I blame Aristotle

Here ends the popular modern misattribution of terracentricity and fixity of the species to the Bible. No, it was Aristotle.
Below a relevant page from Copleston's History of Philosophy.

Genre

You've probably been in a discussion in a Bible study group, where one of the sage ones, patiently explains that understanding Genesis 1 starts with its 'genre'. A fancy word for literary type. Why they don't say 'type' I don't know.

But what is the 'genre' of Genesis 1?

It's not peotry...we can look at the psalms and see what Hebrew poetry is.

It's not symbolic...we get that lesson in Ezekiel...and a bit more in  Revelation.

It's not quite history either: compare to the later pentateuch or Acts...a little different.

What are we left with?

Chronicle!

That is, a time-ordered list of events.

The writer has driven the point of 'time' and 'sequence' home in every possible way while retaining literary elegance.

Time markers are prominent:

We start with 'in the beginning', then after a set of events: set with chronoligical grammar (the 'waw' consecutive: 'then this happened' recurs through out the creation passage.

Each day is numbered and delineated so that we know what type of day is meant: an evening-morning type day, of course!

Numbers 7 has a similar structure, and it is clearly a chronicle as well.

Compare this with a snippet from Enuma Elish; a pagan theogony that some have the gall to compare to Genesis 1.

Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven,
Lahmu and Lahamu were called into being...
Ages increased,...
Then Ansar and Kisar were created, and over them....
Long were the days, then there came forth.....

 Here and throughout EE uses the chronological imprecession of pagan myth: time markers are not important to myth, in fact, not having them is the important thing to de-historicise the myth and place it beyond enquiry.

Quite the opposite to Genesis 1.

On history: despite this, there are clear historical elements in Gen 1. History compared to chronicle adds meaning, if not analysis. It is not only 'that' something happened, but 'why' and the consequences. It puts events into an existential coherence that Gen 1 certainly does.

The point I want to drive, tho' is that the objective chronological markers of sequence frame this narrative with unmistakable self-conscious precision.

The Gumbel Error

My previous post on Nikki Gumbel's removal of 'when' from history and giving it to science (he means, of course physical science, as history is a 'science' in that it seeks knowledge) left a gap: the gap was about time itself and its place in the Genesis narrative. I've already dealt with this from one perspective, but there is another I want to bring here.

The presumption that the time markers in Genesis are not germane to the revelation derives from an implicit physicalism: an ontological error that parts company with both the dualism of the Bible, and its concrete realism. Because it presumes that time is a 'given' its action within creation is not recognised and thus the error also parts company with time's existential dependence: that 'word' has priority. Moreover, 'word' strictly in the John 1:1-3 sense. Not a logos of the Greek kind, but the word as going out from the love of God as triune communion of unified will.

Time is integral to the revelation as a created thing, and the markers of time in the creation passage show not only that God orders within time, but uses time to bring order; he using time as the domain of fellowship within the creation (I don't know how the new creation will work in this connection...we'll have to wait and see) where it provides a shared constraint-space definitional of event sequence. Time forms the event-space in which we can join in relationship. Indeed, in which we are shown that the event-space is God's and is where he joins us in relationship.

To put this to one side is firstly a hermeneutical arrogance, then it treats time as an 'accident' of material, almost putting it behind God and not an essential part of the revelation. If God use the time markers as simply symbolic of something else ('what' is never canvassed), one would have to wonder at the specificity of the markers, the deliberation of the pace of creation, the connection formed by his people Israel reflecting his creation and use of time having their life pattern reflect God's.

But, time has to be signficant, and more than symbolic theologically (because the language denies a symbolic role and requires a concrete role for it), as time is our universal constraint: it dominates everything that we do and think; it is inescapable.

Physicalism evacuates time of its theological significance. The proponents fall back to the implicit materialism. Their reference to a paganised framework of understanding (that there are universal givens apart from God) this entails is a theological embarrasment.

Alpha boob

I saw the second video of the new Alpha course where Gumbel tells us that Jesus is the creator walking on earth. Good. Then, opps, 'I've mentioned creation, I'd better hose down that one straight away'. So he moves onto science and assets its non-connection with history (the Bible).

He tells us that science is about how and when, but the Bible tells us about who and why. He gives us the analogy of a birthday cake.

