GNOSTICISM, SCIENCE, AND RELIGION

This is a double-pronged approach to the problem of the inter-
relationship of religion and science:   a materialistic/scientific
explanation of religion coupled with a mystical philosophy of
science.  The scientific explanation of religion is mostly an
attempt at explaining mysticism--which, however, is still far from
being the whole of religion; there's also mythology and ritual.

I became interested in the psychology of this subject because, at
times when I've been psychotic, I've had mystical experiences.  My
first religious experience during a psychosis came, in part, from
reading Philip K. Dick:  After I'd read A MAZE OF DEATH, UBIK, and
Nietzsche's THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, I started a novel with the
intent of inverting Nietzsche:  God comes down from the mountain
and says, "Zarathustra is dead"

--but as I wrote, the story became more and more like a gnostic
myth, what I'd originally attempted to refute.  I wound up
delusional that I was "dead," and in the Bardo--a huge glass dome
with the War of the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness
(from THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS) going on outside.  Outside the dome,
evolution proceeded at a perpetually more rapid clip; inside,
everything regressed into its ancestors (like in the original Dick
story).  In a cave, a Lizard-thing gave me a piece of the fruit of
the Tree of Knowledge, which grew in the Dome; I became God and
committed suicide by jumping from a cliff.

My biology of mysticism is an attempt to explain the death-rebirth
experience, the core of all religious symbolism:  the "long, dark
tunnel" with the mysterious figure at the end, &c--though I don't
think it "explains it away."  

My belief is that the BIOLOGICAL roots of the phenomenon are a
means of heightening altruism, due to inclusive fitness.  In
sociobiology, there are two forms of altruism:  "reciprocal
altruism"--in which you act altruistically, expecting a reward in
return, and "kin altruism"--loving your family, which sociobio-
logists explain through "inclusive fitness."  The "God is love"
metaphor probably refers to a level of altruism not-explainable by
either of the above.

Kin altruism occurs because you share one half your genes with your
parents, a quarter with your siblings, an eighth with your cousins,
&c.  Suppose your father falls in a lake and starts drowning.  You
jump in after him, and manage to save him, but in the process lose
your own life--but you've indirectly saved a part of your own gene-
line, because of the common, shared genes between you and him.

Now, let's examine the near-death experience:  Suppose, again, your
father falls in a lake, and you manage to save him, but DO NOT lose
your life--but you also have a near-death experience at the same
time.  This heightens altruism, because, if you believe you're
immortal, you'll be MORE LIKELY to jump in next time.  

This type of selection process probably began as soon as animals
were able to recognize kin, and probably contains a lot of
background-noise from the environment, seeing as how kin-selection
is a weak force--I believe Jung's "archetypes" are derived from
just such background noise, which has been filtered from white-
noise (containing an equal admixture of all frequencies) into
"pink-noise"--filtered white-noise.

In my opinion, the Holy Spirit (Plotinus' World Soul) moves through
time as a similar filtering process:  some mystical experiences are
accepted by their cultures as being "Divinely Inspired," others are
rejected.  This materialistic idea has spawned such works as Violet
McDermott's THE CULT OF THE SEER, about the so-called "Desert
Fathers" of Third Century Egypt:  they achieved altered-states by
such mind-altering techniques as sleep-deprivation, food-depriva-
tion, and self-inflicted pain to produce altered states.  These
were then "filtered" by selection-processes based around Scripture
and Tradition:  if it fit into the religious paradigm, it came from
God; if not, from Satan.

But--materialism is compensated by mysticism:  Ernst Haeckel, one
of Darwin's Bulldogs (a keen football team, and I can even get you
a jersey), once proposed a "monistic" religion, whose goals would
be "to worship monism itself, and make all nature our temple." 
Monism is complemented by dualism:  for Descartes--the "ghost in
the machine" metaphor--the mind and body are separate systems, but
interact in the pineal gland.  But the problem isn't where they
interact, it's that they do:  as Daniel Dennet says about Cartesian
mind-body dualism in CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED (which should have a
question mark behind the title), "How can a system with no mass or
energy (the mind/soul) interact with something which does have mass
and energy (the body/brain), without violating all the laws of
physics?"

One philosophical idea I'm very fond of which can possibly explain
this paradox is Gordon Globus' "panpsychism"--the belief that all
entities, no matter how simple or complex, maintain some form of
awareness, which he describes as "complexity over duration."  His
arguments include two papers, UNEXPECTED SYMMETRIES IN THE WORLD
KNOT, published in SCIENCE in the early 70s; another paper in
CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE BRAIN, MIND, STRUCTURE, AND CONTRADICTION;
and two books, DREAM LIFE and THE POST MODERN BRAIN, which I
haven't read--yet; I'm getting them through Inter-library loan.

In the SCIENCE article, he generalizes the wave/particle dual-
ity--complementarity--of quantum physics to the brain, and
maintains he has proved both monism and dualism; that the two
systems are "symmetrical"--as in the mystical doctrine of the "Two
and the One."  In the second paper, he argues from Godel's proof.

Panpsychism does not necessarily mean pantheism--though in the
paper in SCIENCE, he did offer a proof for the existence of God,
albeit a pantheistic God--complementarity applied at the level of
the All.  Globus' view is that the complementarity principle of
physics proves both monism and dualism; they are "complementary"
the same way as quantum physics postulates a wave-particle duality: 
a quantum object like a photon behaves as both a wave and a
particle, what it is at any given moment depends upon the observer.

