> On Jan 23, 2017, at 3:40 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> > wrote: > > So I think we can say pretty definitively that Peirce's conception of God, at > least in 1908, does involve God actually creating out of "nothing," which he > consistently characterizes as "less than a blank."
Right, I recognize that. However this seems somewhat at odds with Augustine and creation ex nihil where the nothing is not the nothing of Peirce’s quasi-neoplatonism. So there’s equivocation going on. That is Peirce’s conception of creation is closer (albeit not the same) as what one finds in process theology. Peirce says the nothing is “boundless possibility” as opposed to particular possibility (which is firstness). (CP 6.217) “The zero collection is bare, abstract, germinal possibility. The continuum is concrete, developed possibility.” (RLT 162) Part of the problem is that Peirce’s cosmology ends up providing that God himself as something real also emerges out of the same nothingness from which creation proceeds. So this is quite different from Augustine. Again we’re here at that point I’ve often seen as the most controversial of Peirce’s thought. It’s not necessarily well developed for reasonably good reasons. I think that in some ways Peirce is retracing thinking that went on in traditional neoPlatonism (i.e. non-Christian). There are several key differences of Peirce from traditional creation ex nihilo such as the ontological divide between creator and creation which isn’t part of Peirce’s conception. The meaning of nothing, as I mentioned. It’s also different from certain neoPlatonic conceptions in terms of the ordering of time. “The evolutionary process is, therefore, not a mere evolution of the existing universe, but rather a process by which the very Platonic forms themselves have become or are becoming developed.” (CP 6.194) While time is tricky to discuss in neoPlatonism typically the One is seen as logically preceding such matters. So time is the unveiling of in spirit of something there is already a form for. Peirce inverts this which also puts him at odds with creation ex nihilo since Augustine and most medievals see everything complete prior to time. That is God creates the universe whereas Peirce sees God as “to be now creating the universe” (CP 6.505) While I wouldn’t say Peirce is a pantheist quite the way say Spinoza is, there is a certain similarity. The famous passage in “A Guess at the Riddle” shows him thinking in this direction. The starting-point of the universe, God the Creator, is the Absolute First; the terminus of the universe, God completely revealed, is the Absolute Second; every state of the universe at a measurable point of time is the third. (CP 1.362) How to take this isn’t completely clear, especially given his notion of nothing. And there is always a risk of mixing quotes from different time periods. But it seems like out of nothing God appears and continues to create out of nothing which is the universe unveiling itself until God is completely revealed as the end of the universe. Again I’m not sure how to take all of this. It’s ideas I’m a bit skeptical about. I think the places Peirce is discussing these things are at the limit of what we can even do with language. I’m also not sure, as I’ve mentioned before, how to connect this with the theist interventionist God that sometimes Peirce seems a bit skeptical of.
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