Now, when did 'when' slip into the domain of science? I don't remember that happening!

Nikki clearly wants to offset any recourse to the timing of early history in Genesis 1-11, and let us slip comfortably into the idea that Genesis' timing is something to do with 'who and why' isolated from science and its 'how and when'. Thus letting science appear to take the lead when it comes to the understanding of time in ancient texts, Genesis in particular.

But 'when' is always history, my friend, and in early Genesis (1-11) reaches far more into our relationship with God, and God's relationship with his creation than a bare 'scientific' fact. It carries profound implications for who God is in relation to us, and how the Bible positions itself as revelation.

Gumbel fails to tease out the ontological issues that Genesis 1-11 deals with and the setting that God thereby delineates for his fellowship with us, his creation-in-his-image.

Gumbel also fails to deal with the evidence in the text (a fail for an ex-barrister, let alone a theologian): its form of language (consecutive narrative), its time references (natural days delineated in two ways, just to make sure we follow), its style (unadorned fact), its reference by other parts of Scripture (Exodus 20:11, for example, and note God's direct speech in this passage), its parallel with other passages of historical narrative (Numbers 7 springs to mind), and its 'first philosophy' of word, not matter (John 1:1-3, Hebrews 11:3).

So Alpha carefully places the train of developing belief on tracks that lead through the dark tunnel of pagan confusion before it ends at the precipice of materialism's emptiness.

Thus The Gumbel Error.

How to start a conversation.

Many years ago in a Bible study I was asked for my thoughts on Genesis 1. I gave the direct non-pagan view, which seemed to evoke some surprise.

Now I would start in one of two ways:

In an essay on Wittgenstein, the writer points out the split in Wittgenstein's work of the use of langauge to talk about a chair: a brute fact; and a subjective 'event'. He has to say that these are different; but cannot live as though they are...

Or

In a wonderful essay by Richard Rorty, he approvingly quotes Yates' yearning to be able to capture reality and justice in a single vision. He cannot. He cannot see how to, he cannot integrate his delight in the beauty of orchids with his desire for justice. His world, which he experiences as an integral continuity, fails his own explanatory program...

The only place these seemingly disparate (but only because of entrenched philosophical mistakes endemic in modern thought) elements of the world are brought together is in Genesis 1, and its elaboration in John 1:1.

I leave the rest to you, dear reader.

The eye!

Dick Dawkins is well known in some circles for his story of the evolution of sight, or 'the eye'. It starts with a light sensitive spot on a worm, and goes from there.
His story is what I call a Victorian gross morphology fantasy. It considers only the macroscopic anatomy, has some vague inferences about underlying bio-chemical processes, and that's it.

Now let's think about the human eye and its orchestration of quasi independent sub-systems that all had to come together to give us what we have today.

Let's start with the eye itself.

Its shape, various membranes, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, chemical supplies (to maintain light sensitivity) and differentiated rods and cones all had to come together to work together. Any single element by itself would have been eliminated as biologically useless.

The eye-brain system would have to be functional. Nervous connections to the appropraite part of the brain would have to form in step with the formation of the eye as an anatomical component. The 'software' would have to keep step with the 'hardware'. All the eye does is create an image optically on the retina. This then gets decomposed into electric impulses that go to a part of the brain that then assembles these impulses into something that is mentally meaningful for the organism (us). Each step requires substantial 'evolution': optical accuracy and control, translation to electrical impulses, transmission to the brain, some form of re-coding, formation of the mental impression of an image, and then this impression's meaningfulness to us! The orchestrated systems then keep track of the images as they change, smoothing them into a stable continuous image of the scene around us. None of this complex processesing, no use for the eye. No eye.

Now this system has to coordinate information that comes from the eye muscles, that point the eye, and those that focus it. They also have to coordinate with the amount of light coming in as the pupil changes size due to movement of the iris.

This enables the eye-brain system to maintain its stability of orientation, focus and illumination as it assembles moving images.

The body also moves on its axes. The eye-brain-ocular feedback system needs to coordinate with the balance mechanism and its whole system: detection organs and a processing centre in the brain. This helps to maintain a stable image as we move, lean over, turn around...

While the eye as a sense organ is 'evolving' its controlling muscles, blood supply and ancilliary nervous network need to keep up with it.

