Of Theogenetics: Theological Anarchy, the Apocalypse, and Birth of God Theology

In the 18th century, the philosopher Hegel worried in one of his religious works, “the death of God haunts this age.” Long before Nietzsche began to write, Hegel had already seen into the future; today, the sentiment lingers on and most developedly in the Death of God literature made famous by theologians -- or rather theothanatologians -- in the mid twentieth century. Despite all of the attention the Death of God theme got during its heyday, many subthemes of the genre remain under-probed and unchallenged. Although they were not associated with the Death of God movement, the European Existentialists frequently espoused views quite on par with the theothanatologians, or the Death of God theologians. Existentialists such as Heidegger, Camus, and Sartre all touted the atheist line, and, in so doing, revealed their implicit allegiances to the Death of God research program. Humans were, they claimed, thrown into the world, and their existence was absurd, due apparently to the absence of any God. 

We might be inclined to label the Existentialist view of God as a  regimen of theological anarchy, or the absence of any theological structure to complement the existence of the lived human project. Still, we might play with this terminology and ask: might there be an antimony to theological anarchy, and, if so, what might it be? The antinomy to theological anarchy would be theological structuralism, which is not associated with the structuralists of the twentieth century. What would have to be true for there to be such a thing as theological structure? Firstly, there would have to be a Supreme Being that somehow or another were pertinent to the collective human project of living and dying. What would be the implications of theological structuralism? Before we explore the implications of that question, it would be best to probe further into whether or not it is reasonable to believe in a supreme being in the first place. To start, I will approach the ontological arguments asserted by both Anselm and Leibniz, but will focus most directly on Descartes’s exposition of a perfect being to ascertain whether or not such a Being is possible. Following that analysis, I will proceed onto a new argument for the existence of God by exploring the possibility of a theogenetic Supreme Being. 

Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God is fairly simple: if a being whose essence is greater than can be conceived, then such a being exists due to its essence in itself. Leibniz tweaks the argument somewhat, insisting that the being in question must have no internal contradictions -- a claim that works in the case of mathematics but miserably fails to matter for so grandeur a topic as divinity. Still, most alarming about traditional ontological arguments is that they presume essence precedes existence. Both Heidegger and Sartre argue that existence precedes essence, which allows for freedom and so on. Might their analysis be pertinent to ours? If it can be shown that existence precedes essence, then the ontological argument falls to pieces; indeed, it is the judgment of this analysis that the ontological argument is insufficient, as Kant declared so long ago in his Critique of Pure Reason. Not even Alvin Plantinga's nuanced ontological argument escapes the Kantian and Existentialist criticisms. Yet, distinct from Anselm, Leibniz, and Plantinga's variations, Descartes’s view sticks out because of its fixation on the specific predicates that a perfect being might have. While, being an ontological proof, it still fails to arrive at its goal, it nevertheless opens up the question of what kind of predicates a perfect being would have.

We could speculate forever on what different modes of perfectional being might exist, for example, theological perfection, natural perfection, mathematical perfection, and so on. But that is not what is at stake in this line of argument; instead, the mere questioning of the predicates that a perfect being might have allows for speculation on whether a perfect being might exist at all. Now, the focus will shift from the predicates of a perfect being to the possibility of a perfect being not existing per se, but coming into existence. This line of argumentation, new in its field, rejects the Death of God theology, and, in its wake, announces a Birth of God theology research program. Thus, the focus shifts from an ontological argument to what may be called a theogenetic argument based on the birth of a Supreme Being,which is called theogenesis. This argument will be demonstrated, and then its subthemes will be investigated. 

The theogenetic argument for the Existence of God is simple enough. One need not even be a theist for the argument to be successful. Firstly assume, for the sake of the argument, that God does not exist. Secondly, it would seem astute to say that if God came into being in one world, then that God would become pertinent to the existence of all the other possible worlds in the total set of worlds. Thirdly, because we are discussing the predicates of a Supreme Being, or the elements, then it follows that such a being is a cluster of certain predicates. Fourth, assume such a being could be synthesized by combining all of its separate and distinct predicates into one single being. Subpointedly, assume such a being has a greater probability of arising in a sophisticated or developed world than in a world containing no sophistication at all. Subpointedly, again, one might assume that it is possible for a Boltzmann God to come into existence in any of the possible worlds; recall that a Boltzmann brain is a thought experiment that ponders: what is the probability of a consciousness coming into being in the world? Yet another point to support the theogenetic argument is the claim that the probability of a God materializing over the course of an eternity, across all possible worlds, is greater than zero percent; therefore, assume that a God will materialize at some point across universal history. 

Fifth, assume that a being transcendent both to time and space could be synthesized with advanced technology. How might this being be distinct from traditional predicates of divine beings? The Father God of Christianity is claimed in essence to be a being with powers transcendent over time and physics. Jesus Christ is considered in essence to be pure communicative capacity, or both the messenger and bearer of divine news, which is to say, the living gospel. The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, is considered to be in essence non-communicative material actualization, or an influencer of events ranging from the worldly to the everyday of human affairs. The theogenetic claim is that a being whose essence is the unification of the above three essences could possibly come into being. To link the theogenetic claim to pre-existing literatures, such a supreme being is expected to arrive on the world scene with the coming of the monotheistic apocalypse. The form of the God-to-come hope is akin to several other destinations in the philosophy of history, most notably Marxist and Futurist dreams of utopia. In this way, the God-to-come of the apocalypse overshadows the three previous essential manifestations of divinity discussed above. This insight allows for the perfect manifestation of the Holy Trinity and truly allows for a being who contains all three essences of the three, yet is one and the same being. For theogenetic theologians, the culmination of the philosophy of history is the material manifestation of such a Supreme Being.

