Coeternalism FAQ

[Snarf]

More relevant material from my book...
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[i]What exactly is the soul?[/i]
The soul is a purely ethereal entity that exists to the pleasure of God that represents the passage of one human life. A common conception is that ethereal matter exists as some tangible matter or entity in some alternate plane of existence. While this is possible, I find it highly improbable.

In light of Coeternalism, I find it best to describe the soul as a sort of intrinsic pattern in the fabric of the universe. One model I use to describe this is computer programming. A computer program consists entirely of binary code, which correlates to the presence or absence of an electric charge. Just as how Lao-tse described the emptiness of a cup as giving it its utility, it is the absence of charge on a microchip that gives the charged units their meaning. Matter in the tangible universe is arranged in such a way as to conceive of consciousness, and this consciousness pertains to an otherwise non-entity. However, this consciousness will immortally in that it will function everlasting at the end of time.

Another model that can be used is that of a mathematical function. Functions exist purely as an abstraction, they generally have no natural bodies that represent them. However, they do operate as a means of understanding certain patterns or behaviors in nature. With this in mind, one could describe a human life as having a particular function expressing a ratio of caritas and cupiditas, and when applied to deterministic rules of human development the life transpires as normal from this input.

So, does that not imply that the soul simply does not exist? Absolutely not. The universe exists eternally—not in that it entails an infinite amount of time, but that its existence is atemporal in the perspective of eternity. To visualize this, think of a reel of film that represents the history of the universe. One can watch the reel as many times as she desires, but the existence of the film extends beyond the duration of the movie played thereon.

So, atemporally God created human souls, then created Heaven and Hell as an eternal abode for them, and then created the tangible universe as a means of expressing the souls’ ethereal wills. I emphasize “then” because all of this happened in eternity, and conventional understanding of one event happening after another is a bound of thinking in temporal forms. In other words, all of creation could be said to have happened at once with prescience of all factors entailed therein. However, it would be even more accurate to assert that this creation never even took place in time, all of creation is eternal. While we can understand or relate to this at the axiomatic level, such an assertion in reality transcends human understanding.


[i]How did God create the Universe? How do souls shape human lives?[/i]
The question of how God created the universe is one that will perpetually elude human understanding. Science describes interactions between matter and matter’s evolution, but it must never violate the principle that matter cannot be created from nothing . This stands in stark contrast to the dogma that the universe was created by God at the beginning of time ex nihilo—from utter nothing.

It must furthermore be noted that the universe was, to speak in purely linear terms, never created in time. Time is merely an index to describe one moment of the universe from the next, with all moments being arbitrarily coexistent with one another in perspective of eternity. Thus the metaphysical notion of Creation is helpful to establish levels of perfection and priority of matter, but it is misleading in that it never actually happened. God is eternal. Souls are eternal. The universe is eternal.

So, if everything is eternal, what exactly is it we mean by Creation? Is it not, then, non-created? At the starkest level of comprehension, one might be able to assert this. However, such a view is simply not consistent with dogma, Coeternalism, or common sense. We call the universe a part of “Creation” because it exists to fulfill the wishes of God, and God very well could have not chosen not to create the world. Likewise, the ethereal collective could have not willed for the world to have been as we observe it, and perhaps not to exist at all. So, even though the act of creation never took place within time, it nevertheless refers to the beginning of time.

How I explain the relationship between ethereal will and Creation is that the will is a liaison of causation. That is, Creation exists as a metaphysical necessity of the ethereal collective, although neither predate the other. The universe exists because souls necessitate it. Souls exist because God wills it. Why God exists is a question that has plagued minds since the advent of philosophy, and will quite probably never be resolved.

[i]If the soul exists outside of time, then it would seem that it cannot be “created”, a heretical position indeed. If the soul is eternal, how is it created?[/i]
The crux of this argument dwells on the fact that all of Creation is conventionally held to exist within time. However, time itself is a facet of Creation. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that just because the tangible universe was created within the confines of time that all ethereal matter besides God Himself should be temporal. The term “coeternal” at first implies that the soul did not have to be created at all, but this is an erroneous outlook. God did indeed create the soul, He however did so outside the boundaries of time. To rectify this with conventional theology, consider Augustine’s Confessions. In the Twelfth Book of that work, Augustine argues that “nothing mutable is eternal”. However, he goes on to say that because God’s word is immutable, it truly is coeternal with God. As it is senseless to posit the Word, or logos, as being without a creator, Augustine thereby proves that the construct of time is not a prerequisite for something to be created. The same argument could be applied to Christ, the second person of the Trinity, whom Augustine argues also to be coeternal with the Father.

