Convergent Cosmogony

Unlike Plato I'm Writing This Down

Last July, I wrote an essay entitled On the Problem of Evil, in which I touched on certain topics of cosmogonic interest. Specifically:

What if we think about creation differently? Creation ex nihilo was not the original understanding of the Bible. The ancients coupled creation with order, and destruction with chaos. This worldview lives on in the words we have inherited from them. The English word “cosmos,” nowadays a synonym for “the universe” or “all of creation” derives from the Ancient Greek κόσμος or (kosmos), meaning “order” or “government.” Likewise, the English word “chaos,” nowadays a synonym for “anarchy” or “disorder,” derives from the Ancient Greek χάος (kháos), meaning “void” or “nothingness.”

To the ancient mind, the statement “there was nothing until God created the universe” is the same statement as “there was chaos until God created order.” To annihilate order is to annihilate creation; to bring about chaos is to bring about destruction.

We find this doctrine across many ancient societies: The Hellenic kosmos, the Vedic rta, the Buddhist dharma, the Sumerian mes, and the Egyptian maat. Each subject of the Pharaoh was expected to follow his or her maat in order to hold back chaos; to not follow them ran the risk of chaos breaking forth and destroying the cosmos.

Applying this thinking to our syllogism:

• Premise 1. God created order/cosmos from chaos/void.

• Premise 2: Order/cosmos is good.

• Premise 3: Chaos/void is the absence of order/cosmos.

• Premise 4: Evil is the absence of good.

• Therefore, the absence of order/cosmos is the absence of good.

• Therefore, chaos/void is the absence of good.

• Therefore, chaos/void is evil.

After I broadcast this presumably-novel insight, a few commentators politely alerted me to the fact that this doctrine was approximately 2,000 years old. It had existed during the period of Middle Platonism, embodied in the writings of Plutarch. That lead to a follow up, where I quoted Plutarch at length:

What preceded the generation of the world was disorder, disorder not incorporeal or immobile or inanimate, but of corporeality amorphous and incoherent, and of motivity demented and irrational, and this was the discord of soul that has not reason.

The Universe [is not] without mind, without reason, and without guidance, and tossed about at random, nor is there One Reason that rules and directs all things…[There are] two opposite Principles and two antagonistic Powers; the one guiding us to the right hand and along the straight road, the other upsetting and rebuffing us, that Life becomes of a mixed nature; and also the Universe… is made inconsistent with itself, and variable and susceptible of frequent changes.

The Pythagoreans characterize these Principles by several names: the Good One, as the "One," the "Definite," the "Abiding," the "Straight," the "Exceeding," the "Square," the "Equal," the "Right-handed," the "Bright;" the Bad One as the "Two," the "Indefinite," the "Unstable," the "Crooked," the "Sufficient," the "Unequally-sided" (parallelogram), the "Unequal," the "Left-handed," the "Dark"—inasmuch as these are supposed the final causes of existence—Anaxagoras defines them as "Mind," and the "Infinite;" Aristotle, the one as "Form," the other as "Privation¹." Plato, as it were mystifying and veiling the matter, denominates in many places one of the opposing Principles as "The Same;" the second, as "The Other;" but in his "Laws," being now grown older, he no longer speaks in riddles and symbolically, but names them directly. "Not by one soul," says he, "was the universe set in motion, but by several, perhaps, at all events, by not less than Two; whereof the one is beneficent, the other antagonistic to this, and the creator of opposite effects

Over the past year, I’ve sought further insight on these concepts in some notable books, among them John Dillon’s The Middle Platonists and Dmitri Nikulin’s The Other Plato. But to my astonishment, I also encountered similar concepts when doing unrelated reading — mathematician Wolfgang Smith’s The Vertical Ascent and Christopher Langan’s Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory.

This essay is my attempt to synthesize the strands I’ve discovered in these works and bring them together.

Plato’s Unwritten Doctrine

The Other Plato is a series of essays describing the so-called “Tübingen Interpretation” of Plato's Inner-Academic Teachings. According to the Tübingen Interpretation, Plato’s written dialogues were merely introductory texts designed for a public (exoteric) audience. Plato’s actual doctrines were left unwritten, to be conveyed verbally from master to student in the inner circle of his Academy.

The Tübingen Interpretation is widely accepted and taught in Europe but is not popular among American scholars, who largely take the position that the unwritten doctrines were created by later thinkers. Decades of academic warfare have spilled the bloody ink of ten thousand pages without resolving this issue, so I shall not try to; I will just say that having now read The Other Plato I think the Tübingen Interpretation is correct.