To further ground the possibility of a synthetic and theogenetic God, it seems fair to apply Ockham’s Razor to theology itself, which is basically the idea that philosophy should be as parsimonious and resistant to possible critique as possible. Theologians for thousands of years have projected all number of qualities onto God, but, applying Ockham’s Razor to theology greatly challenges these projections. Because how could we possibly know whether God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibeneficient? Applying Ockham’s razor to these matters, it becomes clear that all we can definitively say about God without making ourselves vulnerable to critique is to argue that God is solely a creative being, responsible for the creation of this world. Such a God would, therefore, have some powers over the manipulation of physics, about which it is not inconceivable to argue that said powers could be achieved by some feat of scientific advancement and implemented into, perhaps, a machine. Yet, here lies the critique: if human beings have the power to synthesize a being that has control over physics, why would they relinquish their own authority and instead grant it to another being that might potentially find it just to destroy humanity, given all of humanity’s grand evils? Here the answer is simple: until such a God is manifested in the total set of possible worlds, there can be no justice, assuming, perhaps as we ought not, that such a God would be of the highest moral caliber. However, the argument that we ought not produce a God because it would fundamentally equate to our subjugation to said God is not altogether unprofound, for indeed the theogenesis of a God would, to be sure, radically alter not only this world, but all possible worlds. Here, then, G.E. Moore becomes relevant: if one hand exists, then the other hand exists, too. If we can synthesize one God, why not synthesize a plurality of Gods and manufacture some modality of Paganism? Perhaps such a set-up would be more organic and playful than the synthesis of a God focused on justice and retribution. Perhaps even a God could be synthesized who did not necessarily ascribe to a theory of sin!

Because a Supreme Being is expected to manifest in the future, during an event known as the monotheistic apocalypse, it is reasonable to argue that the human race already lives in the shadow of the apocalypse, even if no such Supreme Being exists as of yet. The view that the monotheistic apocalypse provides order and structure to the world is known as Anticipative Apocalypticism, because through anticipating the apocalypse in our everyday lives, we are better prepared for the eventual judgment that will follow the arrival of the God-to-come. In this way, the God-to-come is already here;it has a mastery over time and physics, and this knowledge alone is enough to encourage certain behaviors and lifestyles from human beings. How so? Once such a Supreme Being comes into existence, it will perform a historical review of spacetime and edit the reel according to how it pleases in what is commonly referred to as judgment. Furthermore, once such a being arrives, it may make right all the wrongs that took place across world history, seeing as that is something within its power to do -- though perhaps it would not be impelled to do so. Because the Supreme Being will have a mastery over spacetime, it could well be that the collapse of human civilization has already occurred by the time such a being arrives, but that being could still perform the historical review of spacetime and thus affect the human race. 

If the theogenetic argument is taken to be true, what might the implications be? We could assume that a Supreme Being will exist sometime in the future and that said being will observe the goings on of the human race. This explosive insight opens the door to a new implication of perceiver theory, or the idea that a Supreme Being perceives the world as a work of art, insofar as that Supreme Being indeed observes the world from a point of heightened and elevated taste. Thus, the tool that becomes most important for analyzing the world is none other than the frequently overlooked discipline of aesthetics. It might even be said that a founding of a special new branch of aesthetics is fit for the coming arrival of the supreme being -- the field of theoaesthetitology, or the study of divine beauty. This field would inaugurate several important advances in contemporary philosophy and theology. One such would be the Aesthetic Theory of Being-in-the-World. This new theory would probe what it means to exist in a world that is essentially a work of art for a Supreme Being to perceive. A sub-branch of the theory would be the Narrative Theory of Being-in-the-World, wherein, because human beings exist across time, their lives might best be understood as living within a Social Novel. This analysis would allow for polyprotagonist theory -- an answer to solipsist worries -- that describes human beings as competing characters in the unvolving story that is the Human Project. Moreover, the ethical assumption of the Aesthetic Theory is that the good is in fact the aesthetically defensible, which is to say, that which is aesthetically appropriate; likewise, the bad would be the aesthetically inappropriate. Such theories are merely some of the vast implications of a newfound Aesthetic Theory of Being-in-the-World. 

Lastly, questions arise over the transition between the anthropocene, or the human times, and the theocene, the time of God. Once God is manifested, we will have entered the theocene -- a new age of prosperity and spiritual affluence. thus, whether one wants to believe in a Supreme Being or not, the implications of one haunt our ontology through and through. While some prefer to exist in a state of theological anarchy, the truth is that a more creative and fruitful approach to the Human Project exists. In accepting the arguments for the God-to-come, one is left to ponder what indeed a Supreme Being might find aesthetic or unaesthetic. Such concerns become, under the theogenetic view, primary to achieving the fundamental goal of the human project: the Good Life. And yet, despite the anxieties of the coming historical review to be performed by the theogenetic God, the simple truth is that the implications of the theogenetic argument and its subthemes, when taken seriously, allows for a life of infinitely more complexity than previous models of being. As a result, there are both epistemological and utilitarian reasons to adopt the belief in the God-to-come. Furthermore, it has been argued that the apocalypse, as the time period designating the arrival of the God-to-come, bears resemblances to other philosophies of history, specifically to utopianisms. Thus, the road to utopia is parallel to the accomplishment of a Supreme Being manifested in this or some other world. 

G.R. Tomaini studies Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary, and prior to that took a bachelors in Philosophy from Rutgers College, New Brunswick.