Nietzsche and Christianity - Metaphysical Idealist Critique

[AshvinP]

Let me expand on the above a bit. We can forget all of the theological labels and references for a moment. All we are assuming is metaphysical monism-idealism, because without that, all of our experiences and concepts kind of dissolve into fragmented islands of meaning without any necessary relation to each other. We can discuss why that is if we must, but I am assuming almost everyone here agrees. I am also assuming everyone agrees that the individual human organism can be thought of as an attentive network of instincts-motivations, feelings and thoughts (the "human soul").

Under idealism, we reach the conclusion that the human soul is not other than ideal forms, i.e. it is all mental activity. It is also pretty clear that these forms can be thought of as beings in their own right, "under-souls", sub-personalities, "luminosities", etc. Regardless of what sort of mental activity they have attained, they are volitional beings. They are dependent on us and we are dependent on them. We can also tentatively extrapolate that 'upwards', as we are individual organisms who are also social and embedded within various collective forms, some of which are rather obvious to us and some of which we do not currently perceive (such a view is also rather undeniable in Judeo-Christian scripture and tradition).

So what does it mean to seek deep Self-knowledge in this view? It means nothing less than exploring all of the possible relations between us and the volitional beings within and without. And what does it mean to have faith in Christ? Nothing less than trusting that if we authentically seek these relations, we will find them. That "with God, nothing is impossible". God becomes man so that man can become God. It is a theosis which works in all directions. The Fall is not something which could have been avoided, as it is with the typical theological conception; something which God desired us to avoid, thereby obviating the need for all post-Fall history, including the Incarnation.

I'm not sure what in this I'm supposed to disagree with from a "typical theological conception". The catchecism says the fall was the result of man "preferring himself to god... against the requirements of his creaturely status and therefore against his own good". It seems to me that this is exactly what god would have expected. You see with spoilt children that get everything they want and more, they loose the correct perspective of the relationship with their parents (and others). So I don't think god wanted it to happen, but there is a reason why we have to go through hardships in this life.

There is an implicit dualism there which makes it unnecessarily hard for people to swallow that Christian pill. An omnipotent, omnibenevolent God who created the world, animals and humans knowing without a doubt that the latter would sin and plunge the whole creation into thousands upon thousands of years of suffering and malevolence... for what reason? So that we, as non-Divine human souls, may glorify Him in some distant future? And if that wasn't enough, the typical theology tells us that Adam was free to choose to obey God but decided not to, and now all humans after the Fall inherit his sin. Now if we take the Fall as a human development into self-consciousness, i.e. "knowledge of good and evil", we must also admit that God wanted it to happen because He wanted us to be truly free, which cannot happen without self-consciousness. I don't see any way around that.

What's happening here is similar to the Kantian divide between phenomenon/noumenon. No matter what, we cannot presume to talk about God as a human being or any other creature, because that is strictly outside the limits of our experience, or so we are told. Anything we say about God's motives, reasoning, etc. must be a "projection" because there is no other choice for us. Now you add on top of that some sort of rational dualism, mind-matter separation, and you have the perfect recipe for full-blown nihilism. If nothing else, according to thinkers like Nietzsche, we should at least see what disastrous results such conceptions have brought about in the Western world and question them for that reason alone. It ends up being all about life-negating blind faith, rather than life-affirming reconnection with God and our spiritual ancestors.

Jung remarks, "God needs man in order to become conscious, just as he needs limitation in time and space. Let us therefore be for him limitation in time and space, an earthly tabernacle... God wants to be born in the flame of man’s consciousness, leaping ever higher." Again we do not need to assume any metaphysical reality here, only to observe the spirit of his remarks. Bringing it back to Nietzsche, the biggest philosophical influence on Jung, and also a great (yet certainly fallible) source of wisdom for Steiner, we can see how his concern and fight for freedom relates. How can we be free if we do not know the relations between ourselves and the beings which influence our evolution?

As the oft-quoted saying goes, "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free."

