The Meaning of the Book of Job

 The book of Job is a strange book. 

Satan appears as one of the Sons of God in Heaven - that's unusual for starters - who knew Satan still lived in Heaven? Wasn't he supposed to have been cast out? Then he appears to challenge God - is he tempting him? - into sending terrible disasters on his most loyal and faithful servant Job.

God does this - first Job loses his possessions. His 7,000 sheep are killed by fire from heaven, his 3,000 camels are taken by the Chaldeans, his 500 oxen and 500 donkeys are taken by the Sabeans and his children (seven sons and three daughters) are killed when a wind blows down the house they are all in. For each disaster all his servants die but one who is able to escape and bring Job the news of what has happened.

Job is devastated but still is faithful to God and continues to worship him.

But Satan challenges God that job will lose his faith if he is physically afflicted - and God allows Job to be covered in painful sores all over his body.

This all happens in the first two chapters - What happens in the following forty chapters (there are 42 chapters in the Book of Job) is how Job deals with what has happened to him.

Early on three friends come to sit with Job and most of the book is their conversation. Each friend insists that Job must have done something to anger God in order to have had this happen to him. After each speech from one of his friends Job responds that he didn't do anything wrong and he wants to talk to God to find out what is going on.

Every person - Job included - says that God is great and mighty and beyond anything we can understand - so they all agree that we cannot understand how God works, but the friends still insist that Job must have sinned for this to happen to him, and the solution is for Job to repent and ask God's forgiveness. Job continues to insist he hasn't done anything to deserve this and to also point out that his friends aren't being much comfort to him.

Near the end another guy turns up - younger than the others and quite full of himself and tells them that he has the answer to what is going on - but actually he just repeats what Job's friends had been saying about Job having done something to deserve what has happened.

At this point God turns up and speaks to Job, and reveals how mighty and powerful he is, and asks Job a series of questions that he cannot know the answer to. The speech is quite strange in that large sections of it are given to describing how God really likes the hippopotamus and in particular how he loves the crocodile, it appears to be his favourite creature.

He then speaks to Job's friends and says Job is correct, he hasn't done anything wrong, and they have sinned in saying he has, however God will forgive them if Job prays for them. Job does so and God accepts his prayer.

The young guy who appeared doesn't get a mention - it seems he said his speech and left.

God them gives Job back everything he had lost and more - he now has 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 oxen and 1,000 donkeys he also has seven sons and three daughters.

Job is restored to health also of course, and after this lived another 140 years.

So what is going on? 

I suggest that when Job's friends heard the young guy saying to Job what they had been saying, they saw how mean and hurtful it was - seeing a stranger doing what they themselves had been doing gave them a new perspective on how they had been hurting their friend. 

After all - they had still sat with him, even though they had been arguing. Job similarly saw that God was beyond understanding and maybe he wouldn't ever get every answer to every question - there are so many things we don't know, we just have to deal with unanswered questions.

So God speaking is really a reconciliation between Job and his friends - the friends stop judging Job and Job sees that his friends mean well and have been sitting with him - unlike the young guy who just turned up, said his speech and left again.

So Job is about letting go of answers - the friends have to stop assuming they know how God works and just care for their friend who is suffering. Job has to let go of wanting to know why this has happened to him - he realises there are a million things he doesn't know and it doesn't matter.

I think they all end up valuing their friendship and caring more for each other. What matters is how we treat each other, caring for our friends, being kind and helping. It isn't about knowing all the answers or judging people, it is about being loving and accepting of others.

What is Truth? Part 2

Here is a suggestion for a general framework for thinking about "truth".

I propose picturing three layers to truth.

Let's start with the middle one - the language of facts. 

Truth works as a language game, in which we learn the rules of creating true statements the way we learn the rules of any game. The "height" game has the rule of measuring how tall someone is, the "colour" game the rules of identifying the colour of something, the "mood" game has rules to report on how someone is feeling. Mathematics is another example of a language game with its own rules. 

