CHAPTER TWELVE
Ideas of quantavolution -- of sudden great changes -- attract the attention of historians of religion in especially two regards: religion was, and must remain in whatsoever guise, the companion of the newly born, traumatized, self-aware human mind; and the earliest religious voices, still speaking through the sacred documents of ancient times, were telling many truths, even literal truths about natural events, human nature, and human institutions -- truths that bespeak quantavolutions.
Yet quantavolution also presents a distressing problem to those who believe that, if once they could approach closer to the earliest days, when "the gods walked on earth" they would be inspired, ennobled, and reinforced in their faith. This is not the case and they may become downhearted and skeptical.
They should realize that even before quantavolution was assembled as a body of theories, those theologians, mystics and millennialists who ventured into the great first days of creation had to feel the terror and suffering that comes with "looking upon the face of god." Hence, indeed, most religions have calibrated the approaches to the sacred, so that only the well-prepared and thoroughly-warned would attempt the journey. That is, long before quantavolutionism, it was fully known that only the hardiest of souls could cope with the revelations of the first ages, could endure the historicity of the apocalypse.
It is possible to absorb the theories of quantavolution solely in the form of science, eschewing all contact with the religious experience as truth, while pursuing every avenue to religious experience as sociological and psychological fact. That is, quantavolution would only ask of its students that they exercise its hypotheses and evidence according to the current general methodology of science. This would be the more comfortable and easier choice.
Alternatively, however, one may confront the issue of the religious truth contained in this body of revolutionary theories, probing, inquiring whether perchance there is inherent in them something that those seeking a truth that is religious will recognize as valuable. The road is hard, and lined with the philosophical tombstones of many catastrophists and uniformitarians who have gone before, trying each in turn to transport a body of science into the realms of religious truth. Nevertheless I shall aim at the same goal.
I shall try to reach my goal in several steps. A metaphor of a box is used throughout. The human mind is inextricably contained within a physiologically limited box of perceptive possibilities and cyclical redundant logic.
The truths of religion are not within this box. Yet the existence of the box is proof of the supernatural, this being what is outside the box, which, we must admit, has an outside.
It is well that religious truths are not within this box, for the box limits and shapes its contents, and therefore disciplines the fields of knowledge that it holds.
The box nevertheless is indefinitely expansible. Its resources and limits have not been fully tested or strained. (This differs from the expansion mentioned above, which was only communicative expansion.)
In whatever direction the box expands, it is not likely to be limited. Hence the supernatural is not bounded by the accomplished full testing of any of its facets.
The simplicity and complexity of things are subjectively perceived or operationally invented. Things is themselves cannot be defined as absolutely simple or complex. The same is true of the concepts of space (size), time, past, and future. The same is true of "life" or "animism." It is subjective percept or operational invention, not defined other than by the human mind.
Now, if god is whatever is beyond the box (i. e. limitless), god must be also what is in the box, inasmuch as what is in the box is speculating upon what is outside of it, as we here.
Therefore, all that we sense and think in ourselves and our perceptible and thinkable world is part of the supernatural. If the supernatural and god are joined, we are pantheists.
Putting god into an animistic metaphor, god is our judge; god has already judged us. We already are composed and function according to god's cosmic spirit, by intelligence, and necessity.
The very nature of our ignorance, then, cribbed and confined in our cosmic box, constitutes a proof of the existence of gods. The agreement of extended ignorance from the crypto-blind bio-box probably stands up better under modern scrutiny than the traditional arguments for the proof of god that we mentioned in an earlier chapter. Furthermore, a second modern proof may tend to confirm the existence of gods, and support the proof from the cosmic box.
The universe is presently thought to be some billions of years old, probably finite, although the boundaries are not clear, and populated by many billions of stars. Many stars, if not most of them, are believed to have spawned planets. Planets will have had ample occasion to acquire atmospheres and "the building blocks of life," as we like to say from inside our cosmic box. We are also forced to admit that life as we know it is defined from inside our box, and "intelligence," as we might conceive it without actually knowing it, may be a product of other means of manufacture and assembly.
Even if we have to conjecture the birth of gods from the elements of the atomic table, the combinations and permutations of this, plus the practically unlimited conditions of time, space, temperature, and pressure can provide the substance and form of a god whom even scientific materialists, even Karl Marx, must recognize as authentic and in being.
