cover some of the biblical stories.

So, and, hopefully a number of them. Um.

As I said last time, I'm going to go through this,

well, as fast as I am able to,

I want to do as complete a job as possible

and of course, the probability that I'll get through the entire Bible is very low.

But we'll get through a lot of the major stories in the beginning of it

and that's a good start.

And then, you know, assuming that this all goes well

then maybe I'll try to do the same thing again either in the fall or next year.

Assuming everything is still working out properly next year.

It's a long ways away.

Alright, so...

I guess we'll start.

So, last week I talked to you about a line in the New Testament that was from John,

and it was line that was designed to parallel the opening of Genesis.

And it's a really important line and I thought

I would reemphasize it.

Because the Bible is a book that's been written

forward and backwards in time,

in some sense, like most books.

Because if you write a book, of course,

when you get to the end, if you're the writer,

you can adjust the beginning and so on.

So it has this odd appearence of linearity

but it really isn't linear.

It's like you're God, in some sense,

standing outside of time,

that's your book,

and you can play with time anywhere along it.

And the people who put the books together took full advantage of that,

and that makes the story...

It gives the story odd parallels in many, many places

And this is one of the major parallels, at least

from the perspective of the Christian interpretation of the Bible,

which of course includes the New Testament.

And so, there's this strange idea

that Christ was the same factor or force

that God used at the beginning of time to speak habitable order into being.

And that's a very very strange idea,

you know,

it's not something that can be just easily dimissed as superstition

partly because it's so strange.

It doesn't even fit the definiton of a superstitious belief.

It's a dream-like belief, in some sense,

and what I see many of the ideas in the Bible as

is these dream-like ideas that

underlie our normative cognition and

that constitute the ground from which our more

articulated and explicit ideas have emerged.

And this one idea is so complicated that it's still mostly embedded in dream-like form

But it seems to have something to do with the primacy of consciousness,

and this is one of the biggest issues regarding the structure of reality,

as far as I can tell,

because everyone from physicists to neurobiologists debates this.

The stumbling block for a purely objective view of the world seems to me to be consciousness.

And consciousness has all sorts of strange properties, for example:

it isn't obvious what constitutes time or at least duration in the absence of consciousness.

And it isn't also easy to understand what constitutes Being in the absence of consciousness,

because it seems to be the case...

Well, if a movie is running, and there's no one to watch it

- I know it sound like the tree in a forest idea, but it's not that idea at all -

if a movie is running and no one's watching it,

then in what sense can you say that there's even a movie running?

Because the movie seems to be the experience of the movie,

not the objective elements of the movie.

And there's something about the world, at least insofar as we're in it as human beings,

that is dependent on conscious experience of the world.

Now, of course, you can take consciousness out of the world and say:

well, if none of us were here, if there was no such thing as consciousness,

then the cosmos would continue running the way it is running,

but, of course, it depends on what exactly you mean by the cosmos

when you make a statement like that,

because there's something about the subjective experience of reality

that gives it reality.

Or at least that's one way of looking at it.

And since we're all pretty enamored of our own consciousnesses,

although they're painful, because they define our Being,

it's not unreasonable to give consciousness a kind of metaphysical primacy.

And it's a deeper idea than that,

because there are physicists and they're not trivial physicists,

like John Wheeler,

who believes that in some sense consciousness plays a constitutive role

in transforming the chaotic potential of being into the actuality of Being.

He actually thinks about it - he's not alive anymore, but

he actually thought about it as playing a constitutive role.

And then, from the neurobiological perspective,

or from the scientific perspective,

counsciousness is not something we understand,

I don't think we understand it at all.

It's something we can't get a handle on

with our fundamental materialist philosophy.

And I don't know why that is.

It's quite frustrating if you're a scientist, but it isn't clear to me

that we've made any progress whatsoever in understanding consciousness,

even though, well, we've been trying to understand it for hundreds of years

and even though psychologists and neurobiologists and so forth

have really put a lot of effort into understanding consciousness from a scientific perspective

in the last 50 years.

Anyways, what seems to me is the idea

that God used the Word to extract habitable order out of chaos

at the beginning of time, which is roughly the right way of thinking about it,

seems to me deeply allied with the idea that

what it is that we do as human beings is encounter something like a formless and potential chaos,

I mean, we're not omniscient, obviously, and we can't just do whatever we want,

but we encounter a formless and chaotic potential.

That's always what we're grappling with

and somehow we use our consciousness to give that form,

and this is how people act.

Like, if you look at how they regard themselves, it's how they act,

because you say things to people, like: You shoud live up to your potential.

And you make a case that there's something about a person

that's more than what is, that yet could be,

if only they participated in the process properly.

