The Maker and the Material: God and the Material Cause

By M Vasudevacharya

The five chapters of this book discuss a number of possibilities about the “relation” between the cosmos and God. This may seem abstract, but the way we think about the world has important implications for the way we treat it. Chapter 1 surveys the philosophical world of the ancient Greeks in order to examine the different ways that early Greek philosophers understood the relation between the cosmos and its Divine Source. From among them, I single out Plato’s depiction of God as a Divine Artisan who made the world out of pre-existing matter. In chapter 2, I discuss a conception of the relation between the world and God that is different to anything envisaged by the classical Greeks. This is the idea that God created the world from nothing (creatio ex nihilo). This idea has remained part of the Western intellectual background over the course of many centuries and it has provided the dominant creation paradigm for Western civilization. Chapter 3 offers another perspective, one which can be found across cultures in East and West. This is the idea that the world is an emanation from the Divine (creatio ex divino). I discuss this specifically in the context of the philosophy of Plotinus.

We thus have three different ways to explain the “relation” between the cosmos and its Creator: Plato’s idea of God as a Divine Artisan, the idea that God created the world from sheer nothing, and the idea of the world as an emanation from God. Chapter 4 begins with a discussion about the Argument from Design, as presented by David Hume, the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher. I concur with his conclusion that while the legitimate scope of the Argument from Design is very limited, when correctly formulated it is nonetheless a persuasive argument for the existence of a cosmic Intelligence that we might call God. Given that it is reasonable to think of the cosmos as having an Intelligent cause, we may inquire as to what is the relation between the cosmos and such an Intelligent cause. This leads to a comparison between the three possibilities we have already discussed. I first compare Plato’s portrayal of God as a divine Artisan with the Biblically inspired doctrine of “creation from nothing” and find in favour of the latter, because it solves the problems raised in Plato’s account. I next compare “creation from nothing” with the idea, taught by the Neoplatonists, but also found in the Upanishads, that the world is an “emanation from the Divine”. My argument is that the concept of the world as a “divine emanation” is a viable possibility with a number of advantages over the idea that the world is a creation “from nothing”. My proposal is that our understanding of God should be widened to include the idea that God is the intelligent cause of the cosmos and is its material cause as well. In other words, the Maker is also the material.

The idea of the world as an emanation of God is not without some philosophical challenges, which I try to address. Its chief benefit, which I discuss in chapter 5, is that the idea of the world as God manifest as form recovers the lost immanence of God and it restores the conception, common to many ancient cultures, of the world as a sacred place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Oct 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781925666830

M Vasudevacharya

Vasudevacharya completed his BA (UNSW) in the 1970s, majoring in the History and Philosophy of Science and he also holds an MA (Univ. of Sydney) in Religious Studies. In the early 1980s he spent three years living in a seminary run by the Chinmaya Mission where, under the tutelage of Swami Dayananda Saraswati, he studied Advaita Vedanta and Sanskrit. He later earned his Ph.D (ANU) in Classical Indian Philosophy under the supervision of the renowned Indologist professor J.W. de Jong. He has taught at the University of Sydney and has published three books in India on aspects of Vedanta philosophy. He is the first person in Australia to have taught the entire Bhagavad Gita and most of the major Upanishads to the general public. He continues to teach privately, in Australia and in India.

Book preview

The Maker

and the Material

God and the Material Cause

M. VASUDEVACHARYA

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Copyright 2017 © M. Vasudevacharya

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

for Mum, for the gift of her time;

for Archana, for her support and help;

to Miss Betty Katt, for the gift of a dictionary;

to Chris, for his many gifts;

to Craig, for recognizing that there were two books;

to Sesha Prasad, for his discussion about solar.

Chapter One

HOW THE ONE BECAME MANY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GREEKS

Nearly two hundred years ago the German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers (1758-1840) posed a problem which became known as the Olbers’ paradox. The attempt to solve the problem stimulated research that has contributed to our current understanding of the cosmos.¹ Put briefly, Olbers’ paradox arose out of the observation that the night sky contains a few very bright stars, a larger number of stars of medium brightness and vast numbers of faint stars. Olbers explained this by the reasonable proposition that, in general, the brightest stars must be closest to us, since this would account for their brightness and for the fact that they are few, because there is relatively little space close to us. The stars of medium brightness must be further away, and that is why their luminosity is smaller and their number is greater. The faint stars must be immensely far off, which is why they are so faint and so numerous. What, then, about the most distant regions of space? Should we not expect those regions to be populated with extremely faint but exceedingly numerous stars? Olbers thought so, and he considered that the light emitted by these stars should contribute a faint background brightness to the night sky. Although the individual stars themselves would be too faint to be visible, their number must be so great that their aggregate should provide a faint glow.² Olbers even calculated what he thought this amount of light should be. The paradox, of course, arises from our observation that there is no such background glow to the night sky.

