The Fall into the phenomenal: How idealism can help the Creation story....

The Fall into the phenomenal: How idealism can help the Creation story converge with deep scientific truth

Androu Arsanious, BS, MBA 

Taking a clue from Christian theologian and philosopher Origen of Alexandria, Androu Arsanious argues that the biblical Fall is the story of humanity’s mistaking of the Kantian phenomena (the world as represented in perception) for the Kantian noumena (the world as it is in itself); that is, the story of our mistaking appearances for reality. Understanding this allows us to complete the Augustinian project of reconciling the stories of religion, which describe what is beyond the world in terms of the world, with the stories of science, which describe the world in terms of what is beyond the world, such as mathematical abstractions. This is a fascinating essay.

I grew up in a religious household. We’d attend church twice or thrice weekly: sports, youth group, and Sunday school. Every Easter liturgy, they’d ring the Church bells at 10:30 pm to mark the Resurrection of Christ. Incense filled the Nave as deacons sang at the top of their voices, and then we’d process around the packed church three times, holding crosses and icons. It was a surreal experience for 10-year-old me. We didn’t just accept the stories propositionally, we performed them. That’s because religious stories describe what is beyond the world in terms of the world. Good stories aren’t just heard or read. They’re felt.

Scientists tell stories too. They call them theories. Like any good story, a valid theory doesn’t just describe the past but helps us understand the present and prepare for the future. The most foundational theories in science use mathematics, a language that wasn’t invented as much as it was discovered. After all, math will remain true well beyond the heat death of the universe. As such, scientific theories are religious stories turned inside out because they describe the world in terms that are beyond the world.

If natural selection is true, then objects in space-time don’t have stand-alone existence in the way we think they do. Instead, our senses build an interface, a story that allows us to organize our lives. This odd conclusion is one physicists have likewise converged on.

The story of the fall is, therefore, a tale of exile into Plato’s Cave. Origen writes that “this sinking results in us taking on bodies” and warns that “all rational creatures who are incorporeal and invisible, if they become negligent, gradually sink to a lower level and take to themselves bodies suitable to the regions into which they descend.”

Androu Arsanious argues that the biblical Fall is the story of humanity’s mistaking of the Kantian phenomena (the world as represented in perception) for the Kantian noumena (the world as it is in itself); that is, the story of our mistaking appearances for reality.

Actually Sciborg didn't say the above, it is a quote from somebody quoted by Sciborg.  

I don't understand how anybody can possibly interpret Genesis like this.  It  is about how man preferred to go his own way causing a separation of the heavenly kingdom from the material kingdom leaving it prone to entropy and the destruction of all things as well as moral corruption.  There is little room for interpretation, the scripture is direct enough.

The ‘Fall of Man’ as the Freudian original loss

Dr. Ludwig Sachs

The biblical story of the Fall of Man is a symbolic representation of our universal experience of primordial loss, the Freudian pure lack, or “das Ding,” argues Dr. Sachs. The fall into the phenomenal world of perceptual experience appears from this psychoanalytical perspective as the “I” development of the human being.  The subsequent expulsion from paradise and the loss of the immediate presence of God are the trauma of this fundamental loss.

Analytical Idealism’s assumption that the mind is the fundamental basis of the world raises profound questions about the relationship between structure and subject. A useful approach to discussing these questions can be found in structural psychoanalysis, as developed by the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan.1 It conceptualizes “the unconscious” as a language-like structure from which the subject emerges. By bringing structural psychoanalysis into dialogue with the principles of Analytic Idealism, we open up new ways of exploring the complexity of human experience.

This essay is also intended to make a complementary contribution to Arsanious’ profound analysis of the biblical Fall of Man, in which he considers the Kantian distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal.2 I build on his argument that the misrecognition of these levels raises central questions about our experience of the world. By integrating structural psychoanalysis, I try to shed light on how unconscious processes influence this misunderstanding and shape our experience of reality.