[i]Why should one believe in the soul?[/i]
If one takes as an a priori that all miracles can be rationalized under scientific rubric, that divine revelation is a human invention, and that virtually all religions have nothing of truth to them in regards the eternal, then there simply is no reasonable answer for which one should believe in the soul. Proponents of Occam’s Razor will be quick to deduce that if the belief in the soul is more complicated than non-belief, then its existence is not logically probable. Nevertheless, all of the aforementioned statements are subject to argument, so the possibility of the soul’s existence is not entirely ruled out. Some facets of existence simply defy probability, as any keen biologist will attest.

Moreover, no matter where one stands in a logical argument for or against religion, the most important factor in determining one’s belief thereof should always be personal conviction. Quite often people feel the need for an eternal essence in their life, consummated by their own immortal soul and the existence of God. Some people simply need to believe, whether rationally or not. The scientist in me cannot corroborate such experience as a candid argument, but it nevertheless stands as valid in light of what it means to be human. As for myself, I have found so innumerable instances of patterns, coincidence, and purpose in daily life that to posit them all as belonging to a purely stochastic universe is personally absurd. I have found my reason for belief in the soul, and it is every person’s responsibility to find her own.

[i]Does reincarnation happen?[/i]
In short, I personally hold that reincarnation does not exist. The reason for this is that I, surprisingly, tend to hold to Roman Catholic doctrine as often as possible. However, if one wishes to be a non-Catholic coeternalist, there is nothing that intrinsically argues against it. For example, there is nothing dictating that one soul cannot be represented by multiple human lives, as many attest that it does. I actually find this a very comforting thought, but deject it as heretical.

[i]Do miracles exist? If so, how can they be rationalized?[/i]
Coeternalism tends to hold closely to the beliefs on miracles that were espoused by Malebranche. Malebranche held that miracles do exist as extremely improbable acts of nature driven by God that adhere as closely as possible to the nature laws of the universe. In fact, Malebranche defined a miracle as “the effects which depend on general laws which are not known to us naturally.” Malebranche maintained “either that God acts as a consequence of other laws unknown to us, or that what He does then is determined by certain circumstances He had in view from all eternity in undertaking that simple, eternal, and invariable act which contains both the general laws of His ordinary providence and also the exceptions to these vary rules”.

In Coeternal terms, a miracle is simply a highly improbable metaphysical consequence of some divine impetus. Accordingly, the designation of what is or is not a miracle is totally arbitrary. However, history is replete with examples that simply baffle the mind. Should one take seriously such tenants of faith such as the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, it is indeed quite difficult to rectify these with conventional science. Also, phenomena such as the incorruption of certain saints and the material transubstantiation of Eucharistic miracles such as that in Lanciano defy easy explanation. There are cases such as the Joan of Arc’s prescience of where to find the an ancestral sword and how to identify the dauphin that could be rationalized as amazing stark luck, and Coeternalism tends to dwell on such examples as the shining occasion of metaphysical consequence.

[i]With the concession of determinism, how is it that ethics matters? Are we not “destined” to follow a path of good or evil, with no real choice in the matter?[/i]
In short, the Coeternal explanation is that the tendency to adhere to ethics is the metaphysical consequence of having a benevolent soul. It is difficult, however, to rationalize the phenomena of ethical deliberation in deterministic terms. Coeternalism holds that conscious will is the manifestation of ethereal will in such a way that while choosing between good and evil is a passive progression of consciousness, it is experienced as an active process. Problems are incurred when one who realizes determinism feels that all her actions are the product of inevitable compulsion and is thus spurred into apathy, feeling unable to control her own life. The error in this mode of thinking is that while conscious will is irrevocably illusory, it is by no means worthless. The coherent passage of human history is dependent upon the axiom that each individual feels that she is the sole originator of her actions. In the list of causes that determine one’s course of actions, foremost is the very emotion of volition. Regardless of how we may realize that all actions are compelled, life entails the feeling that one is choosing between good and evil. The choice that one makes is indeed respective of her eternal destiny, so anyone should feel the need to act morally. The idea that one should surrender her faculties to however “fate” steers her is intrinsically flawed; the abandonment of moral identity is no less the product of volition than the partaking of conscious will, even if this is a mere illusion.

[i]What can be expected of death and the end of the world?[/i]
Death and its relation to eschatology is an area wherein Coeternalism far outshines conventional theology. Most conventional religions of the Christian variety dictate that when one dies, she goes to Heaven or Hell (and for the Catholics, Purgatory), and then are returned to the corporeal Earth during the Resurrection. Such a view pervades because it seeks perpetual continuity of the immortal soul, that is, once the soul is created at conception it must have consciousness from the age of reason until the end of time. Metaphysically speaking, this is simply asinine. There is no reason why the soul should be conscious from the time of death until the Resurrection, just as it was not conscious from conception until early childhood.

