Notes on a durable deity
Charles Sanders Peirce is not celebrated by more than a handful of theologians and still less by devout religionists, and with good reason. He champions a durable deity whose existence he nailed down in the measurable regions of science, logic and reason as he evolved these words in his fertile mind.
The note on the “new conception” below and what will soon follow provide the general tone of his apologetic. His observations suggest that the universal mentality that is emerging is one that can widen, not narrow, inquiry. That it can move to a tenable universalism that is consistent with reason. Ultimately what Peirce suggests is what Triadic Philosophy is at pains to underline and expand and amplify: That the person, the individual, is a universally-attuned center able to commune with the entirety of the Reality in which he or she lives.
The deity that can be assumed in all of this is not what atheists have trouble with. Nor it is the pugilistic projection of the addled human mind that finds its ways into the authoritative texts that religionists venerate. This deity is simply the way things are in all their infinite and infinitely variegated complexity. Finally the rules become fewer. The miracles more tangible. And the truth more comprehensible.
The durable deity for me is just what underlies what is here, whatever it may be. Ultimately it contains its end which I believe is the fusion of truth and beauty via the gradual elimination of harm from the MO of human beings. I genuinely believe that most of the terms philosophy has built upon are merely finite utilities and that the ultimate structure of things is that to which everything tends. This goal or end can be expressed in the realization of values culminating in the triumph of freedom and love.
Peirce saw this as a move toward the agapaic — agape being the Greek term for selfless love. I see love simply as all of its meanings realized and freedom as its fullness perceived as that which exists when love is fully enabled.
Hints of this are not far off. Our days can know them. They do not depend on who we understand ourselves to be. The reason which a durable deity makes possible exists beyond anyone’s perception and within anyone’s perception should one seek, ask and knock, wanting to commune with same.
Peirce: CP 2.33 Cross-Ref:††
33. The new conception will not be content to be restricted to the particular phenomena it was devised to explain: it will insist upon applying itself to analogous phenomena, and to others analogous to these again, without stint. For that purpose it must be widened and probably simplified and rendered more agreeable to reason. It will not be content with explaining the history of thought, but will aim to explain history in general. It will not be content with accounting for man, but will wish to grasp all the forms in the universe, which is greater than man. It will not be content with an accidental universe, but will wish to assimilate every possible universe that the mathematician can suggest. It will not be content with allowing to the unreflective view a sort of subordinate legitimacy, but will insist upon elevating it to a truth in full harmony with its own.
