Ok, I watched from 1:12:00 to 1:27:00 and here are my comments…
He says he doesn’t believe in the engineering God, which sounds a lot like my own complaint about how so many have replaced the shepherd concept of God in the Bible with the Deist conception of God as a great watchmaker. But in my case this is about the incompatibility between the nature of living organisms as self-organizing processes and the idea of design. I also don’t think much of the idea of God creating the universe like an artist paints or sculpts, for it is clear that the things of the universe have also come into being (and are as they are) through natural processes. Though I have no problem with the idea of God as a designer of the laws nature themselves.
The suggestion that God is a force is incompatible with Christianity and I have explained why I have rejected this. A God which best serves the faith that life is worth living is one who can interact with us fully as a person with all of our capabilities and more, not something less which I must think the word “force” as referring to.
McGilchrist concludes God is relational in nature…
No. and… yes.
God is in some sense the least relational of all things. It is we and everything in the universe which is relational, because our very existence derives and subsists in relationships. And this is certainly not true of God in Himself …but it is true of God as we can know Him. God will never be some objective thing we can examine in a microscope. The contact between us finite beings and the infinite being of God will always be highly relational.
In general I get the idea that McGilchrist gets his notion of God from what science has learned of nature. So all this stuff about the universe being a web of relationship rather than a collection of things is spot on accurate. But it is precisely the reduction of reality to the natural world alone that inspires me and many others to believe in God and NOT just a complaint against the reductionism of antiquated science.
I am sorry but I think his notion that by speaking about God you betray “it” is complete nonsense. Would it be true to say that if I speak of my wife then I betray her? Do you imagine that these two case are really that different – that I can capture and give the sum total of my wife any more than I can do so of God? Say rather that when people confuse the reality of God with a theology of God then they have done such a disservice to God. And since we know this would be a ridiculous thing to do with people, then doing such a thing with God has made Him less of a person than the people we know.
Of course I quite agree with McGilchrist’s notion that we are not just passive creations… I am way past that since I believe all living things are literally participants in their own creation, for the very nature of life is that of a self-organizing process. I believe this is the ultimate distinction between living organism and machine – that which (in part) brought itself into being with its own choices rather than being a product of design.
In summary I pretty much agree with Dale in essence even though I say it somewhat differently and I do make an effort to see value in what McGilchrist has said.
I think it depends on what you do believe.
It reminds me Shroedinger’s cat: only “opening the box” will let you know if God really exists or people have just created him to explain inexplicable. We do not have an option of “opening the box”, which means that our thoughts on it don’t even matter. So you can believe whatever you want, because it has no sense eventually.
Your question made me remember an old joke:“How to make an atheist believe in God: let the plane fly down for 5 seconds”.
Thank you for engaging the ideas and sharing how they fit and don’t with your own. Since what we can know of Him is limited by our relational nature, when you say “God in Himself” I think you might have in mind God as Christianity invites us to imagine Him. What else can we do? My answer would be He is the mystery you leave room for and the reason you don’t leap to conclusions either about who God is or about who each of us is. Surprise is always possible.
Of course the list of characteristics which can be consensually verified in the case of your wife or any other human is huge compared to what we know of God in Himself, if indeed He has any ‘nature’ apart from what we experience relationally. Another possibility might be to think of God as the field of relationality which gives rise to all the things which do or can come to our notice. Our ‘thingness’ as unfeathered bipeds already exceeds God’s thingness since He is not a thing. That is what makes the attempt to put put Him into words so vexed. That is why any attempt to do so is a betrayal as it must demote His true nature. But I agree with Iain that ignoring Him altogether can give the false impression that it is nothing that matters, another kind of betrayal.
Thanks for the shout-out. You asked about compatibility with Christianity. Good question. Let me sum up the video before I react.
It started with McGilchrist describing his concept of the divine. He disagrees with the idea of God as a mechanistic “engineer” and describes the divine as a “force.” But he sees this force as relational in nature, not just an inert thing. He sees the whole of the cosmos as relational. The relationships come first, not our noticing of the patterns. He brings up the fact that it’s almost impossible to speak about God, yet we must. We are not only part of this relational cosmos, but part of creating what comes. Our task is to respond to “what is” and “encourage it more into being.”
You don’t have to agree with his left-brain, right-brain analysis to agree that God isn’t a mechanistic engineer. On the compatibility of his thinking with Christianity, offhand I’d say 100%. Classical theism sees YHWH God as ineffable. Words and concepts come close but not quite. Neither logic nor mysticism can bridge that gap. We can’t make the leap to God, but God can can reach down to us. Christianity is incarnational. Karl Barth’s theology was entirely based around the Christ-event. He interpreted the image of God as placing us in a threefold relationship: Between God and humanity, between every human and other humans, and between humanity and the creation as a whole. I prefer the “vocational” rather than the relational interpretation of the image of God, but they’re different paths to the same destination.
Maybe McGilchrist is a “Christian in progress”? Like I consider you. Haha.
Do you see panentheism as compatible? That denotes an impersonal amorphic and nebulous ‘it’ to me, one with no particular personhood or discrete relationships with separate individuals.
This is what I was thinking too about the case for thinking his takn is compatible.
I imagine Iain was raised as one and has integrated that into what he has been finding out. Me, I’m unallied regarding creeds but respect and am an ally of the core values.
I’m not so sure about words coming close. ‘Infinite’ is a word that scratches at but doesn’t come close to capturing the reality of God’s multiple omni- attributes, so ‘ineffable’ very much still applies. And as for the cool mystery of the reality of God’s sovereignty over timing and placing…
It was a pretty generic ‘relational’ and ‘relata’ – they certainly sounded like they were not necessarily personal or necessarily had any attributes of personhood. And regardless, if he is indeed panentheistic – the sum total of everything material ‘gives rise to’ god, that is not compatible with Christianity.