In the creation of all things, we must contend with the principle of entropy, a term invented by Clausius in 1865 to refer to the state in which thermal energy is no longer available for mechanical work. Later, and especially with Norbert Wiener, the term was broadened to describe "the running down of the universe." Clausius himself had written "the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum." (Thus the idea merely subsisted until a century of history changed the optimistic mid-nineteenth to the pessimistic mid-twentieth century intellectual climate.)
Given even a time of short duration, or of a conventional dozen billion solar years, the number of occasions for "phenomena" or "phenomenal intelligence" to appear in the universe is extremely large. Cases of "negative entropy," that is, of existence moving toward creation rather than desuetude, must be very numerous.
There is no reason to use life on earth as the archetype of the universe. As the Encyclopedia Britannica reports, "all the organisms of the earth are extremely closely related, despite superficial differences. The fundamental ground pattern, both in form and flesh, of all life on earth is essentially identical." Nor ought we take mankind as the measure of the product of potential habitats of intelligence. In some proportion of them, something much more than homo sapiens schizotypus must have emerged. There should exist planets or complexes where beings of much greater intelligence and competence than ourselves exist. There must be a range of such superior intelligences from superman to gods.
Whether individuals, conglomerates, complexes, spirits, physiological aggregations unknown to us, or even creatures suggesting ourselves, these will all have many times our abilities. Perhaps some will have supernatural capacities (for we cannot understand them) a billion times our own. Perhaps one of the beings may have generated power to move the universe itself; for, as the second law of thermodynamics maintains that the universe and all matter within it is running down, but an exception is made in the case of life which is negatively entropic, so there is an excellent chance that somewhere in the universe in an intelligent being, of which we can conceive but which we cannot become, whose powers are such that it is in control of the universe moving in the direction of intelligence and progress as we conceive of it: this being certainly must be called god. It would then be for all practical purposes omniscient and omnipotent. That it would be all-caring, omni-benevolent, may also be presumed, for to take care of itself it would have to take care of the universe in some part, as a case of "enlightened selfishness," in our limited human terminology.
Thus the traditional concept of god is exercised with a new proof involving the probability of supreme negative entropy. God is created by the universe, working in opposition to the principle of entropy with the equally universal principle of creation. The creative principle, arising like the phoenix from its ashes of entropy, must naturally turn to controlling the universe.
If this god is not already a fact, still, in the aeons of time to come, it must become a certainty. As the local gods of the solar system were born and died in succession, there may have been many temporary or quasi-omnipotent gods in times and spaces beyond all solar system experience. The universe offers billions of chances for a supreme god to arise in the future. Sooner or later, the universe will create its supreme master, just as the earth, this indescribably minute place, has created its locally supreme master, the human. Whereupon truly the universe would be intelligently ordered, as contrasted with the present chaos, and the far-flung parts, including our own, would be irresistibly induced to cooperate.
Let us proceed to discuss this theory of divine actual or potential existence at greater length.
To establish a new religion on solid grounds requires that the history of religion as the history of the true god be rejected. If one relies upon the scientific history of religion, one would be led to the conclusion that gods do not exist. Luckily for those who yearn for gods, one can go beyond the history of religion, to psychology and philosophy. There they will learn that the human mind is basically limited. Its perceptions and condition are structurally bounded. To exceed this structure they must rely only upon corollaries of the cosmic proof: 1) extension of some hitherto neglected remote recesses of the structure of mind and body and 2) a type of reasoning that proceeds on an "if.... then" basis which says: This is desirable; the question is open; the desirable is therefore not foreclosed. If god exists or gods, and is as we think god ought to be, then we are happier and can seek progress. Since the "if" cannot be foreclosed by any known means, the "then" is always possible.
What is greater than the self can only be known anthropomorphically, that is, by extensions of the self as it is known to one. Hence, if the universe has dimensions that are quite divorced from human traits (or their extensions), we can never know them. But the premise that more exists, which we cannot possibly know, is itself a proof of the existence of gods, even though we cannot know them in any other way than in this paltry manner. Moreover, it is possible that dimensions of the universe hitherto unknowable to us will make themselves known, whether because they change so as to be comprehensible (" God makes himself known,") or we change ourselves structurally by genetic accident or manipulation.
If the universe has only those qualities which we now possess or may in the future possess, or if the universe changes its qualities, then we can come to a knowledge of the gods that we, in our limited way, know must be there.
