Wrasslin’ With God

(this post was written by Kyle on November 14, 2005, and it concerns & & & & & & & )

For my independent study in Philosophy of Technology, I’m reading , by Albert Borgman. Of the books I’ve read so far for the class, this is easily the most engaging (apart from Heidegger, but that’s only because I seem to be ridiculously preoccupied by the man’s thoughts, despite the fact that I’ve read barely a hundred of his pages). Borgman’s writing seems motivated by a transcendent experience with various incarnations of the sublime, specifically, the environment of , Bach’s , in the Upper Rhine Valley, and what appears to be various works in the Christian Canon (read an interview with Borgman from ). It gives a flavor to his argument that, if not convincing, is at least compelling.

I’m not quite finished with the book; I’ve got about another seventy pages to go. But in the last half-hour of my reading, after scribbling voraciously in the margins of the book, I realized that I was spending less time reading Borgman and more time writing Callahan. I wasn’t engaging him with the level of attention his passion deserved. And that is why I find myself here right now.

I want to write about two semi-random thoughts I had during this last half hour. While they both were inspired by Borgman’s book, I don’t think they are any statement on it. They are flights, not bridges, from his book.

The first is that the Book of Genesis shows that the Judeo-Christian God is to blame for . He seems to have fucked us on the first day. In , we are told:

  1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
  2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
  3. And God said, Let there be light. And there was light.
  4. And God saw the light, that it was good: And God divided the light from darkness.
  5. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

In that single day, God created divisiveness and polarity. You might well wonder, “But if the light was good, why did God keep the darkness? God saw the good, and yet God still divided? Is God a fucking bastard?”

But you shouldn’t get unduly angry with God. It was not He who defined the dark as Evil. That was us. Perhaps it was God who created material dualisms (day/night, heaven/earth), but it was us who created the conceptual ones.

Which brings me to a sub-thought of this first one. Evil is not an entity in the Bible. It is a type of action. The closest I can find to Evil being conceived as an entity is in , where it used in the following ways:

  • Not a man of this evil generation shall see the good land I swore to give your forefathers (1:35);
  • You must purge the evil from among you.(13:5, 17:7, 17:12 ["from Israel"], 19:19, 21:21, and 22:21);

For both the former and the latter, we can easily replace “the evil” with “the ones who did evil acts;” the evil, in this case, is a placeholder type of description — it amounts to calling someone a cheater, by which we mean, “that person is one who cheats.” In other words, in the Bible, Evil does not do, but rather, evil is done. This is an interesting position to start from when confronting those who believe that Evil is out there and that it is an active participant in the world.

My second thought concerns the (perhaps uncommon) God as Internet metaphor. This type of metaphorical understanding of God seems to imply that God is total knowledge. While keeping in mind His ineffable nature, it seems to suggest that, as humanity identifies the elemental units of nature and culture and records them on the Internet, we get closer and closer to having a complete archive of the totality of human knowledge. This archive, while not God, is as close to a manifestation of God as we can imagine.

Two things seem to fall from this.

First, while the represented knowledge of the entirety of humanity may represent God, one individual’s interaction with that entirety is always and only a local interaction - that is, while the entire Internet may be at our disposal, one individual can never interact with every part of it at once…

(to some degree, the hope that we may be able to is what fuels ; my use of the word “never” is, I think, dependent upon my current conception of the Internet - that is, if we ever can interact with all of it at once, then I’ll contend that we’ve come face to face with an entirely new entity that deserves its own name, not just a new version number [perhaps that name will be Google])

…instead, one interacts with a single web page. There seems to be an isomorphic connection to the God as All of Us metaphor, in which, while we can never know God in all of His Sublime Totality, we can know (or at least appreciate) a small part of Him in our interactions with other individuals. The end result of all this is that, if we conceive of God as the Internet, its presence on Earth still doesn’t get us any closer to knowing Him in all of His splendor.

Which connects us, in some ways, to the second thought that falls from the God as Internet metaphor. This second thought seems to depend on my understanding of Words as Headstones for Meaning’s Departed Spirit, Words as Monuments to Past Events, Words as Tracks of a Now-Missing Animal, etc. — in other words, it depends on Derrida.

Guided by these metaphorical understandings of words — and extending them to communicative representations of any type –, the God as Internet metaphor leads us to the conclusion that, as an archive of knowledge, our only interaction with God as Internet is with the departed presence of God. As we read the words, scan the photographs, and sit passively in front of the pre-loaded Flash animation, we connect with something from the past (if even the ridiculously recent past), something that is not in the process of creation, but something that was already created (again, Web 2.0 is, in some important sense, fueled by the desire to change this).

All of which means what? Does it mean that the God as Internet metaphor is a fruitless one, or rather, that the fruit of the metaphor are sterile descendants of its promise? That the reality of thinking this way is the reality of the people of Babylon, the story of the Internet as the story of the ? Should this be considered a warning? A prophetic statement of the absence of an ultimate God? Or should it be considered nothing but a metaphorical exploration of the nature of reality?

I don’t have an answer for you. Like I said, these are just two semi-random thoughts I had while reading Albert Borgman’s .