The eye's housing and accessories need to 'evolve' in line with this: facial bone structure, eye socket, skin, and surrounding (non-occular) muscles and their control system have to keep in step. The external apparatus, and eye lubricant system needs to be there: tear ducts, detector and triggering  mechanisms, eyebrows, eye lashes, the lids and blinking system have to happen.

This doesn't even touch on the complexity of the eye's internal anatomy and its fine visual control features.

Then there's hand-eye, foot-eye coordination where major systems of systems interact to enable us to write, play tennis, produce sculptures and do the washing.

I've not mentioned the integration of the eye's lubrication system with another meta-system: emotions. The connection between feelings of supreme joy or suffering, or pain (physical or emotional) and the production of tears!

Genetic information drives all this, and not a simple change in DNA 'letters' here and there, randomly. Because the genetic information system is multiplexed several 'letters' have to change in concord. And groups of multiplexed letter sets need to change in 'super-concord' to bring chemical, nervous, interpretive facility and musculo-skeletal anatomy to the party.

As Dawkins might assert: 'simple'!

Time is the hero

‘Time is in fact the hero of the plot … given so much time the “impossible” becomes possible, the possible probable and the probably virtually certainly certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs miracles.'

Wald, G., The origin of life; in: Physics and Chemistry of Life, p. 12, 1955

Of course, this is nonsense, and Wald probably knew it. Stochastic chemistry does not make the impossible possible. That which is impossible will not happen. All it does is allow the less likely to occur. No matter how long we wait, people will not grow younger and water will not flow up hill.

However, this view does up the ante for Theistic-evolution. Time is given agency, and Wald gives it the honour of creating, in effect.

Contrast this with Paul in Colossians: 1:6 For by him [Christ] all things were created...2:8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.

Time as agent could well be one of those principles.

And consider this in the light of Hebrews 11:3:

By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.

The primacy of word and not time, ‘chance’ or ‘the “impossible” becoming possible! What are theistic evolutionists doing? Implicitly they are placing the material outcome prior to the creating word of God who is love!

The timing of creation in Genesis 1, etc. obstructs pagan conceptualisations of ‘creation’ or ‘origins’ more generally. There is inevitably a timelessness to these conceptualisations, with what Eliade (in The Myth of the Eternal Return) refers to as a sacralised, or mythologised use of time, to disconnect us and the world of gods; time here is vague, allusive, cannot be pinned down...read Enuma Elish carefully. Its time references avoid being pinned down, and are unclear...like a liar in a police interview, attempting to make a case by being unclear. Of course, it does not and cannot work. We see through it immediately.

In the creation account, many things are being done theologically that don’t often get explored. One of them is that the use of concrete time references brings the creation into the existential frame that we occupy. God in making concrete time the one that he acts in, sharing his domain of action with us: he forms fellowship between us and himself, and starts the long process of establishing his credential for being worshipped by his successive acts in history (in the history that defines our worship of him). Denials that mutate the timing of Genesis 1 into something other than concrete timing that we understand destroys this: symbolic time, a 'framework' of events, the general theistic evolutionary reconfigurations of creation destroy the primary credential that God presents to us: that he created, and in terms that are congruent with our experience of time, space and 'extension'. What 'god' then does this leave us with? How is his action giving sense to our experiental engagement with history?

In this context it is critical to note that the Jewish sense of time was different from the symbolic or mythically indeterminate time, or the ‘sacred’ time of paganism that has to keep its ‘gods’ away from the real world, because they in fact have no place there. Theistic evolution takes us to this empty room. But for Jews time was unilinear rather than pagan cyclical. Even the repeated lapses of Israel into idolatry did not dispel belief in God’s overall movement with and orchestration in events. Had he not led his people to the promised land, and saved them repeatedly?

The Jewish God expressed himself in time. Nothing would ever be the same as before. That was the nature of time, and it starts with God embarking on creation by working in the flow of history as we do: forming a common experience, a common existential ground in the common days of working then rest. It is the start of God’s tabernacling with those he created in his image...in concrete acts that occurred in real time with real extension, as the word as prime went out to form the material world, the setting of our fellowship with our creator.

If we reject this: that the word was God and with God...etc, then we are left with Wald's time that can do anything...and an unworshipable ‘god’ who has left us for a vague untimed ‘sacred’ world...the world we are not in and cannot be in, the world where we have no fellowship with our creator.

