Unity and Agency - Divine and Human

I've done some more thinking about God this trip. I was experiencing gratitude for the journey I have thus far experienced in my life of faith - or in my life illuminated by faith. Having received it from my forebears, I have come to own my faith, even as I realize more and more each day how much "my" faith redefines and claims me.

Unity and agency have consumed my thoughts about faith this trip on a couple of my walks and rides. Unity has become the foundation of my new faith home, of late. Agency presents my mind with far more misgivings, so that I begin to wonder whether agency is more useful as a way to anthropomorphize God than it is a way to describe God.

Agency (at least agency as we understand it) involves the ability to affect action - not in some way that merely calls the nature of the thing so affected the agency of divinity (a la Clockmaker) - but action that in some sense reflects the consciousness of divinity. Agency is God's action in the world that reflects and results from the consciousness of God. Judaism and Christianity call this God's will.

And because the universe is a closed system, the way we think of God's agency must change or die, because the present concept of divine agency violates the observable laws of the known universe - at least in terms of Newtonian if not necessarily in terms of quantum physics. What is more, any conception of direct divine intervention in human affairs must account for the apparent amoral (or immoral) caprice or indifference that prompted the Greeks to imagine a divine game of dice on Mount Olympus.

One handy fallback position invokes the tawdry "God's ways are not our ways" cliche, a meaningless attempt at theodicy that ignores the imago Dei aspect of the Jewish tradition and incarnation of the Christian conception of God. Philip Clayton calls God's agency the push of the divine Spirit communicating with human beings, who must decide to act or not on these experiences of divine nudging. I begin to wonder if our (religious adherents') inability to comprehend God's agency stems not from the inadequacy of our theodicy, but from a misapprehension of how agency might "work" from a perspective that takes seriously a spectrum of existence from quantum to cosmic.

To put it another way, I propose to consider agency from a perspective of unity of all existence, at all levels of existence. From such a perspective, the human agent ceases to be the primary referent for agency. In fact, such a unifying perspective not only allows for a reconsideration of divine agency, it transforms our comprehension of human agency itself.

Ironically, the best way for me to begin such a project involves reexamining our notions of human agency, as well as our notions of selfhood. My chief assumption about my own agency involves my creation of a reality outside myself that initially takes form within myself - in my mind or in my will. I think; therefore it is. I want to do something and I do that something.

I think of this process most powerfully in any act of creativity, art or handiwork. I conceive and design a bookcase; I build a bookcase. What I conceived in my mind, I brought into the reality I share with others as an object that more or less reflects my original conception. The act of composing a text (poetry, prose, or a play) involves this process of willing some idea into action or reality.

This will-to-action process serves as a basic definition of agency for any agent we could consider. Such a definition links agency to consciousness, which is why an inanimate object could not exercise agency. This definition also leads to the notion at any animate creature could exercise some form of agency - exerting some form of change on it's environment based on conscious or instinctive will.

But I do not have to explore the boundaries of this definition (sea anemones, a virus or plankton) to expose some serious dilemmas attendant to this definition of agency. And the immediate problem this conception of agency faces is the ubiquitous relational nature of all possible forms of agency.

Take for instance the example of an author composing a text. The language, grammatical conventions, style, form, models of inspiration, and potential recipients of the text (including the author) all precede and inform the text before the "author" conceives it. In the case of language, grammar, literary form, and cultural context, these preconditions of the text bind the text in a way that dictates what any author can conceive or create.

Any agency an author might exercise would be culturally and relationally contingent to such an extent that to consider the text solely the creation of an author-agent would require an act of Herculean myopic blindness in perspective. How else could any other reader ever understand or appreciate such a creation? Yet this blindness to relational and cultural contingency results from the ubiquity of the phenomenon itself: we can no longer see what pervades our existence. Here is the chief problem with our notion not only of agency, but of our understanding of the individual self.

Not only human will, but human identity lies in the vast context of relational and cultural contingency. We cannot comprehend ourselves other than relationally. Cultural norms and values define the spectrum of possible manifestations of self and give comprehensibility to any possible manifestation of self. Any personality trait lies within a spectrum of similar manifestations of this trait. We do not understand these traits other than in comparison these other manifestations. Any self is only comprehensible as a self in terms of it's relationship to others.