What Coeternalism asserts is that upon death, the soul is no longer actualized in the tangible world. It may be actualized immediately thereafter in Purgatory, but that is subject to one’s opinions on its existence. Purgatory makes even more sense in light of Coeternalism, as it provides for an equalizer in everyone’s experience of consciousness. Once purgation is over, the soul is simply not actualized until the Resurrection. It would be as if the soul were in a dreamless sleep, much as it was before its actualization in corporeal consciousness.

So, one dies, then she goes to Purgatory, and then black… until the Resurrection. Dogma in conventional Christianity holds that the Resurrection will occur on the tangible world in our earthly bodies. Some theological constructs go so far as to say the body will have undergone “perfectification”, or will appear in peak physical health free of blemish as it would appear at age thirty-three—the age of Christ at death.

I personally feel that it is important to maintain the classical image as much as possible. However, such an idea as perfectification or even that we return in our own bodies seems implausible to many. Coeternalism encourages such members to imagine alternatives that are scientifically feasible. For example, at its core the idea of the Resurrection only holds that consciousness will endure immortally at the end of time. One could posit that we simply assume consciousness in some other form of a body, or even raw energy. That it occurs on the Earth could merely be indicative that it will take place in a tangible universe—perhaps the one we presently experience, perhaps not.

As for how such an existence could be everlasting, I have pondered a great deal on the matter. One possibility is that as the universe accelerates its spatial growth, time will slow down as an asymptote down essentially to where time ceases completely. This would fulfill the requirement that consciousness would never end, and life would truly be immortal. Such an existence could satisfy either everlasting paradise or perdition.
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Feel free to throw more my way.

[Cow of Shame]

am I having a brain fritz, or is there no word to describe something that has a beginning, but continues to exist for eternity (versus things that have always existed, and will continue to exist forever)?

[Theoketos]

Eviternal \Ev`i*ter"nal\, a. [L. eviternus, aeternus. See Etern.] Eternal; everlasting. [Obs.] -- Ev`i*ter\"nal*ly, adv. --Bp. Hall.

An example of this would be angels and rational souls.

[Cow of Shame]

although, isn't he arguing that souls don't fit into that category?

[Theoketos]

[quote name='Cow of Shame' date='Oct 12 2005, 03:11 PM']although, isn't he arguing that souls don't fit into that category?
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Yes, she or he (?) is. This is popular among many German protestants, though I think that it is against the teaching of the Church, espcially the part of poofing into purgatory then poofing out until the resurrection.


I want to give this a little while in the brain before I comment further. Plus, metaphysics is not my stong point. Really Apotheon has that in the bag.

EDIT

[quote]The soul is a purely ethereal entity that exists to the pleasure of God that represents the passage of one human life[/quote]

I must say that the soul is not purely ethereal. This seems a wee bit duelistic.

Edited October 12, 2005 by Theoketos

[Sarah_JC]

"So, one dies, then she goes to Purgatory, and then black… until the Resurrection."
What a rip off! Suffer through purgatory, and then nothing until the resurrection? What about Saints?

What is this article?

[Cow of Shame]

it's Snarf's own work

[Snarf]

[i]I must say that the soul is not purely ethereal. This seems a wee bit duelistic[/i]

The alternative is saying that it's the summation of chemistry and observation, which to me seems a bit reductionistic. That is how I would define conscious will, not the soul.

[i]What a rip off! Suffer through purgatory, and then nothing until the resurrection? What about Saints?[/i]

Saints go directly to the Resurrection in my system. You may ask, why pray to them? Well, I'd say that prayer has the power to transcend time, so they can intercede during the end of time.

To me, this sounds much more rational than positing a temporary heaven in place of it.

And by the way, I'm all man, baby.

[Cow of Shame]

You need to post smaller snippets of your writing....I'm too lazy to work through all that.

I'd honestly like to help critique, but I get bogged down after the 1st 4 paragraphs. I usually can read late at night when I'm not really paddling with all the oars in the water....

[son_of_angels]

I tend to agree with some of these, but I wonder about the Co-eternalist view on Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell, as you describe them.

First of all, it contradicts Church teachings, which indicate the real Beatific Vision in heaven, as well as real pain in Hell.

I would argue that the division between Heaven and Purgatory are quite slight, and simply represent different states of the same active soul (though no soul is active in the physical sense), whereas Hell represents the suffering of a soul without any possible activity in the economy of God. The only difference between Purgatory and Heaven is that one assumes full participation in that activity of God, whereas the other is only partial activity.

In other words we pray for those souls in purgatory on the one hand, that their soul may be fully an active part of the economy of Heaven, and we pray TO those IN Heaven because they ARE a full part of God's economy of Will. Of course, praying to the Saints is really just a human, and therefore blessed, way of praying to God anyway. In other words, in the same way God exists and is active, souls in purgatory exist and are active in the same way that they are while on earth.