God, World and I

(06. 2. 21. 동아 시사 발언대)

 

God, World and I

Chong Tack Kim (stevision@naver.com)

It seems that the greatest of all our concerns is God and world. A lot of thinkers have reflected on this subject and, interested in the existence of the God and the world, have said their opinions about it. There are by and large two standpoints to this. one is pantheism in which the God and the world are one; the other is the theism of Christianity in which both of them are essentially different from each other. Here, of course, the God has self-existence forever, while the world was created by him at some time past.

Much interested in science since I became a pupil, I was anxious to know the way in which the world exists. How do my body and the world exist? I wanted to know the how of their existence. As I came to believe in God, I really wanted to know in what manner he created the world. When I was a high school student, I became aware that the world is not a part of the God and that the God, by his omniscience and omnipotence, created the world out of nothing. At that time I perceived that all the forces of the world, including gravity, do not actually exist but just seem to us as if they existed. The reason for this is that there is not gravity as a reality in a television set even though an apple as a picture is falling to the earth in the TV-screen. Extending the thought that man, being able to make televisions, can make it possible for pictures to appear on the screen, we can come to the conclusion that all physical forces themselves don't exist because the world is just a phenomenon appearing to us, a phenomenon which is produced in God by his faculty. By the way I misunderstood then and thought that a present object and a past object considered to be the selfsame were not in fact ontologically the very same.

Studying physics at university, I realized that the universe is a rational world based on mathematics, acting according to Schroedinger's differential equation and Einstein's theory of relativity. However, both Schroedinger's equation and Einstein's theory of relativity are just the manners in which the world appearing to us moves, and the problem of the being itself of the world still remained to be solved. It was not until I became a junior that I understood the how of the existence of the matter, or the phenomenon of what is called the world. A thing in front of us is an ‘assumption’ that it exists there, having such appearance. This assumption, of course, is willed by God who exists there where the thing is thought to exist. And the thing exists to us when we take this assumption for reality. The reason why an object happens to exist there is that all, world and we, happen in one God. I perceived in those days that an object existing in the space is ‘a lump of God's will’. So I was able to understand that the world is ‘the word’ of God, because the word consists of will and contents(information). The assumption that an object exists somewhere with such and such appearance just amounts to the will(assumption) containing the information(such and such appearance), which is generated by and in God. ‘Assumption’ denotes creation from nothing; ‘assumption of God’ denotes that it becomes a reality to a man, a creature of the God. Therefore if we ignore the influence of the self-existing God, things surely existing before our eyes don't in fact exist! The world in front of us exists as a reality only because the God acknowledges(wills) both the being of us and the being of the world.

I entered a graduate school of theology after many complications. Now it became a matter of concern and interest of mine to theologize the mystery of being that I had discovered as an undergraduate. First of all, the image of God came into my notice. Genesis has it that man was created in God's image. Now my thought evolved to the conclusion that just as the God, the spiritual Being who created the world by his word, cognizes his word as the world, so a man, a spiritual being who was created in God's image, cognizes God's word as the world, too. Here we can infer from this conclusion, that a man is composed of body and spirit and that the very subject or the agent of the cognition of the world is not man's body but his spirit. The body of man is the word of God as is the world. At that time I accounted the God to be a being like a monad that has nothing to do with the space, because I thought that the space, which is nothing, couldn't be a part of God's being. When I knew how computers operated, I furthered my theological ontology to think that the God as the monad realized three worlds(the heaven, our universe and the hell) which were virtual realities, and that spirits of men were participating in one of these three worlds. It is like a TV station that sends electric waves of three channels at the same time, so that a TV set may select one of them. God is compared to a TV station providing three channels, spirit of man to a TV set. The problem of the existence of the world is resolved when we think that the omniscient and omnipotent God made three virtual realities in his memory and that he allows the spirits of human beings that were created in his image to participate in one of them. Needless to say, this explanation doesn't need to be verified by contemporary science, because laws of physics are just those according to which God makes the virtual reality move. The laws of physics do not assure us of the aseity and autonomy of the matter, furthermore are not pretexts to reject the existence of God and his creation from nothing, but are those that reveal his wisdom and ability.

I hoped to write a thesis based on that thought, but had to write one with other subject and graduated from the theological graduate school. Later I came to understand, perpending on the subject, and decisively by the instruction of the God, that the world is not a virtual reality and that the world is displayed three-dimensionally in the real space. The first enlightenment that I experienced during the campus life was indeed right. The ground for this is that the human perceptions are three-dimensional. In view of stereophony and three-dimensional feelings of organs in the body and of skin, I could not help concluding that the world as well as human being has three-dimensional distribution of being, and that therefore the God who created three-dimensional world can exist in the real space. Herewith the God having created the world at least doesn't have a monadic structure of being. And because the vacant space, a kind of nothing, can't be an element of God's being, I reasoned that the God, subsisting eternally in himself excluding the space, is able to reveal himself into the three-dimensional space as well, creating the world. The world is not merely a virtual reality, because the ‘will’ of God verily exists in the space; and because of the selfsameness of the will of the only God, a present object is the very same object that existed a second ago. It is possible for an object to maintain its identity in spite of the time's passing because there exists the same God who is always, regardless of the time forever.

Now the spirit of man manifests itself as an issue. The body of man turned out to be God's word. Then, how about the spirit of man? The spirit of man is not such a thing as could be created from nothing. It is because the spirit of man exists really in the real space after it was created by God. This existence has a different dimension of being from that of material matter. The being of material matter is ultimately God's ‘will’, and it is in God's memory that the material objects find the ground of their being. But a human spirit, though a being under the influence of God, stands somewhat independent of God. Therefore I'd like to say that the God created independent human spirits out of the spiritual matter(靈質) over against the material matter(物質), spiritual matter which God had ‘possessed’. And I maintain that no one may further the reasoning at this point, to wit by this I mean the suspension of judgment! The cause is as follows: the human spirit was not created from nothing, so that we have to say either that the matter of spirit was emitted from a part of God's being or that the God, having made, with his own being, the spiritual matter different from his being, created the human spirits from this spiritual matter; which leads, however, to a heretical assertion because of the deification of human being. We must only expect that this problem will be answered decidedly by God, later when we enter the heaven. Because the teachings of the church have rejected the theory of emanation so far, the matter of human spirit can not be said to come out of the being of God. So we must for the time being stop where we say God ‘possessed’ the matter of spirit. No another step from here!

Such a theological ontology as this overcomes the atheistic attitudes of modern science, and grants us the independence of theology, and offers us, showing consistency with science, the explanation about the origin of the being of the world as well, which the science can't give. And this ontology attests that the arguments of Buddhism on the existence of the world are nothing but a fallacy! This is, in short, a good theological ontology for today's generation.

With this, for me who majored in physics and theology, there remains no unsolved question about the being of the world. I write this in order to give an additional explanation about the existence of the world, to “Being and Theology”, which I wrote in series on the internet site donga.com before. (You might come across so many errors in grammar and verbalism there (and here also) for I'm a Korean.) Life resides in truth. This theological ontology is the truth that tells you about the existence of the world. This ontology has life. The future theology will be built on this newly manifested truth. Hence a student for a theological doctorate who is interested in the theological ontology or the doctrine of creation may study on my theological ontology. Of course as you know, this officious exhortation is a little presumptuous. But I think you will get something first when you seek first! This ontology is at least better than Hegel's and that of Buddhism. Buddhists are liars!

 

>> You are referred to "창조주 하나님(God the Creator)" for the revised view. <<