As before I see this first part as projection onto god. We need this life in order to be refined. Even some of the angels, created perfect and seeing the full picture rather than the shadow we see, turned against god, by their free will chose the absence of god. There is something about tasting what it's like to be weak and helpless in the face of trials, if we choose to respond to them with courage, perseverance and love, that helps us overcome our own innate arrogance and lack of empathy. When we see ourselves as we truly are, not as this constrained, limited version of ourselves, we need to have absorbed and be living this wisdom (difficult as it is!).

I agree with most of that but don't understand what you claim the "projection" is. That God(s) may be dependent on humans in some way through our unique meta-cognitive activity? Well that's understandable to be skeptical of when coming from any mainstream Christian tradition - I certainly was 5 or so years ago. It really goes against the grain of the abstract transcendent God who is only omnipresent in description alone, not in reality. Certainly not in a person who is not yet "born again" or in the natural world. But, again, there is an implicit dualism in such a view which automatically makes us feel mindless, mechanistic and unfree. No matter how much we tell ourselves a bright expansive future lies ahead for humanity, here on Earth and later in Heaven, we hardly feel any different. By "we" I am just remarking on the average Westerner who has been soaking in those "rays" for decades, centuries even, yet has not spiritually progressed or has taken two steps back for every one step forward. Ultimately we cannot survive with those odds.

[Simon Adams]

There is an implicit dualism there which makes it unnecessarily hard for people to swallow that Christian pill. An omnipotent, omnibenevolent God who created the world, animals and humans knowing without a doubt that the latter would sin and plunge the whole creation into thousands upon thousands of years of suffering and malevolence... for what reason? So that we, as non-Divine human souls, may glorify Him in some distant future? And if that wasn't enough, the typical theology tells us that Adam was free to choose to obey God but decided not to, and now all humans after the Fall inherit his sin. Now if we take the Fall as a human development into self-consciousness, i.e. "knowledge of good and evil", we must also admit that God wanted it to happen because He wanted us to be truly free, which cannot happen without self-consciousness. I don't see any way around that.

What's happening here is similar to the Kantian divide between phenomenon/noumenon. No matter what, we cannot presume to talk about God as a human being or any other creature, because that is strictly outside the limits of our experience, or so we are told. Anything we say about God's motives, reasoning, etc. must be a "projection" because there is no other choice for us. Now you add on top of that some sort of rational dualism, mind-matter separation, and you have the perfect recipe for full-blown nihilism. If nothing else, according to thinkers like Nietzsche, we should at least see what disastrous results such conceptions have brought about in the Western world and question them for that reason alone. It ends up being all about life-negating blind faith, rather than life-affirming reconnection with God and our spiritual ancestors.

You are right that we make a mistake when we talk about god as a human, but if we want to try to understand we can use the examples he gives us as analogies. So we could take the example of a father, who has a son that is really into fast cars. His favourite films are the Fast and Furious series, his favourite sports are motor racing. He gets to 17 and want’s a car, so the father helps him to get a car, contributing 50% to what the son has saved up, but warns him to be careful, drive safely, service it etc. He hears stories that his son has been seen driving fast, in fact he knows it, even just by looking at the tyres on the car. He speaks to the son, but the son responds in typical ‘invincible’ teenage fashion: “There’s nothing unsafe about my driving, I’m a better driver than mum!”. Eventually the son has a crash at speed. The son and his friends have some cuts and bruises, but is otherwise okay. The car is a right off, and so the father gives the son a bicycle to get around on until he has saved up enough for a new car. The father had good reason to know this was going to happen eventually, but given that no one was seriously harmed, he does not regret helping him to get the car as this was the only way he would learn this lesson, and he has to become a driver at some point. In the meantime he has noticed his younger son is playing a lot of his brothers racing games on the Playstation...

It’s obviously not a perfect analogy, but in any area, if we want to understand things beyond our comprehension, all we can use are the framework given by those who do have full understanding.