6 days...really?

In The Economist:

1. In the beginning they destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground and knocked out the planes of Jordan, Iraq and Syria. That was Monday.
2. Then they broke Egypt’s massive defences in Sinai. That was Tuesday.
3. Next, they took the old city of Jerusalem and prayed. That was Wednesday.
4. Then they reached the Suez Canal. That was Thursday.
5. They ascended the Golan Heights. That was Friday.
6. Then they took the peaks overlooking the plain of Damascus. In the evening the world declared a ceasefire. That was Saturday.
7. And on the seventh day the soldiers of Israel rested.

Now, I'm not sure what this refers to. Perhaps it is a framework about something we don't know, to teach us the capability of the Israeli Defense Force.

Or, perhaps it is a counter-story to rebut the stories of Islamic supremacy that abound in the Islamic fairy story, the Koran

No, perhaps it is a type of the Temple Theology that points to Jewish wishful thinking for the old days...

Or, perhaps it is the account of something that happened.

If I believe an Israeli solder about this, I believe God about his 6-day story.

Doing so I can resist the pressure around me to start with a materially framed reality and proceed with a God-first ontology.

Could have...

I love the way people claim that God 'could have' 'used' evolution.

I don't know what 'used' is supposed to mean;do we posit a mechanism, and what is it; how are the links made in absence of God telling us...but what are we to do with 'could have'?

He either did or didn't; if he 'could have' show us how; give us an argument that understands evolution's historic contempt for the idea of a relating god from Epicurus onwards; let's see how the modern development of the idea intersects with a concrete actual God in a concrete actual world...'could have'?

I could have bought out BHP...if I had the money...I could have swum naked to Chile...if I could have...this phrase is an embarrasment of absence in argument and stands for nothing but an intellectual black hole: everything enters, and nothing comes out.

If this is merely a logical 'could have' it gets us nowhere, particularly as it pretends that the logic is patent, which it is not, and leaves it to the listener to imagine what the proponent's logic is and insert it. Its a bluff; God could not have used evolution, because he told us that he didn't. God doesn't deal in hypotheticals.

But there's more to it:

God 'could have' used evolution, but only if we rob both of their meaning. An easy error that is made is to think that 'evolution' is a real thing in the world; it is not! It is a theory that exists in the human mind. It was made up expressly to eliminate God. So 'evolution' and 'creation' (or 'design') are only 'compatible' if we talk about two things that didn't happen, two things that seem to float in an ill-considered make believe.

In the real world Evolution = not by God; creation = by God. So to put them together is to claim that  God used 'not by God' to create, celebrating Epicurus' separation of the 'gods' and the world in a most peculiar fashion.

Why would we follow a pagan?

Moreover, the small changes have to be 'evolutions' small changes from ooze to humans; there is no way this has been, or seemingly could be, explained in the real world (not the imagination of materialists who seem to think that it could have happened...).

So God could not have 'used' 'not by God' as the idea evaporates in a puff of meaninglessness.

An atheist tells us

Theistic evolutionists wax lyrical about the compatibility of the biblical doctrine of creation, and materialist ontology.

One atheist is unmoved (a comment on the Andrew Bolt Herald Sun blog):

Atheist1 8 hours ago

@ERNEST @Atheist1 @Dean Yes...I cured it by removing religions from being at all necessary and looking at the wonders of the Universe and the advances of science with open eyes,open ears and an open mind.How amazing that the genome project finally CONFIRMED Evolution,how incredible that the Universe is only recently discovered to be far larger than previously thought,etc,etc. 

Within a materialist framing, of course, I don't see where 'incredible' fits in though.

La La Land

Theistic evolutionists live in a different world to you and I. They live in La La Land. A world where belief about what is basic has no influence on all derivitive beliefs.

You and I and Peter Singer live in the real world. Singer is mistaken...he accepts evolution as explanatory of the real world. I do not. My belief springs from the word of God and leads where God lays out the path; Singer's belief leads elsewhere, as shows the quote below from his book Writings on an Ethical Life (Fourth Estate, 2000). TE-ers attempt to combine these 'worlds' into one; but it doesn't work, and leads (ill)logically to Singer's position. If the world truly is as Darwin (and Singer) believe, then it is so; if not, they are mistaken. There is no bridge between them.