Are these possibilities of knowledge additive? can we say that our full knowing potential plus the potential of the unknown gives us virtual certainty that gods exist? Like the lost sailor, we know that land lies in every direction. Also we know that land may be far away if we go in some directions. Can we determine in what direction the divine land lies? A wee mouse, five centimeters long, is in many ways superior to the human. In proportion to size, he can run 20 times as fast, jump fifty times as high, scale walls, swim naturally well, has senses superior to those of men, and trains readily for reactive tasks. His brain and his organs are marvels of miniaturization, relative to ourselves. The outstanding difference is that homo is schizotypical, that is, self-aware and all that flows from this fact.
We know nothing about any species that has the equivalent of schizotypicality and what this affords us. We can conjecture how many species in all the universe might be schizotypical or have other systems capable of performing operations that we designate as being along the parameter of the human-as-divine up to the exceedingly divine, that is, the full god.
Moses and his followers claimed that Yahweh could see and punish malefactors and delinquents. The Christian religion says that God can know the minds of all persons. Paranoids will sometimes say that they can tell what all minds in a crowd are thinking and single out individual minds, too. A body containing 10 20 cells can pass a signal to most or perhaps all cells in a brief time so that they are all reacting consonantly. The number of Jews is 10 7 +, of Christians 10 9 , of humans 4 x 10 9 . The coordination of "nature" exceeds that of gods, so to say, in some respects, and goes far beyond the most paranoid human mind. (Indeed, many humans are content to control one other person, such as a spouse or child.) Coordination means two things: communication and control.
Thus far, the shocking modern revelation of the numberless stars and vast extent of the universe has been converted into constructive thought regarding the possibility of there being other intelligent beings in the universe, with whom we might possibly communicate. Inevitably the thought has been elaborated into contentions that at some time in the past, astronauts have settled upon our planet, assimilating biologically with lesser breeds, or constituting the human race itself. The thought has also moved, theoretically, to the contention that more intelligent or hostile or flagrantly incompatible beings might be confronted, to our embarrassment, should we be successful in communicating with exoterrestrials.
These discussions employ formulas not essentially different from what we employ here. We take up estimates of 10 11 galaxies of 10 11 stars each, without counting dark stars or clouds, reaching thus 10 22 stars. We count 10 22 dark stars and dark clouds as having theogonic possibilities (" darkness" is our problem). Gods take time to develop, but we may assume that the average body has had enough of such time, billions of years. Whether, for instance, the Earth has subsisted for 4 x 10 9 or 10 6 years, it has had at least a 1/ 10 44 possibility of generating a god. Of the total source bodies, some 10 11 (plus dark stars and clouds) would exist in our galaxy alone. We are not counting the separate planets or comets, that would multiply these several stellar figures by 2, 5, 500, 1000 or some other multiple not known, but depending on the average number of planets per star.
Suppose that science on Earth expands its capabilities ten times, a figure not in excess of many predictions from various fields. Suppose the human achieves an IQ of 160, lives to be 200, and can travel to the neighboring star cluster of Arcturus. Suppose the human is even morally set upon acting as god. The human will probably not be a god, but he will show that gods are possible somewhere. That is, it does not take too much more than man can be in order to define a god or demigod.
If there also are and have been 5 x 10 11 centers for realizing divine beings in the galaxy and this over a period of time -- in fact, why not infinity? -- then the chance that one or more gods have developed is certain. Probabilistically, at least one is certain; let us say five are highly probable; 5000 are likely; 5 million are at least 50% probable; and some 50 million gods are possible, this in our galaxy alone. In the universe as a whole, these figures would be multiplied by 10 22 . At 5000 per galaxy, the gods would number 5 x 10 25 , too many by far to crowd into Valhalla. If gods should die (speaking of the götterdammerung), that is, lose some or all of their capabilities, one would halve the number of gods in the confines of the stipulated universe.
Among all of the probable godships, should not many have evolved to a multi-galactic god , and at least one to supreme god of the universe? An interesting feature of the results here is that there appear to have been more gods than the conventional formulas claim there to be planets with intelligent life forms. This paradox occurs because one does not constrain estimates by looking for something close to man, to technical civilization, or intelligent life as we know it. Further the requirements of an environment similar to man's can be waived; the gods need not be limited by humanly severe temperatures, or the presence of a long string of prior primitive life forms called for by nonquantavolutionary evolution.
Thus, as soon as less conservative considerations than are customary are set for intelligent forms in the universe, the number quickly exceeds the number of gods estimated here. Ordinary calculations of life spans are irrelevant, too; the occurrence of gods presumptively reduces time constraints; the possibility of divine viability stretching over much, most or all of the age of the universe adds to the probability that gods are active now.