I agree with most of that but don't understand what you claim the "projection" is. That God(s) may be dependent on humans in some way through our unique meta-cognitive activity? Well that's understandable to be skeptical of when coming from any mainstream Christian tradition - I certainly was 5 or so years ago. It really goes against the grain of the abstract transcendent God who is only omnipresent in description alone, not in reality. Certainly not in a person who is not yet "born again" or in the natural world. But, again, there is an implicit dualism in such a view which automatically makes us feel mindless, mechanistic and unfree. No matter how much we tell ourselves a bright expansive future lies ahead for humanity, here on Earth and later in Heaven, we hardly feel any different. By "we" I am just remarking on the average Westerner who has been soaking in those "rays" for decades, centuries even, yet has not spiritually progressed or has taken two steps back for every one step forward. Ultimately we cannot survive with those odds.

I agree there is problem, and although I like to blame Descartes, you can see it right through from the european nominalists in the middle ages right through to modern christian evangelists in the US (some of whom have probably never heard of nominalism or Descartes. It’s a flattening of the spiritual world, and I agree that idealism is a more accurate depiction of the world and one that can help this. The east has a much better foundation of this than the west (outside of traditions like the monastic anyway), but they are still moving towards this flattened view, on the mistaken assumption that “this is what science tells us”.

I need to start work, but will try to get into this a bit later, as I’ve been meaning to reply to Eugene’s point but haven’t had a chance.

[Eugene I]

There is one thing common between us and God - we are aware and experience conscious phenomena in the same way he is aware and experiences phenomena. We have a flow of conscious phenomena in our field of experiences in the same way he does. And he makes up stories in his field of experience using his ability to volitionally create meanings and ideations the same way we do. The difference is that the story he created for us became a "reality" of our everyday life and of the world and of our body-minds from our perspective, but our perspective on it does not make the story any more real than it is - just a story, a play in the theater of the world. But it is still good to experience and good for learning and development of consciousness, so no reason to discard it as a worthless mental fabrication (as some hardcore Buddhists try to do).

[AshvinP]

There is an implicit dualism there which makes it unnecessarily hard for people to swallow that Christian pill. An omnipotent, omnibenevolent God who created the world, animals and humans knowing without a doubt that the latter would sin and plunge the whole creation into thousands upon thousands of years of suffering and malevolence... for what reason? So that we, as non-Divine human souls, may glorify Him in some distant future? And if that wasn't enough, the typical theology tells us that Adam was free to choose to obey God but decided not to, and now all humans after the Fall inherit his sin. Now if we take the Fall as a human development into self-consciousness, i.e. "knowledge of good and evil", we must also admit that God wanted it to happen because He wanted us to be truly free, which cannot happen without self-consciousness. I don't see any way around that.

What's happening here is similar to the Kantian divide between phenomenon/noumenon. No matter what, we cannot presume to talk about God as a human being or any other creature, because that is strictly outside the limits of our experience, or so we are told. Anything we say about God's motives, reasoning, etc. must be a "projection" because there is no other choice for us. Now you add on top of that some sort of rational dualism, mind-matter separation, and you have the perfect recipe for full-blown nihilism. If nothing else, according to thinkers like Nietzsche, we should at least see what disastrous results such conceptions have brought about in the Western world and question them for that reason alone. It ends up being all about life-negating blind faith, rather than life-affirming reconnection with God and our spiritual ancestors.

You are right that we make a mistake when we talk about god as a human, but if we want to try to understand we can use the examples he gives us as analogies. So we could take the example of a father, who has a son that is really into fast cars. His favourite films are the Fast and Furious series, his favourite sports are motor racing. He gets to 17 and want’s a car, so the father helps him to get a car, contributing 50% to what the son has saved up, but warns him to be careful, drive safely, service it etc. He hears stories that his son has been seen driving fast, in fact he knows it, even just by looking at the tyres on the car. He speaks to the son, but the son responds in typical ‘invincible’ teenage fashion: “There’s nothing unsafe about my driving, I’m a better driver than mum!”. Eventually the son has a crash at speed. The son and his friends have some cuts and bruises, but is otherwise okay. The car is a right off, and so the father gives the son a bicycle to get around on until he has saved up enough for a new car. The father had good reason to know this was going to happen eventually, but given that no one was seriously harmed, he does not regret helping him to get the car as this was the only way he would learn this lesson, and he has to become a driver at some point. In the meantime he has noticed his younger son is playing a lot of his brothers racing games on the Playstation...

