About a year ago I entered my e-mail in a giveaway for a book on theLibraryThing web-site. The idea of these give-aways is that you kind of promise to read and review the book in exchange for a free copy. And then I suddenly won a free copy! So I found myself reading it.
The book is called "A god that could be real" by Nancy Ellen Abrams. The topic of it, to put it simply, is to reinvent and re-envision the concept of God that would not contradict modern cosmology, yet would also be an active personally engage-able God, a type one could conceivably pray to, as opposed to a cold rational impotent deistic construct. So Abrams takes a chisel and starts working on the clumsy block of our standard God-related preconceptions (such as omniscience and omnipotence), trying to get to the believable core, while not destroying the piece entirely. To summarize her message in one sentence, the author revisits post-Hegelian dialectics and applies it to religion, defining God as a truly (but dialectically) existing teleological representation of meta-humanity.
My biggest problem with this book is that Abrams rejects, ignores, and sometimes plain hides from the very idea of Platonism, be it the original Greek version, the Jewish interpretation of it (something in the style of the Gospel of John), or Hellenistic and Medieval versions. She chooses to understand all key theological words, such as "to create" (as applied to the Universe) in a very practical, matter-of-fact way, which then obviously leads to contradictions. But she pretends that these purely materialistic (as opposed to idealistic) interpretations are the only possibly ones. Which is of course not true.
In a similar fashion, she ignores, or politely dismisses, the mystical tradition. Her book is dedicated to the active process of defining and redefining God, which contradicts the very central message of most mystical traditions (from St. Symeon the New Theologican, to St. John of the Cross, and early Hassidic rabbis). While not all authors spell it out explicitly, the core message of Judeo-Christian mysticism is that not only one cannot define God, but even more strongly, it is not possible to formulate a logical predicate, a true/false statement that would contain God as an object, as God is not an object of our reality. In mystical monotheism, God is fundamentally a subject, staying outside of our world (and in most extreme versions - outside of our logic as well). God is the subject in the sense that s/he makes our world exist; God exists us. But we cannot ensnare God in our statements or trap God in our definitions, however clever they might seem (see apophatic theology).
Abrams ignores, or rather dismisses with a half-a-paragraph-long hand-wave this entire stratum, and entire school of thought. Which is annoying, as it means that in order to test and taste the validity of any of her statements I need to first translate them into their weaker versions, and only then think about them. Because of course these weaker versions are very possible: the whole concept of angels (messengeres) in Judaism, and then Christianity, as well as related concepts of Metatron, Son of Man, Messiah, prophets, Wisdom of God, etc. - all grow from this very same tension that made Abrams write her book: the tension between the intuition of God as infinitely "another", and the intuition of God's full presence in one's existence here and now. The impossible leap through this void was again and again reinterpreted by religious thinkers as different kinds of messengers, projections, incarnations and deputies, from the Angel wrestling with Jacob, and to the concept of Church as the body of God. Abrams is not the first person to fight this very fight.
Overall, it took me about half a year to finish this book. Every now and then, feeling guilty, I would try to pick it up, but it just would not go. I do hope that it could make a more pleasant read to a non-scientist (as it talks a lot about science), or a non-believer (as it talks a lot about God), but if you happen to be interested in both religion and science, then this book may feel too slow for you. At the same time, the book is definitely thought-provoking. It contains several interesting, poetic metaphors that were a pleasure to read, and a nice discussion of physical scales that could be welcome in any classroom. It has some really nice material, but it did not quite work for me as a book, and I definitely cannot subscribe to its main argument.
The book is called "A god that could be real" by Nancy Ellen Abrams. The topic of it, to put it simply, is to reinvent and re-envision the concept of God that would not contradict modern cosmology, yet would also be an active personally engage-able God, a type one could conceivably pray to, as opposed to a cold rational impotent deistic construct. So Abrams takes a chisel and starts working on the clumsy block of our standard God-related preconceptions (such as omniscience and omnipotence), trying to get to the believable core, while not destroying the piece entirely. To summarize her message in one sentence, the author revisits post-Hegelian dialectics and applies it to religion, defining God as a truly (but dialectically) existing teleological representation of meta-humanity.
My biggest problem with this book is that Abrams rejects, ignores, and sometimes plain hides from the very idea of Platonism, be it the original Greek version, the Jewish interpretation of it (something in the style of the Gospel of John), or Hellenistic and Medieval versions. She chooses to understand all key theological words, such as "to create" (as applied to the Universe) in a very practical, matter-of-fact way, which then obviously leads to contradictions. But she pretends that these purely materialistic (as opposed to idealistic) interpretations are the only possibly ones. Which is of course not true.
In a similar fashion, she ignores, or politely dismisses, the mystical tradition. Her book is dedicated to the active process of defining and redefining God, which contradicts the very central message of most mystical traditions (from St. Symeon the New Theologican, to St. John of the Cross, and early Hassidic rabbis). While not all authors spell it out explicitly, the core message of Judeo-Christian mysticism is that not only one cannot define God, but even more strongly, it is not possible to formulate a logical predicate, a true/false statement that would contain God as an object, as God is not an object of our reality. In mystical monotheism, God is fundamentally a subject, staying outside of our world (and in most extreme versions - outside of our logic as well). God is the subject in the sense that s/he makes our world exist; God exists us. But we cannot ensnare God in our statements or trap God in our definitions, however clever they might seem (see apophatic theology).
Abrams ignores, or rather dismisses with a half-a-paragraph-long hand-wave this entire stratum, and entire school of thought. Which is annoying, as it means that in order to test and taste the validity of any of her statements I need to first translate them into their weaker versions, and only then think about them. Because of course these weaker versions are very possible: the whole concept of angels (messengeres) in Judaism, and then Christianity, as well as related concepts of Metatron, Son of Man, Messiah, prophets, Wisdom of God, etc. - all grow from this very same tension that made Abrams write her book: the tension between the intuition of God as infinitely "another", and the intuition of God's full presence in one's existence here and now. The impossible leap through this void was again and again reinterpreted by religious thinkers as different kinds of messengers, projections, incarnations and deputies, from the Angel wrestling with Jacob, and to the concept of Church as the body of God. Abrams is not the first person to fight this very fight.
Overall, it took me about half a year to finish this book. Every now and then, feeling guilty, I would try to pick it up, but it just would not go. I do hope that it could make a more pleasant read to a non-scientist (as it talks a lot about science), or a non-believer (as it talks a lot about God), but if you happen to be interested in both religion and science, then this book may feel too slow for you. At the same time, the book is definitely thought-provoking. It contains several interesting, poetic metaphors that were a pleasure to read, and a nice discussion of physical scales that could be welcome in any classroom. It has some really nice material, but it did not quite work for me as a book, and I definitely cannot subscribe to its main argument.
