To understand the first part of Genesis, I'm going to turn, strangely enough,
to something that's actually part of the New Testament.
And this is a central element of Christianity.
It's a very strange idea,
and it's going to take a very long time to unpack.
But the idea, this is what John said about Christ.
He said: "in the beginning was the Word."
And so that relates back to Genesis I:
"In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Three sentences like that take a lot
of unpacking because none of that seems to make any sense whatsoever, really.
"In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was both with God, and the Word was God."
So the first question might be, what in the world does that mean?
In the beginning was the Word?
That's the Logos actually, and the Logos is embodied in the figure of Christ.
So there's this idea in John that whatever Christ is, the Son of God is not only
instantiated in history, say, at a particular time and place as
a carpenter in some backwoods part of the world, but also something eternal
that exists up outside of time and space that was there right at the beginning.
And as far as I can tell,
what that Logos represents is something like modern people...
It's something like what modern people
refer to when they talk about consciousness.
It's something like that. It's more than that.
It's like consciousness and its capacity
to be aware and its capacity to communicate.
It's something like that.
And there's an idea underneath that,
which is that, being, especially from a phenomenological perspective...
So, the being that is experienced cannot exist without consciousness.
It's like consciousness shines a light on things to bring it into being.
Because without consciousness...
What is there?
No one experiences anything.
It's like, is there anything when no one experiences anything?
That's the question.
And the answer that this book is presenting is that no,
you have to think about consciousness as a constituent element of reality.
It's something that's necessary for reality itself to exist.
Now, of course, it depends on what you mean by reality,
but the reality that's being referred to here, I told you already,
is this strange amalgam of the subjective experience and the world.
But the question is deeper than that too, because it is by no means obvious what
there is if there's no one to experience it.
The whole notion of time itself seems
to collapse, at least in terms of something like felt duration.
And then the notion of size disappears, essentially because there's nothing
to scale it and the causality seems to vanish.
And so...
We don't understand consciousness.
Not in the least.
We don't understand what it is that is in us that gives illumination to being.
And what happens in the Old Testament, at least in part,
is that that consciousness is associated with the divine.
Now, you think well, is that a reasonable proposition?
And that's a very complicated question, but at least we might note that there's
something to the claim because there is a miracle of experience
and existence that's dependent on consciousness.
I mean, people try to explain it away
constantly, but it doesn't seem to work very well.
And here's something else to think about.
I think that's really worth thinking about.
People do not like it when you treat them like they're not conscious, right?
They react very badly to that.
And then you don't like it if someone
assumes that you're not conscious and you don't like it if someone assumes that you
don't have free will, that you're just absolutely determined
in your actions and there's nothing that's going to repair you and that you don't
need to have any responsibility for your actions.
It's like, our culture,
the laws of our culture are predicated on the idea, something like people are
conscious, people have experience, people make decisions and can be held
responsible for them, that there's a free will element to it,
and you can debate all that philosophically and fine.
But the point is that that is how we act,
and that is the idea that our legal system is predicated on.
And there's something deep about it because, you know...
You're subject to the law.
But the law is also limited by you, which is to say that in a wellfunctioning,
properly grounded democratic system, you have intrinsic value.
That's the source of your rights.
Even if you're a murderer.
We have to say the law can only go so far
because there's something about you that's divine.
Well, what does that mean?
Well, partly it means that there's something about you that's conscious
and capable of communicating like you're a whole world unto yourself,
and you have that to contribute to everyone else, and that's valuable.
You can learn new things.
You can transform the structure of society.
You can invent a new way of dealing with the world.
You're capable of all that.
It's an intrinsic part of you and that's associated with this.
That's the idea there. Is that there's
something about the logos that is necessary for the absolute chaos
of the reality beyond experience to manifest itself as reality.
That's an amazing idea,
because it gives consciousness a constitutive role in the Cosmos.
And you can debate that,
but you can't just bloody well brush it off, because first of all,
we are the most complicated things there are that we know of by a massive amount.
We're so complicated that it's unbelievable.
And so there's a lot of Cosmos out there, but there's a lot of Cosmos in here, too.
And which one is greater is by no means obvious unless you use something trivial
like relative size, which really isn't a very sophisticated approach.
And whatever it is that is you has this capacity to experience
reality and to transform it, which is a very strange thing.
You can conceptualize a future, in your imagination,
and then you can work and make that manifest.
You participate in the process of creation.
That's one way of thinking about it.
And so that's why I think in Genesis I,
it relates the idea that human beings are
made in the image of the divine, men and women, which is interesting, too,
because the feminists are always criticizing Christianity, for example,
as being... What? Inexorably patriarchal. They criticize everything like that.
So it's hardly a stroke of bloody brilliance, but...
I think it's an absolute miracle
that right at the beginning of the document,
it says straightforwardly like, with no hesitation whatsoever,
that the divine spark which we're associating with the word that brings
forth being is manifest in men and women equally.
That's a very cool thing.
And you got to think, well, like I said, you actually take that seriously.
Well, what you've got to ask is what
happens if you don't take it seriously, right?
That's... Read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
That's the best investigation of that tactic that's ever been produced.
Because what happens
in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is that the main character,
whose name is Raskolnikov, decides that there's no intrinsic value
to other people and that as a consequence, he can do whatever he wants.
It's only cowardice that stops him from acting, right? Because...
Why would it be anything else... If the value of other people
is just an arbitrary superstition, then why can't I do exactly what I want
when I want, which is the psychopath's viewpoint.
Well, Raskolnikov does.
He kills someone who's a very horrible
person, and he has very good reasons for killing her, and he's half starved
and little bit insane and possessed by this ideology.
It's brilliant, brilliant layout.
And he finds out something after he kills her, which is that the postkilling
Raskolnikov and the prekilling Raskolnikov are not the same person,
even a little bit, because he's broken a rule like he's
broken a serious rule and there's no going back.
And Crime and Punishment is the best investigation I know of what happens if
you take the notion that there's nothing divine about the individual, seriously.
Most of the people I know who are deeply
atheistic, and I understand why they're deeply atheistic,
they haven't contended with people like Dostoevsky.
Not as far as I can tell,
because I don't see logical flaws in Crime and Punishment.
I think he got the psychology exactly right.
Dostoevsky is amazing for this,
because in one of his books, The Devils, for example, he describes a political
scenario that's not much different than the one we find ourselves in now.
And there are these people who are possessed by rationalistic,
utopian atheistic ideas, and they're very powerful...
They give rise to the Communist revolution.
Right? I mean, they're powerful ideas.
And his character, Stavrogan,
also acts out the presupposition that human beings have
no intrinsic nature and no intrinsic value.
And it's another brilliant investigation, and Dostoevsky prophesies, that's what I
would say, what will happen to a society if it goes down that road and
he was dead exactly accurate.
It's uncanny to read Dostoevsky's
The Possessed or The Devils, depending on the translation and then to read
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago because one is fiction and prophecy
and the second is, hey, look, it turned out exactly the way
that Dostoevsky said it would for exactly the same reasons.
So it's quite remarkable.
So, the question is, do you contend seriously with the idea that
A) there's something cosmically constitutive about consciousness and
B) that might well be considered divine and
C) that is instantiated in every person...
And then ask yourself, if you're not a criminal,
if you don't act it out. And then ask yourself what that means?
Is that reflective of a reality?
Is it a metaphor, like, maybe it's
a metaphor a complex metaphor that we have to use to organize our societies?
Could well be.
But even as a metaphor, it's true enough so that we mess with it at our peril.
And it also took people a very long time to figure out...