It’s obviously not a perfect analogy, but in any area, if we want to understand things beyond our comprehension, all we can use are the framework given by those who do have full understanding.

You misunderstood - I am being critical of the divide which assumes that we cannot speak about God in relatable human terms or anything else. That is what I am relating to the Kantian divide, which I am also being critical of. Our language cannot exhaustively capture the essence of God, but it can still help us gain a better understanding as long as don't mistake the descriptions for the reality. The analogies are fine as well

But your analogy above is wholly inadequate to explain the Fall and God's motivations (apart from the Father symbolism which is clearly used in the Bible). It once again sets up a scenario in which the son's bad driving decisions transform the very structure of reality for all of his descendants. It is also downplaying the consequences when we can state what they are - the son and friends crash and die. Or, at best, they survive in extreme agony for the rest of their lives and some of them choose to reject the Father because of it and then are consigned to Hell or annihilated or whatever other permanent fate awaits them. None of that can be considered Just.

I agree with most of that but don't understand what you claim the "projection" is. That God(s) may be dependent on humans in some way through our unique meta-cognitive activity? Well that's understandable to be skeptical of when coming from any mainstream Christian tradition - I certainly was 5 or so years ago. It really goes against the grain of the abstract transcendent God who is only omnipresent in description alone, not in reality. Certainly not in a person who is not yet "born again" or in the natural world. But, again, there is an implicit dualism in such a view which automatically makes us feel mindless, mechanistic and unfree. No matter how much we tell ourselves a bright expansive future lies ahead for humanity, here on Earth and later in Heaven, we hardly feel any different. By "we" I am just remarking on the average Westerner who has been soaking in those "rays" for decades, centuries even, yet has not spiritually progressed or has taken two steps back for every one step forward. Ultimately we cannot survive with those odds.

I agree there is problem, and although I like to blame Descartes, you can see it right through from the european nominalists in the middle ages right through to modern christian evangelists in the US (some of whom have probably never heard of nominalism or Descartes. It’s a flattening of the spiritual world, and I agree that idealism is a more accurate depiction of the world and one that can help this. The east has a much better foundation of this than the west (outside of traditions like the monastic anyway), but they are still moving towards this flattened view, on the mistaken assumption that “this is what science tells us”.

I need to start work, but will try to get into this a bit later, as I’ve been meaning to reply to Eugene’s point but haven’t had a chance.

What I am basically arguing here is that the metaphysical idealist approach eventually undermines many traditional Christian theological doctrines, especially the ones which place a hard division between human-God, natural-supernatural and life-afterlife. I am arguing that those divisions are the result of implicit unexamined metaphysical assumptions which are likely not true, broadly the Cartesian rationalism and the Kantian epistemic limit, although it would be a mistake to consider those two people or their specific formulations wholly responsible. Rather it is the spirit of their times, and perhaps even earlier times, which has pervaded the Western world in that manner.

[Eugene I]

On a side note, IMO, there is a good chance that God is a much simpler, friendly, accepting and approachable personality compared to how the followers of monotheistic religions archetypically portray him.

[SanteriSatama]

On a side note, IMO, there is a good chance that God is a much simpler, friendly, accepting and approachable personality compared to how the followers of monotheistic religions archetypically portray him.

[AshvinP]

On a side note, IMO, there is a good chance that God is a much simpler, friendly, accepting and approachable personality compared to how the followers of monotheistic religions archetypically portray him.