Language allows us to communicate with each other and ourselves to perform useful functions and work together.

There are many games we learn to play to use the categories true and false. The nationality game - I am British, not German; the Gender game - I am male, non female or non-binary; the Capital City game - London is the capital of England, Oxford is not; the Continent game - England is in Europe, not Africa; this is how we integrate into society by learning the rules to communicate.

Of course at the social level of language games there are no doubt many languages and cultures that have no notion of nation, capital city, continent and maybe even gender - certainly not a simple binary gender model which has been dominant in the west.

Incidentally our language to describe our inner world may well be different between languages and cultures. I read the notion of romantic love was introduced to the east from the west (see the book  When True Love Came to China by Lynn Pan). So again different languages would have their own rules of how to play "fact" language games.

It is worth noting that metaphors can be true. Saying something like "Madonna set London on fire" would also need to be counted within the game of facts. Some argue (Julian Jaynes is one) that all language is metaphor, so we can't even begin to speak or name without metaphor.

But how does language relate to reality?

I'll call "reality" our non-linguistic world that we experience, both inner and outer worlds - this is my second layer of truth. I suppose I could go another layer behind that and question what exists outside of experience, but I will leave that for now.

The point about this layer is that by definition it lies outside of language, yet language can "shape" and "order" it. If our world is mostly snow we have lots of words for snow and perhaps none for sand or jungle. Our language (and vocabulary within a language) allows us to make all sorts of distinctions within our world of experience. Each language has its own truth games, because we all share the same physical world it may be there is a lot of overlap with languages with words for the external world, but different languages may still identify different colours, may number things differently, may identify different qualities, may even relate to time differently. 

My point is there isn't a single "true" language that describes objective ("non-linguistic") reality. There are many languages, each relating to the world in its own way. This layer gives us our experience which language uses to play truth games.

But there is also another layer of language - this is my third layer. This goes beyond the language of facts and describes processes - how do things work? How do things fit together?

Trying to describe a process means trying to link a lot of facts together to somehow "model" what is going on. We want our model to have as much explanatory power as possible, and so to "make sense" of our experience. This obviously is different to simply learning how to identify facts. To appreciate a model means to apply judgement and understanding.

To be able to hold a conceptual model in our minds is to think about change over time, how elements interact, to employ notions of cause and effect. To communicate about processes is a more complex language game with its own rules and behaviours. To say a process is true is different to saying a fact is true, often facts are generally agreed as they have their own quite simple rules, but a process usually requires judgement - and it would be more common to use terms such as "I believe this is a good account of what occurred", or "this makes sense to me as an explanation". A fact isn't (usually) an explanation.

I'll stop there but hopefully these are useful distinctions when thinking about what truth means.

What is Truth?

What is the truth and how can we discover it?

Unlike Descartes who of course begins by doubting everything, I think we begin with our "world" - the world in which we live and inhabit and which we daily articulate to ourselves - and accept it all. We make an assumption of truth.

Yet as we proceed in this world, as it is lived, we discover that what we think as "true" is not always what others think. Perhaps we discover this directly in talking to someone, perhaps we read a book about other events in different times and places, perhaps it isn't even articulated, perhaps we see someone doing something we think they shouldn't be doing.

We begin to be aware of all sorts of claims to truth.

In some of these disagreements we might immediately feel we know the answer. Often these might be moral truths - from an early age we might be convinced killing animals for food is wrong, or ambitious truths - we want to be a doctor or a lawyer, or practical truths - friendship is valuable and being accepted by our peer group is important.

As we get older and are able to read more, discuss more, we become aware of conflicting claims to truth and perhaps wider "truth tribes" - and we might feel instinctively that we belong to one of these wider truth tribes and find something of an identity in such a belonging ("I am agnostic", "I am a buddhist", "I am a Marxist" etc).

