestion is called Everett’s many-worlds interpretation, in which there is not any real selection, but all alternatives occur the same time, for example in some set of parallel universes. The second theory of ‘decoherence’ says that it really like that, but that it appears to a good approximation as if only one outcome occurs. Niels Bohr thought it was the fact that experimental apparatus was ‘classical’, with no wave behavior, that gives rise to a particular outcome. We now know that quantum physics applies to the experimental apparatus as well, so that does not really solve the problem. Werner Heisenberg, Eugene Wigner and Henry Stapp have in turn introduced the speculation that selection is something to do with consciousness or mind, and this has given rise to a whole stream of suggestions in which consciousness (or something) has become more and more involved in trying to solve the problem of quantum physics.


Wigner in a paper of 40 years ago suggested that it was the consciousness of the observing scientist, and this idea has been carried on by Stapp, who says that consciousness is actually involved in the brain. Stapp believes that since a quantum brain has many alternate things that can happen, consciousness selects one of these outcomes to produce a result. I have listed other alternatives here, which get progressively more ‘way out’. A few of these ideas we can imagine being true, for example that ‘spirit produces nature’, but some people have gone even further than that, and have said that nature is somehow essentially spiritual – that it is connected with, or equal to, the spiritual. Others have continued this theme to say that quantum physics is a way of learning about spirituality, a way to regain our spirituality. There is a great range of possible solutions here that try to solve the same problem: how something that is described by a wave can produce a definite outcome. The trouble starts from the fact that when physicists think about nature, they only have two ideas in mind: they can think of a wave or a particle. The difficulty is that the objects which quantum physics tells us are in nature are not just waves, and not just particles, so the challenge is to find a new understanding and a new picture.

In theistic science, we start by taking a realist view of the quantum world, as composed of dispositions or propensities in particular forms.

Philosophical motives for saying this:

As well as the more extreme ideas above, there are further ideas that have been proposed. James Jeans, the mathematical physicist, wrote about 60 years ago that “the wave function looks like not something solid and substantial, but looks more like an ‘idea’”. Some (e.g. Zohar) have taken this to mean that quantum physics tells us about ideas. Others, discussing the putative identity of spirit and nature, have tried to work out various ways for why they appear to be different. They have said that perhaps spirit and nature are different grades of energies, different frequencies, different dimensions, and/or different ‘fineness’ of material.

Theistic science will tell us that suggesting ‘different dimensions’ here is trying to use spatial analogies (thinking from ideas of space) to distinguish mind from nature. When people try to talk about ‘different frequencies’, they are using temporal analogies to think about this difference.

There is a strong impetus in much 'New Age' physics toward nondualism, in which our own consciousness is identified as 'essentially identical' to the Consciousness of the Source.

In the Spirituality Approach, I discuss whether nondualism can be true within Theism:

1. How to distingush the Natural and Spiritual? here
2. Is Nondualism the way to go beyond the physical? here
3. How do we love others in a nondualism? here
4. Is there esoteric knowledge about spirituality? here
5. How can there be permanent spiritual growth? here
6. What is Enlightenment without Paradox?
   Nondualism from a Theistic perspective, here.

In Theistic Science:

According to Theistic Science, the natural world is really and definitely produced by generative processes, of which spiritual and mental stages are intermediate parts. The natural world is not itself living or consciousness, but is produced in part by means of worlds and by people which are conscious.

Moreover, the physical world is not an arbitrary production, but is constrained at least by the past: by what already physically exists. We say that the natural world is the terminus and containant of spiritual processes, and is the base for the spiritual degrees as are the foundations for a house.

This has important philosophical, biological and theological consequences. It is most important as our actions in the physical world have the function of building up the permanence of our spiritual bodies, our souls.

There are important analogies between mental and physical processes, but these analogies do not indicate identity, as is often supposed, but arise from systematic correspondences of function.

To explain all these things within the context of science and theism, I have written my book Starting Science from God. The book website is www.beginningtheisticscience.com/ 

Appearances of Reincarnation

According to Emanuel Swedenborg, we only live once on earth. After death we live in a spiritual world and move eventually to a permanent place that depends on the spiritual nature we created by our actions on earth. We are not reborn or reincarnated again on earth, to have another attempt to do better next time.

Historically, however, there have been many stories about reincarnation, notably the "transmigration of souls" (metempsychosis) that Plato describes in the Republic. Reincarnation has been an essential part of Hinduism and Buddhism. It is interesting to see when it became popular in the west. We might assume it came with the great interest in spiritualism in Europe and America that started in the 1840s, which lead to a great many scientists becoming interested in it, with the formation of the learned societies of psychical research in the period 1850-1900. But it did not: there was no hint of reincarnation among those beliefs. Instead, it came through the books of theosophists like Annie Besant and was imported into western thought from the early 1900s. It has subsequently become rather widespread among spirit communicators, and it is especially dominant in the "channelled works" written under dictation from spirit sources that claim higher knowledge.

This essay is not concerned with the moral or theological basis of reincarnation, but discusses instead the evidence that has been presented in its support. The idea might simply be regarded as mistaken if it were not for the evidence that has been described for example by Ian Stevenson in his 1966 book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. There are two main kinds of evidence. The first is the evidence of birth marks in young children as shown by Stevenson. The second comes from hypnotic regressions, in which a subject under hypnosis is "taken back" to relive his past lives. Often a great deal of historical evidence is produced that cannot be plausibly only invented; realistic names may be given; and unusual languages may be spoken fluently. Sometimes these pieces of evidence are spontaneously recalled.