To be clear, I am not making such an argument when critiquing traditional Christian theology using the Nietzschean framework. It's actually the opposite - the hard divisions between God-human make our burdens in life much easier. With them, we can equate being "self-aware" with a simple recognition of how helpless and uninfluential we are as human beings. That means we have no responsibility to reach our full potential, because our full potential is never more than what we are at any given moment, certainly never close to any standard approaching Divinity. That is why JP formulates one of his rules as, "don't compare yourself to other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday." If we are all helpless sinners before God no matter what we do, then we always remain in the same relative position to the Absolute as we have always been, unless perhaps we recite some creeds and tell the world we have "faith"... then we are "saved" and let off the hook.

[Simon Adams]

You misunderstood - I am being critical of the divide which assumes that we cannot speak about God in relatable human terms or anything else. That is what I am relating to the Kantian divide, which I am also being critical of. Our language cannot exhaustively capture the essence of God, but it can still help us gain a better understanding as long as don't mistake the descriptions for the reality. The analogies are fine as well

But your analogy above is wholly inadequate to explain the Fall and God's motivations (apart from the Father symbolism which is clearly used in the Bible). It once again sets up a scenario in which the son's bad driving decisions transform the very structure of reality for all of his descendants. It is also downplaying the consequences when we can state what they are - the son and friends crash and die. Or, at best, they survive in extreme agony for the rest of their lives and some of them choose to reject the Father because of it and then are consigned to Hell or annihilated or whatever other permanent fate awaits them. None of that can be considered Just.

Okay the analogy fails fairly quickly, but imagine that the car is like being given power, and we know with humans, unconstrained power nearly always corrupts us. Why is that?

I assume you agree with Jung (as I do) that we have a “shadow side”, and that we project the negative aspects hidden in here onto others, seeing in them the things we don’t like about ourselves? These things are clearly a part of our character, but from my limited knowledge of Jung, he says the way to resolve them is to go through experiences that bring them out, and then recognise them?

If we just lived in paradise, what do you think would happen to these negative shadow aspects of ourselves?

What I am basically arguing here is that the metaphysical idealist approach eventually undermines many traditional Christian theological doctrines, especially the ones which place a hard division between human-God, natural-supernatural and life-afterlife. I am arguing that those divisions are the result of implicit unexamined metaphysical assumptions which are likely not true, broadly the Cartesian rationalism and the Kantian epistemic limit, although it would be a mistake to consider those two people or their specific formulations wholly responsible. Rather it is the spirit of their times, and perhaps even earlier times, which has pervaded the Western world in that manner.

To me I don’t see the conflict, it’s just that I see god as simple, unchanging, the stable root behind all, and creation relative, expressing itself in multiple ways, to a rhythm between multiple poles. Idealism to me describes this second part (and yes it’s a kind of duality, but not a duality within the universe). To you and most (if not all) here, the latter part is all. So we’re like fish in the ocean, agreeing that there is an ocean, when most people seem to be saying there are fish, seahorses, jellyfish, whales and dolphins, but the only water is in our heads.

I’ll share one vague idea of the wider metaphysics that I’ve had for a while (and this is just my wild intuitive speculation, in many ways it makes little sense to me, so feel free to think I’m nuts ). God somehow opened a dimension in himself, ‘pulled’ two poles apart which became a line filled with spiritual potential between two poles, lets call it mind (what is a ‘line’ of ‘mind’? I won’t pretend. This was then turned and pulled into two new poles in the opposite direction, and then turned again, and again stretched out, repeatedly until there was multi dimensional potential (remember this ‘gap’ is just mind/spirit at this stage, not any kind of ‘physical’ dimension). It’s then sent spinning (what is ‘spinning mind’ - I have no idea), which starts physical time and physical space. Into this ‘empty space’ come the ‘ideas’ of god, the word of god, shaping the way this potential expresses itself through time, between the different poles. The ideas reach their outward expression as matter, structured like a sphere but remember this higher dimensional structure is not spatial, so even though the matter is in a sphere, it translates into physical matter in all directions across physical 3D space (hence the holographic principle).

For all of us in this universe, as beings of mind/spirit, we are in this higher structure, part of it, so it’s not spinning from our perspective, and we can have this transcending experience by realising the wholeness of this reality we inhabit, namely the created mental space. However there is something in our individuality that is like a microcosm of the whole, and when I say “whole” I mean both god and the ‘space’ within him.

