We all long to be personal and personalized; whether Greek or Gentile, whether in the Bronze Age or the Information Age all people desire to have relationship. It is this drive that causes people, even pagan people who reject God, to extrapolate and project out upon what they have available to them as a transcendent point of personalization. This was true for the classical Hellenistic philosophers just as it was for early modern thinkers like Spinoza and even 21^st century physicists. We will find personalization no matter how out of order and perverse the form of that is, we will press forth and find a way to find some sort of relational quality even in the deepest darkest reaches of space; all in an attempt to quench this ongoing thirst and longing for finding a personalizing force that can ground my desires as a human being to be a relational animal.

Colin Gunton, as he is developing some thinking on ontology with reference to Plotinus, and his impact on Western thought modes in this regard, helps us to appreciate how what I just up-pointed is so in the history and heritage of Western intellectual thought frames. It is interesting to see this reality, and recognize how pantheism is so trenchant in the hearts and minds of people who reject or are unaware of the reality of the Christian God who is indeed the personal ground humanity as a whole was created to find relational satisfaction within and from in koinonial bond. Gunton writes:

Thus the words ‘nature’ and ‘evolution’ are often hypostatised — and, indeed, capitalised — almost as if they are agents that achieve ends, and thus clearly operate as secularised versions of the doctrine of providence, which they displace. Peter Atkins, a chemist, is a particularly egregious proponent of the personalising not only of nature as a whole, but of parts of it. ‘Once molecules have learned to compete and to create other molecules in their own image, elephants and things resembling elephants will in due course be found roaming through the countryside.’ (Just like that!) More is to come: molecules are ‘equipped’ (by whom or what?), they ‘eat’ other molecules, though we are not always sure which eat and which are eaten, they ‘keep’  less successful molecules ‘in herds’ and so on, and that is all by the second page of the book. Mary Midgley draws on other parts of the same book to make a similar point. I quote her at length:

Atkins constantly treats Chaos as a positive force guiding the world in a remarkably full sense, performing many of the roles formerly attributed to God, and seems to regard it as simply a form of Chance . . . [The] extraordinary mixture of strong teleological language with inflationary misuse of the concept of Chaos marks a fairly complete bankruptcy of real explanation.

How easily it happens that where God is not longer understood as the overall creator and upholder of the universe there is a reversion to the pagan attribution of agency to the impersonal worlds of molecules, evolution and chaos. The choice is inescapable: either God or the world itself provides the reason why things are as they are. To ‘personalise’ the universe or parts of it, particularly inert substances like molecules, is to succumb to crude forms of superstition.[1]

The human heart doesn’t change. No matter what period of human history we refer to, idolatry is just the same. We will attribute personal attributes to a piece of wood just as quickly (because of technology) as we will attribute the same to molecules, atoms, and neutrinos.

Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness ² Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?” ³ Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases ⁴ Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. ⁵ They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see.
⁶ They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. ⁷ They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. ⁸ Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them. –Psalm 115

²² Claiming to be wise, they became fools, ²³ and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. –Romans 1

The human heart was designed for relationship; it recognizes that there is something more, something transcendent that must ground that; something extra nos outside of us that must be the ultimacy we long for in relationship. Since the heart of stone rejects its actual source and reality in the living God it will cling to all fanciful imaginations about who or what might serve as the replacement; a replacement who ends up looking curiously like the imaginer seeking some sort of relief and solace in a transcendent reality—even if that reality turns out to be a stick or a house (of cards).

Let God be true and every man a liar!

[1] Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical And Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), Loc 583, 590, 596 kindle.