Singer is mistaken about Coperncius and Galileo, who overturned not the biblical world, but the Aristotelian one...and good thing too; trouble is, TE-ers have their feet stuck in Aristotle, and not Moses.

Ken's ark

Driving the point of the real world that the Bible is in:
(Life Sized Noah's Ark)

KAK

I'm sure you are as turned off as I am by the routine of many American media award winners who want to 'thank Jesus' for their gong. Now, I don't want to decry their faith, but it sometimes seems like hollow sloganeering.

We do it differently in Australia. Here's the ending of Kerrie-Anne Kennerely's 2017 Logies acceptance speech:

"Darwin said it's not the strongest or the most intelligent species that will survive, it is the most adaptable to change. So thank you TV WEEK, thank you mum, thank you audience."

Not only no mention of God, but, our theistic evolutionist friends might note that her reference to Darwin does not conduct any hint of the creation being out of love and by God using a 'method' that is congenial to modern materialism.

Indeed, being completely oblivious to any hint of a loving creator it didn't lead her to praise her him in any way, nor did it suggest that the final reality is nevertheless persons in fellowship; nup, it was self centred (she is the one 'adaptable to change') built on random physical events that seem to presume a reality where the material is final.

I think the theistic-evolution project is a dead end idea running off the main street of materialism, and too weak to mount any criticism of said materialism.

What's the chance?

Often we talk about the probability of things in evolution, of life forming by natural processes, for example. Murray Eden put the nail in this with a paper he gave at the Wistar Institute many decades ago on the mathematical challenges to evolution.

But, what does it mean to have a probability of a 'one-off' event?

Some quotes from the very much  pro-evolutionist book A Beautiful Math by Tom Siegfried (pp. 206-7). Emphasis mine.

So here's a clue about what to do when you know nothing about the probabilities in the system you want to study. Choose a probability distribution that maximizes the entropy! Maximum entropy means maximum ignroance, and if you know nothing, ignorance is by definition at a maximum. Assuming maximum entropy/ignorance then is not just an assumption; it's a factual statement about your situation.
...
But what, exactly, does it mean to 'maximize the entropy'? It simply means choosing the probability distribution that would result from adding up all the possibilities permited by the laws of nature (since you know nothing you cannot leave out anything that's possible).

And, there's the rub. When we talk about the 'probability' of life evolving by chance, it must be a type of 'blunt instrument' probability because it remains to be established that there is anything possible in the story of life evolving by known processes. Life is a very low entropy phenomenon and needs a mechanism to overcome the comparitively high entropy equilibrium of the environment and then to keep it there as it 'evolves' the components, inter-dependent sub-systems and dependent machinery to do the job.

Paley's watch

Paley's watch remains one of the most famous arguments for design being produced by a designer. Of course the world and creationist discourse has moved on, but there are those who keep running the arguments of previous centuries and thinking they are cool in so doing.

The typical pro discussion runs this way.

But there's more:

I wonder if a watch is truly complex. It is ordered, no doubt, but it is fairly simple even as machines go: cogs and springs, essentially. Although the dependency chains from any component would be staggering, let alone the interactions between the chains to produce a watch.

However, I think the issue is that coming across a watch in a field we come across something that is not in equilibrium with its environment and that could not be produced by any local equilibrating process. It has very low entropy and very high specified information producing a radical disequilibrium in an artifact with strongly specified function. A mechanism/s is required to achieve this state in the absence of disequilibrating process.

The heart of Paley's argument is that this state is typically and reasonably achieved by a designer; that is, one who applies intelligence to the organisation of materials and processes, rather than the stochastic interplay of 'natural' factors which produce equilibrium even in the short run.

Creation by God...or was it Hayden?

I was amused to hear the announcer on ABC FM intro The Creation by Haydn, explaining that the problem for the librettist was that there was no story!

Unlike those who would have us believe that the creation account is (merely) a story, an arts person can see the blinding obvious: there's no story here folks, just facts; move along now.

Thus, of course, Haydn's librettist had to use his imagination to make a story out of the bare account he had to work from.

Scientist-satirising sense of humour

Creation issues pop up everywhere.

