In Focus... In God’s Image and Presence: Some Notes Based on an Enactive View of Human Knowing

I was recently at the Edmonton Folk Music festival and listened to Kathy Mattea sing a song which she calls “What if God were one of us?” I think any practicing Christian such as myself or a person of any deliberate spiritual persuasion would find this song interesting. In one small part of it she raises the question of the consequences of observing God in our human world. One consequence of noticing the presence of God in one’s world would be that one would necessarily have to face up to the question of believing and all that would entail. Mattea’s song reminded me of two questions of faith: What does it mean to be made or to live in the Image of God? What does it mean to be in God’s presence, and in what ways might we see or recognize that presence and live in it? The purpose of this informal essay (these notes) is to look at these two issues (which for me are issues of faith) from the point of view of concepts and consequences of the work I have done for many years in studying human knowing, particularly mathematics knowing. The many people with whom I have worked over the last 10 or 15 years and some of the authors we have studied collect these concepts under the rubric of an “enactive perspective.” At its roots, this perspective is scientific and biological. It is certainly not a theological perspective. But to paraphrase an aphorism attributed to Einstein: science without religious or spiritual thought is lame; religious or spiritual thought without scientific thought is blind. Perhaps what I have to say will add perspective to what you already know and believe. I am not writing this as a piece that is in any way rigorous. I will not be giving the usual citations or references. I will also not try to offer scientific backing for the ideas or the implications I am making here. I certainly will not be writing or acting in a theologically sophisticated way. This essay is based on many years of work studying and inter-acting in my own systematic way with many persons doing mathematics. And what I say is simply a reflection upon the fact that my work is not disconnected from who I am or from who I am as a religious or spiritual person. Even were I to provide you with scientifically or theologically rigorous statements they would be statements I would choose to make from a view which Maturana calls objectivity-in-parentheses. In making them I am not trying to compel you to accept them because they must be necessarily and universally true in the sense that they tell you about the way the world or God really is. Yet they are not subjective. However, they are necessarily incomplete in at least two senses: They are multiversally incomplete in that there are other ways of thinking about or explaining the phenomena which are not accounted for and are likely not even anticipated by these views; that is, they are part of a multiversal rather than a universal accounting of things. Secondly, they are occasionally incomplete. Even for me as I think or say or write them or for others as they read them, they hold the possibility of recursively occasioning other thoughts which will necessarily “re-write” these. With these caveats, I turn now to the substance of what I want to say—first to concepts that I am drawing from my enactive work on knowing and then to attempts to see what implications that thinking has for the questions I raise above.