In sum, of the terms of the formula used in many discussions of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) only the gross number of celestial bodies is usable in estimating the likelihood of the existence of gods. To find the number of extant technical civilizations in the galaxy, by the "Green Bank formula" of F. D. Drake, N, one multiplies R* (the average rate of star formation over the lifetime of the galaxy), by fp (the fraction of stars with planetary systems), by no ( the mean number of planets per star that are ecologically suitable for the origin of life as we know it), by fe (the fraction of such planets on which life in fact has arisen), by fi (the fraction of such planets on which intelligent life has evolved), by fc (the fraction of such planets on which a technical civilization such as our own has developed) and by L (the average life of a technical civilization). That is, N = R* (fp)( no)( fe)( fi)( fc)( L). [Product of these factors.]
Results, depending upon the estimates fed into the formula, have ranged from one to millions of technical civilizations in the galaxy. Our own technical civilization capable of interstellar radio communication is only a single generation old. The 1000- foot-diameter telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, existing transmitters and receivers, and a presumption of the same type of equipment on another planet would provide a communication medium of 1000 light-year diameter, providing 10 6 stars. Space travel and laser transmission are technically near availability to extend somewhat the range. There is therefore some chance of a communication exchange now.
But how have we defined a god that gods should be so numerous? By god is meant a coordinated divine activity such that 1) it can endure or reproduce or replicate itself indefinitely under highly varying ambient conditions, that 2) it can act so as to expand communication pathways and thus its influence at an exponentially increasing rate, that 3) its proven scope and domain of intervention is extensive within a galaxy or is multigalactic, and contains no inherent limits, that 4) it provably (in human terms) acts so as to increase the aptitude and appropriate behaviors of the most promising existences (including humans) with the end in mind of reducing entropy and establishing theotropy as the dominating principle of the universe.
How do these qualities, if applied to the human condition, reduce fear, war, and famine, while increasing love and knowledge? I have mentioned but a few of such moral connections in these pages. Their deduction from the principles of godship do not appear to present problems in excess of those traditionally and successfully solved by theologians such as Saint Thomas Aquinas when deducing human moral behavior from the qualities of gods.
Theotropy can be considered from the standpoint of gods and of humans. Regarding gods, the achievement of influence is by means and in terms that we understand or cannot understand. So far as we can understand, gods must extend themselves either immediately or by a succession of moves.
Insofar as our world is governed by no intelligent divine influence -- at least no sufficiently powerful and satisfactory influence – then no "great" god has even in our short -- time view extended itself over us, whereupon we can probably more correctly imagine that any god occupying itself with humans is proceeding by a succession of moves, that is, by growth. Both may be occurring, a onetime immediate assumption of our world and a succession of moves to change us.
A reader who has pursued our works on quantavolution knows how we believe man to have acquired his nature and how the world as we know it has come about. Thereupon he may ask: "Why does man need a god, considering all the troubles gods have appeared to cause?" Worse, "What legitimate reason has man for seeking god?" Worse of all, "What can any god do for man that is good for man?"
First of all, none of these questions can destroy the gods if they do indeed exist. No more than one can dispose of tax collectors who are troublesome, unwanted, and useless. From a homocentric point of view, however, we can be more cooperative in responding.
We need all the help we can get, plainly and simply. We are inadequate to our dearest wishes for the universe: that it be controlled and beneficent to ourselves and the posterity with which we identify.
We need help of a quality that is beyond the ability of everything whose qualities we know directly. Our faithful dog, Shep, is not up to the task. Nor are even our most trusted friends and allies. If there is a god, we need him.
The third question gives us pause. If the price exacted by seeking, finding and cooperating with god is our most priceless gifts, we may prefer our troubles, death, entropy, and oblivion. This leads abruptly to the question which we seem to confront at every turn of the way. What does, what ought, the human wish to be? If he wishes to be like the gods, and the gods are likely to be so indulgent, then all is well and good, and we should search eternally, if necessary, for the gods.
One's purpose on Earth will then be answered from the divine point of view: the human is created for the divine task of helping to save the universe. He, and all developing and positive matter, are assigned this overall function. The universe has bred the human as a way to its own survival, as a challenge to its death, as an antibody against the death and dissolution foretold by the second law of thermodynamics.
Elsewhere we have written of man's basic needs, to fearlessly subsist, experience and live justly. If the gods are theotropic, we have nothing to fear from them except the loss of that element in us which is self-destructive and entropic.
