Meta-Paradigms and the Evolution of God

By Greg -

One more post on the subject of God and the Brain before we move onto Harper's.

Paradigm shifts, according to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, are the changes in world view that enabled and drove western civilization’s scientific advances. But Russell in his book From Science to God says that there are other, wider-reaching paradigms under which the paradigms that Kuhn describes operate. There is, he says, a “meta-paradigm” operative in all civilizations that may be too large, too pervasive for us to even notice. And I believe that these meta-paradigms, too, shift occasionally.

Here's my take on three possible paradigm shifts we've experienced in western civilization, and a fourth I think we're almost ready for. I see the following meta-paradigm shifts as part of a continuous spiral:

  1. Man is part of the natural world, and what we take from nature must be returned in a gift cycle. This environmental ethic was the meta-paradigm under which society operated until something changed – probably a series of environmental catastrophes, breakdowns of tribal cohesion and population shifts that enabled man to question the link.
  2. Nature wasn’t living up to its end of the bargain so that gave us permission to shift the paradigm. Now, instead of a common spirit pervading man and nature, the spirit was detached from the natural world. This polytheism was a world view that made the subjugation of Nature permissible. As the unity had been broken, man no longer was obligated to view nature on equal terms as part of a gift cycle. Nature-as-object could be enslaved and domesticated in service to man, and thus we have the agricultural revolution.
  3. With monotheism, the next big meta-paradigm shift, we have the origin of general and universal principles that apply to mankind as a whole and not only to individual tribes. Here we have the origin of nation states, with written law replacing arbitrary power. But with monotheism also came the concept of evil; in a world with universal law, there's no refuge for non-believers. Under this meta-paradigm falls science, and this is where Kuhn’s paradigms are operative. The following paradigm shifts, again, aren't Kuhn's, but my own.

    1. We are the center of the physical universe. God surrounds us. (We are the center of God's universe.)
    2. The center of the universe lies elsewhere: the sun, the galactic core, within a larger cluster of galaxies, or somewhere in the context of super-clusters or even larger groupings. We and everything else surround God. (God is the center of our universe.)
    3. With space-time of four dimensions and higher, the concept of a physical center to the universe no longer has any meaning. But general principles are universal and the same for all observers, regardless of their location or relative motion. God is metaphysical. (And, again, we are the center of God's universe.)
    4. With quantum physics, our notions of space-time itself begin to break down; the general principles operative at larger scales don't apply at the level of quanta. All we can say with certainty is that the universe consists of information, and that the boundary between this quantum world and physical reality is the observer. Not only that, but the act of observing itself determines the nature of our reality. Consciousness is creative and God is consciousness. (And now, again, God is the center of our universe.)
  4. With the next big meta-paradigm shift, we take responsibility for our own evolution. It's no longer us adapting to the environment, or us adapting our environment to suit our needs, or even us adapting to the metaphysical laws that determine our fates; rather, now, we recognize that ecology is a give-and-take between organism and environment, and that creation itself is a give-and-take between the physical and the metaphysical. This can be compared to the gift cycle in the first meta-paradigm (I.) above. But now, we return to a sense of the sacred in Nature with an enlightened attitude toward its domestication and control.

In this last paradigm shift, in this full-circle return to paganism, we can appreciate Russell’s conclusion that consciousness is God. But the creative spirit that pervades the universe might be better understood as the yin-yang synthesis of the metaphysical and the physical.

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