Most recently there has been regression to the "between life" status and reports of discussion with spiritual advisors about the choice of life into which to incarnate, and afterwards a review of the "lessons learned" from the reincarnations. Taken all together, these pieces of evidence are sufficient to convince a lawyer like Victor Zammit that reincarnation does in fact occur (see Ch. 24 of his book A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife: Irrefutable Objective Evidence).

I am not going to rehearse the numerous details of the observations and histories here. Rather, I want to suggest alternative interpretations of both of these kinds of evidence, interpretations moreover which are to be expected if Swedenborg’s descriptions of the spiritual world are correct. To start with, therefore, I remind the reader of some aspects of Swedenborg’s account.

According to Swedenborg, the conjunction between heaven and earth is by means of beings in the spiritual world:

With every individual there are good spirits and evil spirits. Through good spirits man has conjunction with heaven, and through evil spirits with hell. These spirits are in the world of spirits, which lies midway between heaven and hell. … When these spirits come to a man they enter into his entire memory, and thus into his entire thought, evil spirits into the evil things of his memory and thought, and good spirits into the good things of his memory and thought. These spirits have no knowledge whatever that they are with man; but when they are with him they believe that all things of his memory and thought are their own; neither do they see the man, because nothing that is in our solar world falls into their sight. (Heaven and Hell 292)

That is, there are indeed close to us beings who have lived in the past and in whose memory there are indeed descriptions of past ages and past languages. Those memories are not active, so there is no interference with the current life. Sometimes, however, there is some ‘leakage’ of that memory into the current consciousness of an individual on earth, and, then, strange voices or memories from past lives appear that he attributes (erroneously) to his own past life. Swedenborg relates:

If a spirit were to speak from his own memory with a man the man would not know otherwise than that the thoughts then in his mind were his own, although they were the spirit's thoughts. This would be like the recollection of something which the man had never heard or seen. That this is so has been given me to know from experience. This is the source of the belief held by some of the ancients that after some thousands of years they were to return into their former life, and into everything they had done, and in fact, had returned. This they concluded because at times there came to them a sort of recollection of things that they had never seen or heard. This came from an influx from the memory of spirits into their ideas of thought. (Heaven and Hell 256).

It appears that the normally-quiescent memories of the associated spirits may be specifically awakened during hypnotic sessions, when the current individual’s mind is quieted. The minds of the spirits may then be aroused to think of their own previous lives. It thus appears that memories are not "labeled" with their originator, so whatever memories are recalled in hypnosis may afterwards be appropriated to whoever experiences them (not necessarily the originator).

What about the bodily birthmarks and scars that Stevenson found on many Asian children? In some cases the alleged cause of death in an immediate past life is reflected by a birthmark in the present life, since investigators could find and identify by family interviews the life history of a matching recently-deceased person. For example, Stevenson found that in cases of violent death the child may show a birthmark where he was knifed, shot or from whatever caused his death. These cases definitely do not appear as "spiritual possession" as described in psychiatric cases because the child’s life is otherwise normal. Zammit argues that these phenomena cannot be attributed to extrasensory perception, to fraud, to cryptomesia (memories previous acquired but since forgotten), to inherited memory, to collective unconscious, or to possession. In his mind, that leaves reincarnation as the only possibility.

We note that many (but not all) of Stevenson’s examples come from cultures in which reincarnation is the expectation. Moreover, many of them involve violent deaths. In that situation, what expectations should we envisage in the recently-resurrected spirit in the spiritual world? I should expect that many such persons want to reincarnate, if only to resume their earthly life cut short. Mostly, we can conclude, they become associated spirits with young children. The child’s memories appear between the ages of two and four, and then the association fades between the ages of five and eight. It is somewhat surprising to me that they manage to produce birthmarks and scars on the children, but, whatever the details are, they do not support the claim of the reincarnation of a single person any more than they support Swedenborg’s theory of associated spirits.

What then about the apparent memories between earthly lives, where events in the spiritual world are recalled under hypnosis? An author such as Michael Newton in his book Journey of Souls has given many stories of people recalling these. If we take these as veridical, this appears to be strong evidence for reincarnation. I argue, however, that some things like these should be expected in the spiritual world described by Swedenborg.

To understand what is happening, we have to consider events in the quotation Heaven and Hell 292 above from the point of view of the spirits involved. Imagine what must happen. They are living like "normal people" in the spiritual world, and then (somehow) they are transformed to be associated spirits with us (on earth) and with no active memory of their own. I suggest that this process appears to them just like reincarnation. We should expect there to be some discussion beforehand with their advisors concerning with whom to best become associated. We would expect that any decisions be taken with their long-term spiritual objectives in mind (with concurrence of the Lord). Then, after some period, they return to their friends and advisors in the spiritual world. (That period might not be a whole earthly lifetime, but they may perhaps not be able to judge time scales in the same way as us.) Moreover, many such "reincarnations" should be expected during life in the spiritual world, before their permanent place is found.

Again, I can envisage that some memories of associated spirits can be awakened under hypnosis and retrieved, as if they were the memories of the earth individual. Thus can not only "past lives" be "recalled" in this way, but also "between life" events. Moreover, something like "successive reincarnations" can and do occur which involve persons in the spiritual world. I can easily imagine this process being inaccurately described as the reincarnation, not of associated spirits, but of our actual selves, especially since the memories can hardly be distinguished. So there is reincarnation, but not as we know it.

Originally posted at the New Church Perspective blog.