What might this element be? Let us call it the diabolic, because it will turn out to be that often highly attractive mixture of uncertainty, fear, hatred, spite, lies, greed and egotism that goes into some of the most wonderful human creations. Will not the gods take from man the taste of evil for which he slavers? Or will the gods, like certain historical gods, allow man the gift of diabolism with all that it does for his music, dance, art, inventions, and politics?
This is one question; another question, equally important, is related: will the gods take away self-government, self-rule, decentralization of decisions, whether large or small? There is indeed an argument, posed as, "Let every man go to hell in the own way." The felt uniqueness, the exultation, the happiness of determining one's way are not to be given over, even to the gods, one senses -- and we can hear the most stupid as well as the most brilliant of humans saying so.
Perhaps the gods will be indifferent to such trivialities, perhaps they work sloppily, letting as much as we know of life pursue itself along their general guidelines. Or perhaps it will happen that in their intense pursuit of godliness, humans will get their fill of risks, conflicts, imagination, and autonomy. In any event, this crisis is far down the line of theotropy, whereas man's decline and destruction are always close at hand. We prefer to think therefore that, in the pursuit of the divine, humanity will have all that it will want of symbolism, diversity, and excitement.
From the human standpoint, gods are to be awaited and solicited. If they are awaited, the presumption is that the gods are interested in expansion for its own sake. Any part to the universe will do. This is probably an unsafe assumption because it implies a certain kind of god. But god is more than a mere "land-grabber," we reason. He is interested in his own development; he is maximizing his opportunities of theotropy and not interested in entropic refuse. Therefore, gods are to be invited. For some lucky mystics, gods may indeed already have been entertained. I cannot understand the means, hence cannot confirm the encounters.
But what are the occasions for conflict among potential and actual gods in the galaxy and universe prior to the universal achievement of a single supreme god? Will there not occur what even mankind has experienced on its low level of achievement, a set of squabbling barons, a battle of the gods? Then the gods themselves will do what it is now widely believed that man will do - destroy themselves and contribute to the entropy of the universe?
As they move out to order and exalt the universe what will determine their jurisdictions and, as implied in their aims, will merge them into one? Let us look once again at the traits of the divine bodies. They excel in expansiveness, in sensitivity to domains of potential theotropic existence, and in promoting theotropism (countering entropy). It is this last that determines outcomes. The theotropism or divinity that competes most effectively to eliminate entropy will merge with other divinities to the degree that they operate in the same way. It is to their interest to behave in this way. In the end it will be the constructive principle of the universe that will influence and absorb all potential theotropy in the universe. Creation will triumph over destruction. This is the aim of the universe, the greatest of natural laws, and is the ultimate good.
A second objection occurs. If, as has been asserted in this work, man is not a rational animal in any usual sense of the term "reason," and if sublimation is employed to move him from his great fear of himself and the world into large intellectual, imaginative and real worlds far beyond himself, then why is this proof of the existence of divinity not another sublimatory consideration? Is this all "mere" sublimation?
The answer is that sublimation is not unreal, even though it may refuse to treat directly with its origins in human nature. Its rationalizations are testable by rules of reality, logic, consensus, pragmatism, and evidence; this, too, we have said earlier and will discuss later as well. Granted this, the theotropic proof must contend with all other assertions about divinity on the basis of which ones best fit the state of the world as we barely know it and of whatever provides the best consequences for the human condition. Homo sapiens schizotypus is released from his fearful bind and contradictions by this view of the supernatural and is directed to employ his energies constructively -- theotropically rather than entropically.
If the principle of entropy exists -- and we think that this is so out of our material perceptions -- then its opposite principle may exist because, first, the world is not fully entropic, next, there is an anti-entropism observed, and, third, entropism must originate from something that decays. In this last case, the something that decays must have been non-entropic, possibly anti-entropic, that is, theotropic.
The entropy and theotropy can co-exist: they do so under our eyes. It may appear that the theotropic is declining, but this may be false. Our narrow perspective may be giving false measures, and we are better conditioned to detect entropy than theotropy. Especially with our present confidence in materialism, that is, our indifference to theotropy and our desire to emulate the ideal instinctive animal, we may be today underestimating theotropy.
But is not the theotropic also material? It can properly be conceived as such, but only if we realize that most of what we call material is the refuse of theotropic materialism. As to what composes theotropic processes, we submit that theotropy is composed of what is tangibly material, of some extremes of the knowably material (particles, waves, light, etc.) of material potentially known to us but not yet known, and of material unknowable to us. I only call it material for fear of erecting barriers between the "material" and "immaterial."