The solution to the problem of the darkness of the night sky came about as a consequence of the General Theory of Relativity proposed by Albert Einstein (1879-1955). In 1922, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann (1888-1925) noticed an algebraic error in Einstein’s calculations which had led Einstein to conclude that the universe is static. Friedmann showed that with his correction it was possible to develop models of a dynamic universe which changes over time and he created a mathematical model for an expanding universe. Independently of Friedmann, a young Belgian astronomer and Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), published a paper in 1927 in which he also proposed the new idea of an expanding universe. His little-known paper anticipated the conclusions of the American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953).

Hubble and his colleagues had shown in 1922 that the nebulae, incandescent clouds of gas in remote space, which could be observed because of the recent development of more powerful telescopes, were actually distant galaxies composed of billions of stars. In his renowned paper of 1929 Hubble had stated that the light emitted from these galaxies was slightly red in colour, because it was shifted to the red part of the spectrum of visible light. We know that light seen in a rainbow is made up of a number of colours from violet to red. Each colour represents light of a particular wavelength. These wavelengths steadily lengthen from the short waves of the violet to the long waves of the red. Like how the sound emitted by an approaching vehicle is stronger and becomes weaker as the vehicle recedes because the wavelengths are stretched out further, it is known that light from an approaching source appears bluer and stronger whereas light from a receding source appears redder and weaker, because the wavelengths of light stretch as the object moves away. From the observation that light received from the galaxies is shifted to the red end of the spectrum, and the light is reddened in proportion to the distance it has travelled, Hubble concluded that the galaxies were rushing away from our stellar system with velocities that increase directly with their distances.³

The reason why we do not see a background glow in the night sky is because the light reaching us from distant galaxies has shifted toward the red end of the spectrum and this weakens, or dims, the light of the galaxies in proportion to their distance from us.⁴ The discovery of the red-shift did much more than solve an old puzzle, it introduced the most momentous discovery of modern cosmology: the idea that our universe is expanding. To help us comprehend this idea physicists sometimes give the illustration of an inflating balloon. If tiny dots are painted on the surface of a balloon to represent galaxies, then as the balloon expands the distance between the dots will increase, and the further apart the dots are the faster they will move apart. Analogously, as space expands, the galaxies are all rapidly moving away from each other like the dots on the balloon. One notable difference is that the dots on the balloon also expand as they move apart from each another, whereas in the case of our expanding universe the galaxies themselves do not expand, because they are held together by the mutual gravitational attraction of the innumerable stars which they contain.

If the universe is expanding, then there must have been a time when it was smaller. So, like running a film backwards, we can logically deduce that the universe had a beginning, and that when it began it was very tiny indeed. Lemaitre said that if one wishes to attempt to retrace the course of time, the initial condition must be a state of maximum concentration and he proposed the hypothesis that the initial condition of the universe could be thought of as a sort of primeval atom, which he sometimes referred to as the Cosmic Egg. In spite of this picturesque name, harking back to the religious ideas of some ancient cultures, the concept of the initial state of the universe has come to be known as the Big Bang ever since Fred Hoyle, a well-known British physicist who was opposed to the idea that the universe had a beginning, derisively coined the term during a radio broadcast in 1949. The Big Bang has become the most widely accepted theory about the origin of the universe, especially since the discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. George Gamow had argued, as far back as 1948, that if the universe began with a Big Bang evidence of the initial explosion should still be evident today. It seems that after the Big Bang the universe was flooded with incredibly bright light and the light stretched into microwaves as the universe expanded. In 1965, the presence of this microwave radiation was detected from every part of space with the same intensity. We are reliably informed that the Cosmic Microwave Background can even be observed if we turn a television to an unused channel. A few percent of the snow that we see on the screen will be caused by it.⁵

The standard model of the Big Bang goes something like this. About 13.7 billion years ago, all the space, all the matter and all the energy that the expanding universe now contains was concentrated into a tiny region of unimaginable density, perhaps a billion-trillion-trillionth of a centimetre, and having an unimaginable temperature. What that original material actually was, and what happened at the exact moment of the Big Bang, is difficult to say; but one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang the universe underwent an extremely brief but truly dramatic burst of expansion, or inflation, in which space itself expanded faster than the speed of light. It was as if a coin 1 centimetre in diameter suddenly expanded to ten million times the width of the milky way.⁶ A second after the universe began, the surrounding temperature was around 5.5 billion degrees Celsius. At that time the universe was a vast array of fundamental particles such as quarks, protons, neutrons and electrons. The rate of expansion slowed and over the next three minutes the temperature dropped below one billion degrees Celsius which was cool enough to allow protons and neutrons to form the nucleus of the light elements, hydrogen and helium, as well as traces of lithium. After 380, 000 years the universe had cooled to about 3000 degrees, allowing atomic nuclei to capture electrons and form electrically neutral atoms. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation dates from this era. The universe was now filled with clouds of hydrogen and helium gas. After around 300 million years the hydrogen gas began to break up into huge protogalaxies and began to condense under the force of gravitational attraction to form the first stars. The universe had now become a bright place, as the stars emitted light due to the nuclear fusion of hydrogen within their interiors. Heavy elements, such as carbon, were formed within the interiors of stars and were expelled into space when stars, at the end of their life-cycle, exploded as supernovae. Around 9 billion years after the Big Bang, our solar system was formed out of material from supernova explosions coalescing through gravitational attraction.