And everyone knows what that means, no one acts like a mystery has been uttered

when you say that.

And you can see a situation in your own life that's full of potential,

you're often extremely excited when you encounter something that's full of potential

because what you see is something what could be, you see a future beckoning for you,

that could be if only you interacted with it properly,

and it activates your nervous system, in a very basic way

we even understand how that happens, to the degree that we understand how the nervous system works

because the systems that mediate positive emotion,

which are governed roughly by the neurochemical dopamine

and which have their roots way down in the ancient hypothalamus,

a very very archaic and fundamental part of the brain,

that responds to potential, which is the possibility of accruing something new and valuable,

it responds to potential with active movement forward and engagement,

and so we're engaged in the world that has potential and it looks like consciousness does that.

And so there's this idea that -

- and this is the main idea that I think is being put forth in Genesis I -

it's something like -

and you see this in mythology:

from what I've been able to gather, there's always three causal elements

that make up Being at the bottom of world mythology:

One is the formless potential that makes up Being once it's interacted with,

and that's generally given a feminine nature,

and I think that's because it's like the source from which all things emerge and rise.

It's something like that, it's more complicated than that, but it's something like that.

And then there's some kind of interpretive structure

that has to grapple with that formless potential,

and I think that's the sort of thing that was alluded to

by Immanuel Kant when he was criticizing the notion

that all of our information comes from sense data,

which would be the pure empirical perspective.

Because when you encounter the world,

you encounter it with that cognitive structure that already has shape,

and so it's already in you, this structure,

and without that a priori structure you wouldn't be able to

take the formless potential and give it structure

and I think that's akin in some way to the idea of God the Father,

and I'll try to develop that idea more,

it's the notion that there's something in all of us,

that transcends all of us, that's deeply structural,

that's part of this ancient, I would say evolutionary and cultural process,

that enables us to grapple with the formless potential and bring forth reality, roughly speaking.

And then there's the final element, and that element seems to be

something like consciousness itself, the consciousness that actually inheres in the individual,

so it's not only that you have a structure, it's that the structure has the capacity for action in the world.

And it's like...

You're the spirit that gives the dead structure life, it's something like that.

And, as far as I can tell, the triniterian notion that characterizes Christianity

is something like formless potential, which is never given the status of a deity in Christianity,

and then the notion that there's an a priori interpretive structure

that's a consequence of our ancient existence as Beings,

it goes back as far in time as you can go, the notion of a structure.

And then the idea of a consciousness that is the tool of that structure

and that interacts with the world and gives it reality.

And that's the Word, as far as I can tell,

and so the notion is that there's a father - and that's the structure - and that there's a son that's transcendent,

that characterizes consciousness itself,

and that it's the son - the speaking of the son - that is the active principle that turns chaos into order.

That's such a sophisticated idea, as far as I'm concerned,

because while there's something about it at least phenomenologically accurate,

because you do have an interpretive structure and you couldn't understand anything without it,

your very body is an interpretive structure, it's been crafted over, let's say, three billion years of evolution,

without that, you wouldn't be able to perceive anything

and it's taken a lot of death and struggle and tragedy to produce

you, the thing that's capable of encountering this immense chaos that surrounds us

and to transform it into habitable order.

And then there's the idea, too, of course, that's deeply embedded in the first chapters of Genesis,

which is a staggering idea, you know,

and certainly not one that's likely,

that human beings were made in the image of God,

both male and female were made in the image of God,

and that's of course a very difficult thing to understand,

partly because the God that's referred to in those chapters has a kind of polytheistic element

although it's an element that's moving rapidly towards a unified monotheism,

but it's not also obvious to me why people would come up with that concept,

because I don't really think that when we think about each other we immediately think godlike,

you know, the notion that every single human being,

regardless of their peculiarities and strangenesses and sins and crimes and all of that,

has something divine in them that needs to be regarded with respect,

and that plays an integral role, at least an analogous role,

in the creation of habitable order out of chaos,

that's a magnificent, remarkable, crazy idea,

and yet we developed it, and I do firmly believe that it sits at the base of our legal system,

I think it is the cornerstone of our legal system.

That's the notion that everyone is equal before God, which is, of course,

a completely strange idea, it's very difficult to understand

how anybody could have ever come up with that idea,

because the manifold differences between people are so obvious and so evident

that you could say the natural way of viewing human beings is in this extremely hierarchical manner,

where some people are contemptible and easily brushed off

as pointless and pathological and without value whatsoever.

And all the power accrues to a certain tiny aristocratic minority at the top.

But if you look at the way that the idea of the individual sovereignty developed,

it's clear that it unfolded over thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands of years

before it became something firmly fixed in the imagination

that each individual had something of transcendent value about them,