I realise this will sound very strange and I do honestly think it’s meaningless to try to conceptualise elements on such a different level and scale than our possible experiences in this life. But I thought I’d share a rough sketch of one way of looking at a wider metaphysical landscape in order to give you an idea of why I think traditional theology and idealism are not in conflict.

[SanteriSatama]

I’ll share one vague idea of the wider metaphysics that I’ve had for a while (and this is just my wild intuitive speculation, in many ways it makes little sense to me, so feel free to think I’m nuts ). God somehow opened a dimension in himself, ‘pulled’ two poles apart which became a line filled with spiritual potential between two poles, lets call it mind (this seems to conflict with “simple”, but that’s a mystery well beyond my imagination). This was then turned and pulled into two new poles in the opposite direction, and then turned again, and again stretched out, repeatedly until there was multi dimensional potential (remember this ‘gap’ is just mind/spirit at this stage, not any kind of ‘physical’ dimension). It’s then sent spinning, which starts physical time and physical space. Into this ‘empty space’ come the ‘ideas’ of god, the word of god, shaping the way this potential expresses itself through time, between the different poles. The ideas reach their outward expression as matter, structured like a sphere but remember this higher dimensional structure is not spatial, so even though the matter is in a sphere, it translates into physical matter in all directions across physical 3D space (hence the holographic principle).

Sorry for interfering, but this has been a main field of interest for me for quite a while now. Your intuition is not at all nuts, it's a good exploration in process.

It's a natural and common way to start imagining dimensionality from the idea of point-like singularity. It's a good heuristic method, but we should be careful not to confuse heuristic intuition with most coherent and fundamental ways to think geometry and mathematics. It turns out that in many ways plane is more fundamental than line or point; and if we start from a point, many unsolvable math problems follow. On the other hand, singularity in the sense of "first" flash of light in the darkness is a very deep spiritual concept/event.

Speaking of other hand, chirality (from Greek word for hand) is a very fundamental concept-phenomenon, the necessary "asymmetry" before thinking plain geometric symmetries like Euclidean orthogonal coordinate system becomes even possible: I put "asymmetry" of chirality in scary quotes because I consider it a form of symmetry, not the opposite.

Not sure how the idea of 'gap' enters your discussion, but it also very deep and important. Alain Badiou, a top rate philosopher of mathetics, observes that the very idea of Number follows from the idea of a gap in continuum. In this sense God of the Gap (in the positive meaning, not the mocking meaning) is the same as God of Number Theory. The notion of 'quantum' also refers to a gap in continuum, which is prior to the metaphysical postulation of quantification and discrete separation of numerical quantities.

Before we fall too deep in the gap of quantification, unable to find our way back (as in scientism and attempts to limit divine into any discrete number) another more fundamental relation is worth attending. A gap is less than the continuum, whole is more than a hole.

A gap is discontinuous only in relation to a line, when we lift or drop our gaze below or above the broken line, we can see that the discontinuity was an illusion, we were looking at a plane from a hole in it. And when we allow the plane also to curve instead of staying only flat, perhaps we can also see, with the mind of the eye, that also our own form, with our chiralities of stretching our hands in all directions, is also continuous with the plane.

[AshvinP]

You misunderstood - I am being critical of the divide which assumes that we cannot speak about God in relatable human terms or anything else. That is what I am relating to the Kantian divide, which I am also being critical of. Our language cannot exhaustively capture the essence of God, but it can still help us gain a better understanding as long as don't mistake the descriptions for the reality. The analogies are fine as well

But your analogy above is wholly inadequate to explain the Fall and God's motivations (apart from the Father symbolism which is clearly used in the Bible). It once again sets up a scenario in which the son's bad driving decisions transform the very structure of reality for all of his descendants. It is also downplaying the consequences when we can state what they are - the son and friends crash and die. Or, at best, they survive in extreme agony for the rest of their lives and some of them choose to reject the Father because of it and then are consigned to Hell or annihilated or whatever other permanent fate awaits them. None of that can be considered Just.

