Not Mentioning Big G

I guess other folks do things differently. They make sure there’s enough money for food and clothes, rent or mortgage – you know, the basics. But me, well I’d always been amore worried about the Universe. Not that I can do anything about it of course – and I guess that’s why most people don’t spend much time worrying about it. Sure, sometimes, they’ll look up at the stars on a quiet night and so a bit of wondering. But mostly – no. I – on the other hand – spend an inordinate amount of time gazing at the night sky – and indeed, the daytime clouds – and wondering. I’m not talking about the science. I’m thinking more about meaning. One person helped me more than anyone else in this. His name – Robert Pirsig. You might not remember him. He’s probably most familiar as the author of his famous book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It can seem to be a puzzling book. But really, the gist of it is right there in the subtitle of the book: An Inquiry into Values. So, it’s just the idea that value is built into the Universe from the start. Value though, is something we usually associate with subjectivity – I mean there has to be some kind of creatures with agency and autonomy in order to have values. Not just space-time. Or energy, or particles. The only way out – it seems – is to have some kind of higher-order consciousness to the Cosmos – something that sits ahead of creatures appearing in the universe to deliver the value at a later stage. But no! I stop myself there – not wanting to use the G-word – not mentioning Big G. I don’t want to see people forced down the Big G route – just to get value into the Cosmos. So instead, I simply say, well, the Universe could be consciousness – and there we have all the freedom, autonomy and agency we need to get us value from the get-go. And thus – purpose, meaning and reasons for trying to figure out what’s right and what’s good. When I sit puzzling over the Universe, I think that really the only other option is randomness. I know, in reality, there’s lots of options. But, I reckon, it all comes down to that stark choice – value or randomness – meaning or chance. So how do we choose between the two? I wonder if we really do ever make the choice. Or perhaps we make it so early we don’t even realise it. Either way, we end up either a ‘meanings’ person, or a ‘randoms’ person. Probably best keep those affiliations under wraps, to be honest – because saying that you’re on one side or the other – well, that would be almost as bad as using the G-word. It’s only nutters like me who take aside and feel the need to tell folks about it! Would I like to convert the ‘randoms’ people into ‘meanings’ people? Well, conversion, that’s definitely Big G territory. There’s a randomness story and a meanings story and you might think that these stories are diametrically opposed. But no. What I really think is that eventually those stories converge. So – convert? No need, no need. Just follow your story to its inevitable conclusions. I’m just hoping people might be more nuts and spend longer gazing at the sky. I’m just hoping people will care enough to ask big questions from life. Does that seem so bad? Well, the other thing I have to confess here is that I worry that even raising the questions will actually deter people rather than encourage them. Folks have fairly fixed stories for their lives – generally speaking – and if these stories change at all then perhaps they change only slowly. So, it might be that throwing someone the prospect that the Universe might have order built into it – or not be ordered, but be about chaos – well, that might upset them quite a bit. Potentially that could be pretty disruptive to a person’s sense of self – it could be an ontological whiplash! And how about throwing someone the notion that the existence and workings of God (oops) might actually be a secondary question to the question of innate value?! Yes, people could get quite upset about that. So I have to ask myself the question – why do it, if the results could potentially go either way? And, yes, what exactly would count as a ‘result’? Sometimes you hear folks making comparisons between people who try to interest others in spiritual beliefs and people who have hobbies such as tennis or white-water rafting or stamp-collecting. For the most part the people with an interest in tennis or the other pastimes don’t go out of their way to persuade others to take up their particular interest. People – they may reason – have different interests, so just let me get on with my interests and you get on with yours. And thus they include notions such as philosophy, cosmology, spiritualty and religion in this category of ‘private interest’. By implication then the message is, keep your private interests in these things to yourself – don’t try to foist them on the rest of us! The difference, of course, is that a person’s hobbies don’t generally offer some kind of transformation to human culture, civil society or individual consciousness at their root. The whole notion of having a 'cosmology', on the other hand, is that the story we might tell of the world could change and such change would be transformative. The stakes, therefore, are pretty high – in fact they couldn’t be higher. And what if a few folk are offended by views that could rock their own comfortable story of how the world works? Perhaps that’s not even such a bad thing? Perhaps it’s worth stirring things up a bit! So let me be frank with you – this whole not-mentioning-Big-G thing is something of a strategy. The reason is to try to get ideas about the Cosmos across to people without all the complications of dealing with God-questions! Again, it’s a bit of a balancing act. Here’s how. The religious person, you see, when presented with ideas on a ‘cosmology’, such as those I’ve explained at the start of this essay, will perhaps ask the question – where’s God in all this? They’ll likely believe that there’s a kind of ‘higher-order’ truth going on – perhaps from scripture, or by the promptings of the Spirit – which trumps any philosophical arguments that might be presented to them. So, they might just shrug and think, well, God has all this stuff sorted, so no need to be bothered by such questions. On the other hand – and this is the big part of my concern – they might find philosophical questions deeply worrying. The questions might even result in them abandoning their faith. We could ask, at this point, whether such ‘abandonment’ would actually be such a bad thing. If a person has become more honest about their true beliefs, then perhaps that’s a positive thing. On the other hand, perhaps it causes them a good deal of worry and despair so not such a good thing. There’s a related, although slightly different question that’s in the background of all this. It’s often contended that a person with a religious faith is a morally ‘better’ person – more likely to act with kindness and compassion, for instance, to carry out voluntary work of give to charity. So, should their faith be disrupted, for instance, they might become worse – less kind and compassionate, and so on. But this is a different question to the truth or otherwise of their beliefs. If they are believing things that they then decide are not reasonable, then shouldn’t they try to be true to their new beliefs, even if that were to make them a less ‘good’ person in a moral sense? I should confess, at this point, that I don’t consider any of my philosophical ideas to be at odds with faith in a God. And I should also confess that I hold very clear views on he Christian faith in particular. I’ve decided just not to share any of these views. And the reason, as I’ve tried to explain above, is that it just involves so much complexity. Before you know it, every discussion will become a discussion about what God is up to in the Universe. Atheists will turn away in disgust and believers will be divided according to their various meticulous factions. So, instead, I hope to find common ground – to find messages with which all people can find some resonance, without, in the process, diminishing the importance and impact of the matters under discussion. It remains a dilemma though, because of course the religious would always assert that tackling such questions outwith God is to miss he one essential ingredient in every such discussion. There are folks of a religious persuasion who really get the idea of us all living in stories. They have taken up the narratives of their chosen faith and somehow accommodated their lives beautifully within them. Some of these same folk may even try to encourage others to take on broader perspectives – cosmologies, philosophies, spiritual practices – that, they hope will appeal to believer and non-believer alike. To tell you the truth, it’s reading the work of such folk that’s made me think more deeply about my own approach. They clearly feel they need to include the religious aspect of things in their writings – but it’s exactly here where they face their deepest challenges. I wonder if they’ve considered, like me, to drop any insistence on the religion? But they’ve not taken that route. In balance, perhaps there’s a middle way here. Writing and public speaking offer only limited control of who one’s audience might be. Perhaps it’s in the more personal conversations that all the complexities of Big G can be explored. Right now – for better or worse – that’s where I’m at.