I came across this reference in Wheels Magazine from late 2015, by Stephen Corby (reviewing the Lamborghini Huracan; nice car too).

He even had a graphic of some fossils on the page too, just so we would remember what he was talking about.



Aside from getting it wrong (his view quotes an idea that was around centuries ago), and not understanding that fossils are evidence of rapid flood-like burial, he did have one observation, bottom, that shows how the average person views the history of death that evolution requires.

How do I tell my minister #2?

Using an illustration can be helpful.
Eg. Anyone could build a suspension bridge, but an engineer will do it quickly, efficiently, economically, safely and fit for purpose. Or would you prefer an evolutionary approach: almost endless mistakes, dead ends, death and disaster?

Perhaps you'd like to take your car to an evolutionary mechanic? He'd use any old part on any old location, may try water in the petrol tank...just trial an error for a couple of years, instead of an expert service that would have your car back in a day.

Contrast Proverbs 3:19-20: The LORD by wisdom founded the earth, By understanding He established the heavens.

People will talk of using 'evolutionary' processes: I quip "oh, full of waste, frustration, dead ends, delay and mistakes; how is that good?"

Compare Romans 4:17b: there's no foolish delay here, but God creating through his call.

Creation is full of purpose; evolution is devoid of it.

How do I tell my evolutionist minister about creation?

Firstly, I'd ask why he or she sees a difference in the Scriptures between God's action in respect of the physical world, and his action in the spiritual world when God integrates the two from the start.

If God can't tell us what really happened and the factual basis for relationship with him (and each other) and what his love 'really' did, then how can we have any faith, given that God as creator is the basis and starting point of faith? The creation account demonstrates our link with God, it doesn't merely assert it in story-book fashion, or as an illustration with a tenuous link with the real world, but tells us how it came about, with objective clarity and detail that dismisses any attempt to 'paganise' it.

Many ministers split the two, in a move that has more to do with philosophical Idealism than the 'concrete realism' of the Bible. This allows them to follow pagan philosophy and split the 'world' into a 'really real' spiritual world, and an unimportant physical world, where God is not as serious as he is in the spiritual world. But, they have to tell us what the real really is: is it as per evolution, where material is the final basis for reality, and love, relationship, and moral meaning are just stuck onto it for no particular reason, or is it as per creation, where the personal God: wisdom acting in loving relationship is the starting point of all being and the one in whom all being makes sense and coheres together.

The Scriptures belie any attempt to graft the personal onto the material, but turn this over and make the material reliant on the personal God. The Genesis creation account, aside from anything else, puts God's creative intention in the very physical world where his spiritual intent plays out. The two are intertwined.

What's it all about?

I've just finished reading Evolution's Achilles' Heels (Robert Carter, ed.); much there of interest, of course (with the usual detractor websites springing up). The last chapter was the most interesting for me, but the least well done. It is entitled "Ethics and Morality" and gives a fair tour of that topic, but one that ends up, despite a disclaimer, tending to make Christianity look like a system of ethics; back to the past of 'do this...don't do that' Christian life.

It is far more, of course: the challenge of the Bible to the modern world is that of how one structures the world. The World's basic or first philosophy could be characterised as simple materialism, which courts the naturalistic fallacy: that one can somehow derive an 'ought' from an 'is' (the world is thus, so therefore you ought to do 'x'), and must contend with not only a biological information code (whence 'information' in a materialist world?), but an immaterial language that makes the code meaningful as a crucial constituent of it materialism. The Bible's first philosophy is what might be called 'theistic personism'. Basic to it all is that God in community of persons (the trinity) is, loves, and acts with wisdom. This makes our shared echo of his personhood unavoidably basic to being (i.e. ontologically basic).

This feature of the Real drives all else. It gives the person significance over and above material; whereas the materialist world makes the person derivative of an arbitrary material assemblage with no claim to any particular value, status or substance.

Love between persons is therefore the fundamental aspect of us as persons in community (and in existence) and 'information', wisdom and communication are sourced in this: not 'epiphenomena' of matter, but real in their own right.

The 'ethics and morality' chapter should have built on this, with the point made of us not being able to live consistently humanly (and raising the question of the source of that value) being isolated by our own will from basic being (God) and needing to rejoin community with him through his extension in love towards us to become whole.