Thus our "world" shifts as we reflect on different truth claims, different criteria of what constitutes truth. Sometimes we have particularly profound experiences which causes us to fundamentally question our "world" and the particular "truth tribe" we align with. This is what makes a religious conversion - in which reflecting on religious ideas and values, the religious "world" suddenly makes more sense than the previous one we had been inhabiting. 

Yet also it can make a non-religious conversion - in which the believer, from inhabiting a religious truth tribe - and therefore interpreting what they are experiencing in terms of that religious "world", one day feels such a world no longer matches what they believe to be true and so they step into some other world, an "agnostic" one perhaps, or even a "non-theist" religious world.

For people who reflect on truth and have a strong disposition to articulating what they believe, there is a constant shifting of many inner parameters and sensibilities. We can imagine a whole list of criteria about truth:

1. Suffering can have value
2. Material wealth is necessary but not important
3. Art can express important truths
4. The sciences only contain empirical truths
5. Family connections are important
6. Caring for the planet is important
7. A just political system is possible and important to establish
8. etc

This isn't just about truth as feeling or emotion. We all know arguments about ethics are never just "I feel this is right" against "I feel this is wrong", it is possible to have logical, rational reasons for ethical positions, the same as for religious and political positions. Rather there are usually logical arguments on both sides and we have to make a judgement as to which side most persuades us it is closer to the truth.

Even this way of expressing truth is of course open to debate. Some might say only scientific claims are truth or false and any other type of claim (moral, religious, political, aesthetic) is only expressing a preference or a disposition, not the same sort of claim to objective truth as science provides. 

In framing truth within a "world" I have rejected such a view as already being an example of one such "truth tribe" - and so this dance for truth goes on until we fall exhausted or, we are ecstatically transported into a new reality in which we finally see things are they really are.

Metaphysics in the Twenty-First Century

 As humans we have two impulses in achieving understanding - analysis and synthesis. We like to take things apart and see how they work, but we also like to construct and build things too.

This is true in many walks of life but in particular it is true in philosophy. There are some philosophers who like to take the world apart and ask questions about what the various component parts might be, to look in detail at very specific areas and ask very detailed questions about some particular aspect of the world. There are also philosophers who want to try to construct some Big Picture of Everything, to create some world view in which everything has a place, and it all fits together in some meaningful and balanced way.

Looking back over the history of humanity and where we are today, it is clear that mind or consciousness has become a pivotal area of trying to understand who we are and what the universe means.

Today the common view is that most of the universe is non-conscious, and that consciousness exists only - as far as we know - in the heads of a few living creatures on planet earth. Of course it is possible through evolution that other planets will also have evolved creatures similar to ourselves, but this is just speculation.

The difference between consciousness and the non-consciousness universe is that only with minds and consciousness do we have meaning, purpose, intention and value. If minds only inhabit evolved physical beings billions of years after the universe started, then the universe itself has no purpose or meaning. It is just a lot of non-conscious matter following deterministic laws. 

Meaning, purpose, value, goodness, beauty, happiness are just states of mind that exist in the heads of humans and creatures like ourselves.

Clearly such a view is very different to that held historically by many cultures - whether in the east with ideas of reincarnation and cycles of life, or in the west with ideas of God, the gods, or other cultures who believe in spirits, ancestors and other non-human forms of consciousness and mind.

Were all these cultures wrong in believing other minds existed which ordered the universe and gave meaning and purpose to it?

Even today some people question how such a complex universe could have appeared without some form of planning, design or purpose - the universe appears to be "fine tuned" to permit life to evolve. Evolution isn't just the random rearrangement of simple configurations of elements but appears able to create increasingly complex structures - how was the universe able through random, meaningless chance and a few simple basic elements able to contain within it the possibility of life, or DNA, even of conscious thought?

The answer is we just have to try to make sense of all the conflicting evidence and try to decide for ourselves whether there are other minds in the universe. There is so much we don't know even about the current universe - what is dark matter and dark energy, which appears to fill most of the universe and about which we know almost nothing?