In a panpsychist universe, the problem of the observer in quantum
physics is possibly solved by the adjacent levels of organization
being "observers;" another variation on this is my belief that God,
being by definition omniscient, is the One System which knows both
the position and velocity of all particles.  Some physicists
maintain that particles go through all possible states in one
universe or another; in this case, our cosmos is panentheistic with
respect to the All which is the complete system of infinite
universes.

The biggest problem here is that complementarity MAY NOT work at
macroscopic levels; that it may only work at the QUANTUM level.

The "anthroposic" view is complemented by the Anthroposophic, in
the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation:  radical physicist James
Wheeler suggested the first; the belief is that the reason the
Universe came into existence was specifically so it COULD be
observed by humans; cf. Schrodinger's paradox and all that (in a
panpsychist universe, the BOX is the observer).  To explain the
Incarnation, one could say, the All had to descend to the level of
Man, to make an "observation."  As far as Nietzsche's "death of
God" goes, God, besides being the infinitely great, is also the
infinitely small:  God had to die to become nothing.

Panentheism, in my view, can be justified by assuming that
"Classical holism" holds at the level of the All; "scientific
holism"--"complex reductionism"--exists at the level of the parts. 
By the first, I mean "the whole is LITERALLY more than the sum of
its parts," whereas, in "scientific holism," as Herbert Simon
expressed it, "in the face of complexity, an in-principle reduc-
tionist can also be a pragmatic holist"--in THEORY, the All can be
explained by the behavior of the smallest parts; in practical
terms, dealing with complex systems, you have to treat them
holistically.

I see the interaction of the Whole and the Parts as an instance of
what theologians call "emanation;" they meet somewhere in the mid-
range of the hierarchy genes-mind-culture.  In the Bible, this is
expressed in the "Logos" philosophy of the Gospel of John:  "In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God"--the Greek term "Logos" being translated as "the Word."

A lot of my thinking has also been influenced by Gnosticism--due
to an attempt to understand the mystical experiences I had while
psychotic.  As Jung says on the subject of the relationship between
the two religions, "Gnosticism compensates Christianity.  The
message of Christianity is gnosis, and the unconscious compensation
is gnosis to a still higher degree"--Christians draw from the same
set of symbols/archetypes/root-metaphors as the Gnostics; they
merely teach their doctrines outwardly.  Jung's analysis very
accurately explains that first mystical experience of mine, the one
where I'm dead and in the Bardo.

Also in agreement with Jung, if an unconscious content is ex-
pressed, it either has to be integrated into consciousness, or the
behaving system will suffer--which is why I study the religion,
even though I disagree with much of it.  Jung says that when an
unconscious content becomes manifest and is explained, the
unconscious will "compensate" by creating a new meaning; the
reserve of unconscious ideas is inexhaustible.  

When I first encountered alchemy, I found that it mirrored my
psychotic experiences--an idea which Jung argues "compensates"
Christianity, saying, "alchemy acted like a sort of underground to
the Christianity which ruled on the surface.  The message of
Christianity is gnosis, and the unconscious compensation is gnosis
to a still higher degree."  So, I became an authority on the
subject, researching the History of Science as background to my
novel, A NEW CHEMICAL PHILOSOPHY (FOR THE SPACE AGE).  Then I came
across some of the Gnostic texts in the library, and started
researching them.

The central ideas of Gnosticism can be broken down into two or
three basic concepts:  (1) the Created Creator; (2) the God beyond
God--God is Absolutely Transmundane--actually, this term is taken
from Jewish theologian Martin Buber; (3) the Saved Savior, which
is mostly restricted to Christian Gnosticism.

Gnosticism has been described as "acosmic dualism against a
backdrop of pantheism."  God being both the infinitely large and
the infinitely small (as in the above allusion to atheistic
religion in Nietzsche):  "God is nothing," ie, "no-thing:"  if I
point to this or that object, God is more than that--except in the
Incarnation of Jesus.  The "Void" and the cosmos are split off from
each other, but the two are one, the Union of Opposites being a
very venerable idea found in mysticism:  the All has to be One, for
a monotheistic God to truly exist.  This I find justified in
Leibnitz' MONADOLOGY:  the whole is contained in any of the parts,
what sets off the parts from the whole is their interrelationship
with it.

A residue of Gnostic thought existed in alchemy:  Jesus was
androgynous, seeing as how Jesus is God, God is the All, and thus
contains both male and female.  For the alchemists, the Philos-
opher's Stone parallels this duality/androgyny in Christ:  Christ
was the Savior of the Microcosm, Man (the Anthroposophy mentioned
above); the Stone was the Savior of the Macrocosm, ie, metals (and
the material world at large), which is why it could "purify" base
lead into gold--a reflection of the process by which Christ "saves"
Christians.

The Macrocosm/Microcosm analogy was of fundamental importance to
alchemists:  they believed that Man (which is rendered in gnos-
ticism as "the God, Man") is a "microcosm" of the Universe.  Man
contains in his body the entire world--for them, the "veins" of
metals and ores in the earth could be explained by the comparison
of these earthly "veins" with the body's circulatory system.

Again, let me reiterate:  I do not accept the whole of gnosticism,
but think my study of it provides for me both interesting insights
into the history (evolution) of religion, and a key to understand-
ing myself.  I hope this discussion will stimulate a discussion,
and look forward to receiving a reply.