Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Ken Wilbur
After having acquired and read alot of Ken Wilbur's stuff, I've returned them to the bookstore.
And have come to the conclusion, that Ken Wilbur's work has no place on a Christian's Bookshelf.
Here's my reasoning (and rather than recreating the wheel, I'm quoting from a review which I found after I'd already come to the conclusions presented.)
- Seraphim
"...Wilber insists that the final reality is nondual — an all-encompassing and absolute oneness (see 226-32). Yet this nonduality supposedly integrates and transcends all the lower realms of being — including the idea that God is an independent personal being. Tapping into this ever-present state of nonduality, "You are not in the Kosmos, the Kosmos is in you, and you are purest Emptiness. The entire universe is a transparent shimmering of the Divine" (229). However, Wilber claims that this absolute, nondual Emptiness is one with all the manifested forms of the physical universe (the many). Nonduality is the absolute reality, and the manifestations of everyday life, which involve subject-object relationships, are relative realities (231-32).
But Wilber cannot have it both ways. If nonduality/oneness is the absolute, ultimate, and comprehensive reality, this logically excludes any of the dualisms we find in our everyday experience. There cannot be many people, rocks, trees, or birds if the supreme reality is one without duality; they would have to be dismissed as illusions. If nonduality is the comprehensive reality, as Wilber claims, this destroys all duality; formlessness is incompatible with form. Nevertheless, Wilber illogically asserts that both dual and nondual states are somehow real.
The Christian has no such problem with the relationship of the one to the many. God is a unity in diversity — one God in three persons.3 God’s creation is one uni-verse, but it consists of a great diversity of objects, events, and relationships. Neither God nor His creation will dissolve into a faceless oneness.
Wilber’s god is not a being who creates, knows, plans, loves, judges, and feels. These activities require the distinction of subject and object and a personal agent who engages in them. Wilber’s Spirit is beyond personality. Nevertheless, Wilber, undaunted by contradiction, often smuggles in personal language concerning the impersonal Spirit. He speaks of seeing our original "face" and hearing the "whispers" of Spirit (120, 339). These references are blatant anthropomorphisms, since Spirit is impersonal all the way down. The impersonal has no face and can utter nothing. One cannot have a personal relationship with Emptiness. If all is one, there can be no relationships, for a relationship involves at least two entities. Wilber says that "the twoness of experience is the fundamental lie, the primordial untruthfulness" (233). If so, Spirit cannot be "compassionate" as Wilber claims (338), since his god is not a separate moral agent who acts in love. Wilber’s use of personal language for the impersonal absolute is a classic case of what Francis Schaeffer called "semantic mysticism" — terms that have no philosophical application within a world view are invoked for a deceptive emotional effect.4
Wilber asserts, "The radical secret of the supreme identity is that there is only God" (305). When the Spirit recognizes itself "there is no one anywhere to watch it, or even sing its praises" (247). Christians, quite to the contrary, worship and enjoy their Creator and Redeemer; Wilber embraces only Emptiness.
The problem of good and evil also plagues Wilber. Since Spirit is nondual, it is beyond ethical categories. Meaningful moral distinctions require an objective difference between the dualities of good and evil. Wilber is in two minds about this (which is not good for a nondualist). He is happy that evolution has taken us beyond human sacrifice, slavery, and the subjection of women, all of which he rejects as wrong. He also views the KKK and Nazism as evil and admits there are "pathological states [of consciousness] of what can only be Kosmic terror, Kosmic evil, Kosmic horror" (211). However, he speaks positively of the mystical practices of Tantric yoga that "don’t abandon defiled states" but rather "enter them with enthusiasm, and play with them" because "there is only God" (239). He quickly adds that these practices occur within ethical frameworks! Yet the possibility of an ethical framework demands an ethical reality that allows for differentiation between good and evil. Nonduality is not up to the job. Wilber asserts morality without any theological foundation for it. There is an irresolvable tension between his God-given conscience and his defective world view.
Elton Trueblood observed that evil is a philosophical problem for Christian theism; yet evil is a philosophical disaster for pantheism.5 The pantheist must either say that evil is illusory because nondualism dissolves moral distinctions or claim that God is both good and evil, in which case God would not be a being of supreme and perfect value. Wilber is trapped within this theological prison.