All anyone can do is investigate all they can, learn all they can, and try to decide what makes most sense to them. Whether they choose a religious path or agnostic or atheist, there is no overwhelming evidence for any particular view, we just need to do the best we can and be respectful of others who have taken a different view to ourselves.

A few final thoughts.

Sometimes people use the argument from evil to question whether a good God could have created a universe with so much built-in suffering. I believe a better question to ask is if you had the choice to say if this universe should exist or if it would have been better it was never created, what would you say? I think most people would say it is better it exists. In spite of all the pain and suffering the world and the universe are amazing so if there was some creative mind that set up the parameters of the universe, even if it wasn't all knowing and all powerful, it was at least good enough to decide that the universe should exist after all.

In theory it is possible to confirm if other minds exist apart from our own, or even if it is possible for the mind to exist apart from the body - if we were able to get genuine scientific information from some other god or spirit or if someone was able to leave their body and report on what they had seen, this would surely confirm the existence of non-material minds. The fact that this has not occurred at least for now means there is nothing conclusive about minds other than our own, but that doesn't mean they aren't possible.

Confirming the existence of other minds complicates the scientific process of verification. If I get hungry and go and buy a snack, there is no measurable material cause that caused my movement - there is no billiard ball process to map cause and effect. Things happened just because I willed myself to do something, although of course there was also a material correlation within my neurological circuitry. All science can do is map material causes it can't map mental causes because they require self-reporting from the conscious person - so if things were happening in the material world as a result of a non-material mind, science couldn't detect it, it could only detect the correlating material processes.

Although I have been using "non-conscious" and "material" somewhat interchangeably in fact what the universe actually consists of is very much an open question. Quantum Mechanics has mathematical equations that model the behaviour of sub-atomic entities, but has no insight into what the subatomic world actually consists of. What appears to be happening however certainly breaks all the "rules" of the physical world around us. This has led some Quantum Physicists such as David Bohm to speculate that our consciousness might actually be connecting with some non-material part of the universe. What he calls the "implicate order" is some eternal realm existing within all of time and space, when we look up at the night sky, the darkness is actually full of this "implicate order" and it is constantly interacting with the visible "explicate order" that we experience all around us.

William Blake and Theology

 William Blake has this idea of God and the Devil both having good and bad aspects. 

The idea is that the Devil represents passion, sexuality, desire, emotion, while God represents reason, self-control, goodness. For Blake the human stands between these two and has to balance both - to be too much one or the other - too much angel or devil - is to no longer be human.

Such a view encourages a revaluation of the story of the Garden of Eden. Traditionally people ask why did God put that Tree of Knowledge in the garden and then issue this command not to eat from it. I think Ricky Gervais ridicules this with pointing out it was an accident waiting to happen, somewhat like allowing a small child to play with a sharp knife.

But with Blake the story takes on a different meaning. Now, God no longer wants humans to simply be obedient children, to just do as they are told all the time. That would make the angels not humans. Instead the Tree of Knowledge becomes the means by which humanity shows they have grown up and achieved self-awareness and responsibility - it is the sign they are ready to "leave home" and follow their own path.

The snake, similarly, is no accident, but instead part of God's plan that humans consider different options and when they are ready to start questioning what they have been told, to experiment, to find out for themselves.

This is a sort of mixing of the values of the Enlightenment - freedom, self-determination, discovery, experimentation, independent thought - with religious sentiments of awe, wonder, ecstasy, delight and joy. Art and the imagination mix religion - symbol, myth, revelation - with science - discovery and experiment - and so re-imagine a new relationship between God and humanity different in many ways to the previous relationships - no longer that of fear before a mighty power or a helpless child before a demanding parent, but now of a more reciprocal relationship in which like a grown-up child with their aging parent the balance of power is more evenly balanced and each can learn from the other, each can value the perspective of the other.

Even looking back on traditional religious texts we might now be able to see how many times humans have questioned God, challenged God, suggested new ways for God to be, and that God has listened to these suggestions - as for example God listened to suggestions from Abraham and Moses.