Under the regime of theotropy, it appears that mankind is to be more of an observer, thinker and admirer of the abstract than the active being who is acted upon. How can he behave religiously otherwise, and how can his morals connect with this religion?
First, one who possesses this religion will be occupied with the future, as historical man has first sought a heavenly salvation and lately has sought salvation in the future also but in a more scientific and technological way.
Second he will be more objectively self-searching and theological than historically he has been. He is looking for a different kind of divinity; this affects the quality of the search.
Thirdly, he has to consider the question: Do I wish to attract gods? Do I wish to be adopted by gods, lightning-struck so to speak; do I wish to become chosen by the gods? Do I wish to be embraced by a larger theotropy than I have means of becoming in myself??
Surprisingly the answer to all of these questions will be a strong affirmative. (I say surprisingly for I feel personally that we have no right to expect such definite answers to questions that we have formulated with such difficulty and hesitation.) Behind the banners of entropism stands a sad, scientoid diabolism. We do want to live in theotropy, in the future, in the realms of the gods.
Then the question becomes : How do we attract the gods? Do we do so with signals, search parties on vehicles, sending care packages of our little technical tricks into outer space?
Or do we go seeking the gods with a message that we think will have meaning for them? What could such a message be ?
Our best message, our invitation to the gods, is our ability to take care of our own world and its surroundings. It stands to reason that the gods, if they have already reached us actually or potentially, or if they were to come upon us in their expanding operations in the universe, would either embrace us or dismiss us by indifference or destruction.
What would achieve their embrace? Obviously, they would embrace theotropy, for that is their essence. What are the signs of theotropy, which in our older language we might call blessedness? They would have to be signs of which we are capable. These signs are not negligible; they are signs of godliness.
Theotropy is the trend of existence to achieve divine influence. Inasmuch as humans may be capable of it, it calls for an expansion of the influence of life over death and of mind over matter. Thus, it appears that the very principles that we have ascribed to the theotropy of the gods are principles that reverberate down the corridors of human time and thought.
If these principles go unattended or are unsuccessfully pursued by mankind, the gods will not punish us; the gods have more important matters on their more universal "minds." They will ignore us, and let us continue in the predictable shortness of our forever to suffer both from our own behavior and being god-forsaken, which must mean the loss of our hopes, of our development, and of our future. There are a great many people who believe that god may exist but always has reason to punish people, so much so that it is useless to attempt even a decent peaceful and material subsistence for mankind. Famine, plague, flood or war are seen to be inevitable divine visitations. Such apathy and fatalism go along with the succession of gods who could hardly allow mankind to recover from one catastrophe before bringing down another upon it.
At the other extreme of materialism stands the vanguard of the technical achievers. So flushed are they with the successes of empirical science, that they predict a never-ending invigoration of life and conquest of vast reaches of outer space. Among these are the ones who would fill capsules with gimcracks to fire into far space.
The fatal flaw in their vision and plans is a misperception of human limits. The human race stands at a crisis of will and belief, of world disintegration and warfare, even as vehicles hurtle into outer space. Humans have not solved their basic issues of life over death, and mind over matter. They may be incapable of doing so without the help of a great achievement, is to invite the gods for help on matters of life and mind. This the technocrats and military operators of the political economy and outer space are of no mind to do, whether they by acting in the name of mosaism or atheism. In their arrogance, they see no need to invite the gods to their feast. Or they try to beckon to them by exercises paralleling the long history of sacrificed beings and the destruction of nations.
We conclude that gods -- or god, if you will -- exist. They do not exist in fear; fear is human alone. They exist in our mind as the mind tests the limits of reality and invents, while integrating these limits, a special kind of reality in the supernatural -- the area of the divine. Gods exist outside the mind with as much probability as the universe that we contemplate is real. In these two senses, god is reality.
Granted reality, the divine must be our most important reality. This may seem to be skating on the thin ice of scholasticism. "Tell it to a starving man." But it is a statistical reality and in the final analysis it is statistics that compose reality of all kinds. The divine is the most important because it is the only distinction that is uniquely human; it comes straight out of the awful realization of one's divided soul, two or more material contradictions, ineradicable and appositionally creative.
Climactically a reconciliation takes place in philosophy and science. To know oneself is to know more than oneself; it is to know the divine. Here is the reason for the failure of historical religions, which damaged the soul is order to force it to hold delusions about "hard reality" and external gods at the same time.