He is also incarcerated in the silence of unknowing. Wilber affirms that the ultimate reality is "unqualifiable" (137, 225). If so, then no one can logically affirm anything about it. What cannot be described cannot serve as an explanation for anything. Nevertheless, Wilber does qualify the Emptiness by saying it is the ground and goal of evolution, the source of all historical manifestations, the highest state of consciousness, and so forth. This is contradictory; he should remain silent (along with Emptiness). The Christian, on the other hand, is not abandoned to a speechless prison. God has spoken; we must listen. Emptiness, however, is mute.
Lastly, Wilber cannot escape the problem of salvation. Although everybody is already one with the nondual divine, most people are somehow ignorant of their identity and so become narcissistic and selfish (333). Therefore, we must meditate to attain ever higher levels of consciousness (217-18) until we reach the nondual, which is, paradoxically, already our state of being. Christians avoid these hopeless paradoxes by admitting their moral failings before a holy God and by calling out to God for forgiveness and new life through the atoning death of Jesus Christ and the cosmic victory of His resurrection from the dead.
In his "brief history of everything" Wilber mentions Christ only a few times in passing (101, 132, 197-98). When he does refer to Jesus, he subverts the biblical teachings about Him. Thus Wilber’s attempt to explain everything ends up ultimately explaining nothing, because he has excluded the one who has supremacy over all things (Col. 1:18) and who is "the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6). The premier modern apologist for pantheistic monism has sadly built his house on the sand."
—Reviewed by Douglas Groothuis
1 Unlike Wilber, Hegel might better be classified as a panentheist (all is in God) than as a strict pantheist (all is God.
2 For a good critique of evolutionary theories, see Philip Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 2d ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993). On this, see J. P. Moreland, ed., The Creation Hypothesis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994).
3 This is not a logical contradiction, since Christianity does not claim that three equals one.
4 See Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), 55-62.
5 See D. Elton Trueblood, A Place to Stand (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 67-68; see also David Clark and Norman Geisler, Apologetics in the New Age (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1990), 203-22.
And have come to the conclusion, that Ken Wilbur's work has no place on a Christian's Bookshelf.
Here's my reasoning (and rather than recreating the wheel, I'm quoting from a review which I found after I'd already come to the conclusions presented.)
- Seraphim
"...Wilber insists that the final reality is nondual — an all-encompassing and absolute oneness (see 226-32). Yet this nonduality supposedly integrates and transcends all the lower realms of being — including the idea that God is an independent personal being. Tapping into this ever-present state of nonduality, "You are not in the Kosmos, the Kosmos is in you, and you are purest Emptiness. The entire universe is a transparent shimmering of the Divine" (229). However, Wilber claims that this absolute, nondual Emptiness is one with all the manifested forms of the physical universe (the many). Nonduality is the absolute reality, and the manifestations of everyday life, which involve subject-object relationships, are relative realities (231-32).
But Wilber cannot have it both ways. If nonduality/oneness is the absolute, ultimate, and comprehensive reality, this logically excludes any of the dualisms we find in our everyday experience. There cannot be many people, rocks, trees, or birds if the supreme reality is one without duality; they would have to be dismissed as illusions. If nonduality is the comprehensive reality, as Wilber claims, this destroys all duality; formlessness is incompatible with form. Nevertheless, Wilber illogically asserts that both dual and nondual states are somehow real.
The Christian has no such problem with the relationship of the one to the many. God is a unity in diversity — one God in three persons.3 God’s creation is one uni-verse, but it consists of a great diversity of objects, events, and relationships. Neither God nor His creation will dissolve into a faceless oneness.