If there is no God, if no intelligent cause brought our universe into being, and if our universe arose as a spontaneous creation from nothing, as some eminent physicists believe, then our conception of the universe can be labeled material monism.⁷ Monism is the idea that only one ultimate principle exists and material monism would mean that the ultimate principle is insentient matter. If we turn now to the cosmological theories of the earliest Greek philosophers, we find that they were monists and that their conception of the cosmos was remarkably similar to ours in one respect. They believed that the cosmos had emerged from the self-transformation of a single primordial substance. The cosmogony of the Big Bang similarly postulates the existence of a primordial stuff that has evolved into the totality of whatever we now perceive.

The cosmology of the early Greek philosophers differed from modern cosmology in two important respects. Since they had to rely only on what the naked eye could perceive, their cosmos was vastly smaller than ours. It was bounded by the sky and was of a spherical shape, a conclusion easily reached from the way the sky appears to the naked eye. The fixed stars lay on the circumference of the sky. The earth, either spherical or cylindrical in shape, occupied the centre of the cosmic sphere within which the sun, the moon and the planets moved, at different levels, in their orbits.⁸

The second difference is more significant. According to the early Greek philosophers, the original substance that transformed into the cosmos was not simply inert matter as in the theory of the Big Bang, rather it was thought to be alive, because it had given birth to the cosmos. This primordial substance was considered to be of infinite or at least of an indefinite extent and it was said to encompass all things since it surrounded the cosmic sphere. Moreover, the Greeks saw that the cosmos displayed discernable order and in their view this original substance was said to guide or govern all things. Not only was it alive, it was intelligent as well. Since the primordial stuff was uncreated, alive and intelligent, it was called the Divinity.⁹ It was the intelligence that shaped the cosmos and it was the primordial stuff out of which the cosmos was formed. If we were to employ the later terminology of Aristotle, it was both the efficient cause, i.e., the guiding intelligence that causes things to exist in the ordered manner that they do, and the material cause, i.e., the stuff out of which the cosmos is made. This original substance was thought of as God, though not in an anthropomorphic sense.

According to the earliest Greek philosophers the pantheon of gods, Zeus and the others, belonged only to the realm of mythology and popular religion. Though these philosophers are now remembered chiefly for their attempt to explain the world in naturalistic terms, they nonetheless participated in a world-view that was shared by a number of philosophical and religious thinkers of the time. The Greek poet Musaeus, a disciple of the legendary Orpheus, expressed this world-view in the following way: All things come into being out of One and are resolved into One.¹⁰ Everything had emerged out of one primary substance, everything exists as a modification of that substance, and everything will merge back into that substance.

The earliest Greek philosophers, standing at the beginning of what would become the European philosophical tradition, posed the following question: What is the single, divine substance, out of which the cosmos arose and of which it is made? Thales (c. 624-546 BCE), from the prosperous Greek port-city of Miletus, on what is now the west coast of Turkey, was the first to try to answer this question in naturalistic terms. Thales was hailed in his own lifetime as one of the seven wise-men of Greece. He is credited with having predicted the full solar eclipse of 28 May, 585 BCE, a fact which suggests that he may have learnt astronomy from the Babylonians, since their astronomical records were more detailed than those available in Greece. He was also said to have determined the time of the solstices and to have recognized the length of the year as 365 days. It is almost certain that he spent time in Egypt, and upon his return from that land whose ancient civilization held a fascination for the Greeks, he introduced the Greeks to the study of geometry. An interest in the civilization of Egypt, and in the East in general, can be found among other early Greek philosophers, such as Pythagoras, who was born in the half-century following Thales and who spent ten years in Egypt seeking initiations from priests in order to gain access to their secret lore.¹¹ Plato told a half-amusing story about Thales. It seems that one night, when Thales was absorbed in watching the sky, he tumbled into a well whereupon a servant girl laughed at him for searching the sky while missing the earth that lay at his feet.

Thales attempted to find a unified theory of everything in accord with the metaphysical premise that All things come into being out of One and are resolved into One. He also stands at the head of the Western scientific tradition because he sought to explain this