This makes for a more "process" type of God as described by people like Hegel and Whitehead, changing, growing, developing, learning, listening, and a humanity now engaged in an ongoing conversation with a God who is a partner in imagining the future and together both creating and learning what it means to exist.

Consciousness and the limits of science

Science has worked and been so successful because it has identified patterns and laws in the universe that are predictable and natural.

The whole point of science is the discovery that most of the universe doesn't work the way our minds work. If we think of how our minds work - in terms of emotion, experience, value, ethics, meaning and so on - we don't use any of those categories in scientific explanation.

Crops don't grow because we have been well behaved, the speed of light isn't constant to reward us for good behaviour.

Even when we get into the realm of explaining the mind with science, science doesn't operate with values or ethics, the metaphors used are still natural - things are explained due to chemical operations in the brain, or from natural selection or other unconscious mechanisms.

Science has explained phenomena that appear to have meaning in terms of things that don't have meaning or value - that is always the way round things are. Even science explaining why we have ethics and values turns out to be an explanation of how, not why.

So when we finally get to understanding consciousness we have this massive problem. Do we explain consciousness in terms of unconscious mechanisms - which essentially means we explain it away - or are we somehow able to provide explanations in terms of meaning and value and the language of consciousness, and if so how is that still science?

What does it even mean to explain something with reference to purpose and intention - retaining consciousness in the explanation? Can we ever achieve a final meaning or explanation with or without science?

Retroactive Continuity

This is an idea that seems quite elegant and satisfying as a way of viewing the universe and understanding life.

I came across it originally when reading the retcon article in WikiPedia and was particularly struck by this:

The first published use of the phrase "retroactive continuity" is found in theologian E. Frank Tupper's 1973 book The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg:"Pannenberg's conception of retroactive continuity ultimately means that history flows fundamentally from the future into the past, that the future is not basically a product of the past."


The idea that this rather conservative (in some ways - he was anti-LGBT) theologian could conceive of such a radical idea I found unsettling - although I guess the same could be said for the Nazi philosopher Heidegger.

Anyway, this sort of view sort of ties in with the concept of time that appears in The Lathe of Heaven by  Ursula K. Le Guin - the idea in the story being a guy whose dreams can change reality - he dreams of something and it happens - the whole universe changes, everything is now what he dreamed, the whole past has been changed to fit in with some new reality.

It also made me think of the quite Timothy Keller uses about the resurrection "everything bad is going to become untrue" - how can something become untrue? Again, Keller doesn't seem to actually suggest the past could change, but that seems to be the logical end of something becoming "untrue" - for it to no longer be true. Could it be that a past event will at some point no longer have happened? Could the future change the past in such a way that a past event no longer has happened?

Another angle on how we understand time is in the film Arrival in which learning an alien language changes the nature of how we experience time - suddenly time is all in the present - there is no past or future, the person who learns the alien language knows everything "now".

This suggests that the true nature of reality is that "now" contains both past and future, that in some way it is all one, and we just experience it sequentially, but suppose it is just a single entity, then could there be some way in which that single entity might change to rebalance itself?

We know that we experience material cause and effect - one billard ball hits another and moves it - and so matter appears to move from the past into the future, the acts of one object affecting another.

Yet with the conservation of energy we are told energy can't be created or destroyed, just transferred. But what of the energy that comes from the mind?

When the mind is motivated or inspired or excited then we get more energy - we can be energised by all sorts of experiences in our minds, but how can that extra energy that the mind then creates, that is transferred into the material world - how can that obey the law of the conservation of energy?

Perhaps it does so by mental events causing the flow of time to work backwards, so that the sum total of energy in the universe is adjusted every time we produce positive energy - when we increase the energy in the universe the past has to change to adjust to it.

And so positive thinking, acting in a positive and inspiring way might actually cause time to flow from the future into the past, changing the past to somehow align it with the new future.

Thus perhaps with enough mental energy and positive thinking perhaps all the bad events of the past will become untrue, and the universe will be redeemed.