Wilber’s god is not a being who creates, knows, plans, loves, judges, and feels. These activities require the distinction of subject and object and a personal agent who engages in them. Wilber’s Spirit is beyond personality. Nevertheless, Wilber, undaunted by contradiction, often smuggles in personal language concerning the impersonal Spirit. He speaks of seeing our original "face" and hearing the "whispers" of Spirit (120, 339). These references are blatant anthropomorphisms, since Spirit is impersonal all the way down. The impersonal has no face and can utter nothing. One cannot have a personal relationship with Emptiness. If all is one, there can be no relationships, for a relationship involves at least two entities. Wilber says that "the twoness of experience is the fundamental lie, the primordial untruthfulness" (233). If so, Spirit cannot be "compassionate" as Wilber claims (338), since his god is not a separate moral agent who acts in love. Wilber’s use of personal language for the impersonal absolute is a classic case of what Francis Schaeffer called "semantic mysticism" — terms that have no philosophical application within a world view are invoked for a deceptive emotional effect.4
Wilber asserts, "The radical secret of the supreme identity is that there is only God" (305). When the Spirit recognizes itself "there is no one anywhere to watch it, or even sing its praises" (247). Christians, quite to the contrary, worship and enjoy their Creator and Redeemer; Wilber embraces only Emptiness.
The problem of good and evil also plagues Wilber. Since Spirit is nondual, it is beyond ethical categories. Meaningful moral distinctions require an objective difference between the dualities of good and evil. Wilber is in two minds about this (which is not good for a nondualist). He is happy that evolution has taken us beyond human sacrifice, slavery, and the subjection of women, all of which he rejects as wrong. He also views the KKK and Nazism as evil and admits there are "pathological states [of consciousness] of what can only be Kosmic terror, Kosmic evil, Kosmic horror" (211). However, he speaks positively of the mystical practices of Tantric yoga that "don’t abandon defiled states" but rather "enter them with enthusiasm, and play with them" because "there is only God" (239). He quickly adds that these practices occur within ethical frameworks! Yet the possibility of an ethical framework demands an ethical reality that allows for differentiation between good and evil. Nonduality is not up to the job. Wilber asserts morality without any theological foundation for it. There is an irresolvable tension between his God-given conscience and his defective world view.
Elton Trueblood observed that evil is a philosophical problem for Christian theism; yet evil is a philosophical disaster for pantheism.5 The pantheist must either say that evil is illusory because nondualism dissolves moral distinctions or claim that God is both good and evil, in which case God would not be a being of supreme and perfect value. Wilber is trapped within this theological prison.
He is also incarcerated in the silence of unknowing. Wilber affirms that the ultimate reality is "unqualifiable" (137, 225). If so, then no one can logically affirm anything about it. What cannot be described cannot serve as an explanation for anything. Nevertheless, Wilber does qualify the Emptiness by saying it is the ground and goal of evolution, the source of all historical manifestations, the highest state of consciousness, and so forth. This is contradictory; he should remain silent (along with Emptiness). The Christian, on the other hand, is not abandoned to a speechless prison. God has spoken; we must listen. Emptiness, however, is mute.
Lastly, Wilber cannot escape the problem of salvation. Although everybody is already one with the nondual divine, most people are somehow ignorant of their identity and so become narcissistic and selfish (333). Therefore, we must meditate to attain ever higher levels of consciousness (217-18) until we reach the nondual, which is, paradoxically, already our state of being. Christians avoid these hopeless paradoxes by admitting their moral failings before a holy God and by calling out to God for forgiveness and new life through the atoning death of Jesus Christ and the cosmic victory of His resurrection from the dead.
In his "brief history of everything" Wilber mentions Christ only a few times in passing (101, 132, 197-98). When he does refer to Jesus, he subverts the biblical teachings about Him. Thus Wilber’s attempt to explain everything ends up ultimately explaining nothing, because he has excluded the one who has supremacy over all things (Col. 1:18) and who is "the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6). The premier modern apologist for pantheistic monism has sadly built his house on the sand."
—Reviewed by Douglas Groothuis
1 Unlike Wilber, Hegel might better be classified as a panentheist (all is in God) than as a strict pantheist (all is God.
2 For a good critique of evolutionary theories, see Philip Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 2d ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993). On this, see J. P. Moreland, ed., The Creation Hypothesis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994).
3 This is not a logical contradiction, since Christianity does not claim that three equals one.
4 See Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), 55-62.
5 See D. Elton Trueblood, A Place to Stand (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 67-68; see also David Clark and Norman Geisler, Apologetics in the New Age (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1990), 203-22.