Okay the analogy fails fairly quickly, but imagine that the car is like being given power, and we know with humans, unconstrained power nearly always corrupts us. Why is that?

I assume you agree with Jung (as I do) that we have a “shadow side”, and that we project the negative aspects hidden in here onto others, seeing in them the things we don’t like about ourselves? These things are clearly a part of our character, but from my limited knowledge of Jung, he says the way to resolve them is to go through experiences that bring them out, and then recognise them?

If we just lived in paradise, what do you think would happen to these negative shadow aspects of ourselves?

But the 'shadow aspects' only exist because we are self-conscious, correct? Because we are aware of ourselves but not fully. If we were not self-conscious at all, we would be robots, and if we are fully self-conscious, there is no more shadow. And we both generally agree that the Fall is describing humanity's development into self-consciousness. So if there is a hard division between God and humans, then the former is still subjecting the latter to ongoing, perhaps even permanent, suffering and malevolence which they would have avoided if He just didn't give them the damn car to begin with!

What I am basically arguing here is that the metaphysical idealist approach eventually undermines many traditional Christian theological doctrines, especially the ones which place a hard division between human-God, natural-supernatural and life-afterlife. I am arguing that those divisions are the result of implicit unexamined metaphysical assumptions which are likely not true, broadly the Cartesian rationalism and the Kantian epistemic limit, although it would be a mistake to consider those two people or their specific formulations wholly responsible. Rather it is the spirit of their times, and perhaps even earlier times, which has pervaded the Western world in that manner.

To me I don’t see the conflict, it’s just that I see god as simple, unchanging, the stable root behind all, and creation relative, expressing itself in multiple ways, to a rhythm between multiple poles. Idealism to me describes this second part (and yes it’s a kind of duality, but not a duality within the universe). To you and most (if not all) here, the latter part is all. So we’re like fish in the ocean, agreeing that there is an ocean, when most people seem to be saying there are fish, seahorses, jellyfish, whales and dolphins, but the only water is in our heads.

I’ll share one vague idea of the wider metaphysics that I’ve had for a while (and this is just my wild intuitive speculation, in many ways it makes little sense to me, so feel free to think I’m nuts ). God somehow opened a dimension in himself, ‘pulled’ two poles apart which became a line filled with spiritual potential between two poles, lets call it mind (this seems to conflict with “simple”, but that’s a mystery well beyond my imagination). This was then turned and pulled into two new poles in the opposite direction, and then turned again, and again stretched out, repeatedly until there was multi dimensional potential (remember this ‘gap’ is just mind/spirit at this stage, not any kind of ‘physical’ dimension). It’s then sent spinning, which starts physical time and physical space. Into this ‘empty space’ come the ‘ideas’ of god, the word of god, shaping the way this potential expresses itself through time, between the different poles. The ideas reach their outward expression as matter, structured like a sphere but remember this higher dimensional structure is not spatial, so even though the matter is in a sphere, it translates into physical matter in all directions across physical 3D space (hence the holographic principle).

For all of us in this universe, as beings of mind/spirit, we are in this higher structure, part of it, so it’s not spinning from our perspective, and we can have this transcending experience by realising the wholeness of this reality we inhabit, namely the created mental space. However there is something in our individuality that is like a microcosm of the whole, and when I say “whole” I mean both god and the ‘space’ within him.

I realise this will sound very strange and I do honestly think it’s meaningless to try to conceptualise elements on such a different level and scale than our possible experiences in this life. But I thought I’d share a rough sketch of one way of looking at a wider metaphysical landscape in order to give you an idea of why I think traditional theology and idealism are not in conflict.

I may have to consider that more carefully, but I'm not sure how it is any different than panentheist Christianity, regardless of the details of how it actually unfolded. If we are "microcosms of the macrocosm", then we are in essence not other than God(s). That's what panentheism is all about. The main difference is that, from what I can tell, panentheists don't need to try so hard to reach the same conclusion