Unfortunately, the book is so academic as to be almost unquotable. Therefore I’m going to rely on Infogalactic’s well-written summary of Plato’s unwritten doctrine.² The encyclopedia explains:

[T]wo fundamental 'ur-principles' are thought to constitute the basis of Plato's unwritten doctrines:

The One: the principle of unity that makes things definite and determinate

The Indefinite Dyad: the principle of 'indeterminacy' and 'unlimitedness' (

The One and the Indefinite Dyad are the ultimate ground of everything because the realm of Plato's Forms and the totality of reality derive from their interaction. The whole manifold of sensory phenomena rests in the end on only two factors. Form issues from the One, which is the productive factor; the formless Indefinite Dyad serves as the substrate for the activity of the One. Without such a substrate, the One could produce nothing. All Being rests upon the action of the One upon the Indefinite Dyad. This action sets limits to the formless, gives it Form and particularity, and is therefore also the principle of individuation that brings separate entities into existence. A mixture of both principles underlies all Being.

Depending upon which principle dominates in a thing, either order or disorder reigns. The more chaotic something is, the more strongly the presence of the Indefinite Dyad is at work.

This is, almost point-for-point, the same doctrine that Plutarch expressed in his writing; and also very much what I had independently derived. So, to the extent that one believes the Tübingen Interpretation, my current conceptualization of cosmogony traces its lineage directly back to Plato.

Many of the earliest Christian theologians were heavily influenced by both Plutarch and Plato, and saw Plato’s One as the same Being as the Christian God. It is noteworthy that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo was not widespread among early Christianity, most of whose first thinkers broadly accepted the idea of something like the Indefinite Dyad or Chaos.

Aristotle’s Philosophy

For Aristotle, all beings are a mix of actuality (what they are now) and potentiality (what they could possibly become). Pure Actuality is a concept used to describe the unchangeable, perfect state of being. It's the realization of all potentials - fully actualized, unchangeable, and perfect. This is a role often ascribed to the Divine, or God, in Aristotle's metaphysics. Pure Potentia, on the other hand, is the potential for change or transformation, which in its pure form is undetermined and can take any form.³

Plato’s One and Aristotle’s Pure Actuality both describe a state of ultimate perfection and absoluteness. They both represent the source of all reality, a unifying principle, and an unchanging state. In both cases, this can be seen as a representation of the divine or godly principle.

Plato’s Indefinite Dyad and Aristotle’s Pure Potentia both represent potentiality, change, and multiplicity. They both allow for the differentiation and manifestation of the various forms in the world. They encompass the capacity for change and becoming, standing in contrast to the absolute and unchanging nature of the One/Pure Actuality.

However, in Aristotelian philosophy, the understanding of change and potentiality is closely related to the concept of privation. Privation refers to the absence or lack of a particular attribute or quality that a thing should possess. It is the state of lacking something that is essential or natural to an object or entity. According to Aristotle, change involves the movement from a state of potentiality to actuality. For instance, the growth of a plant from a seed involves the actualization of its potential to become a mature plant. In this case, privation can be seen as the absence of the attributes associated with a mature plant in the initial seed.

The concept of privation underwent significant development and transformation within the context of Christian theodicy: In Christian doctrine, the concept of evil as privation emerged as a way to explain the nature of evil in a world believed to be created by a benevolent and perfect God. Evil is not a positive or substantial entity in itself but rather the privation or absence of goodness, which is considered to be the ultimate reality. The idea is rooted in the belief that God is the source of all goodness and that evil is a deviation from or lack of that goodness…

But notice how very, very close this Christian-Scholastic concept is to the Platonic Unwritten Doctrine. Privation is the absence of the actualization. Actualization is the movement from potential to actuality. Therefore, the concept of privation presupposes the existence of as-yet unfulfilled potential — which is to say, it presupposes the existence of something like the Indefinite Dyad.

Remember, to an Aristotelian, a substance is a combination of form and matter. For evil to fail to be a “substantial entity” does not mean that evil does not exist, it means that it does not have form, it is that which exists without (proper) form. The Scholastic concept that correlates to the Indefinity Dyad is therefore the prima materia which is presupposed to underlie all substance. But that means that prima materia is the state of total privation.

If my interpretation here is true, then “creation from nothing” and “creation from chaos” are not competing cosmogonies — they are the same cosmogony simply using a different vocabulary to refer to the same high concepts.

Langan’s Cognitive-Theoretic Model

The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (usually abbreviated as “CTMU”) is Christopher Langan’s theory of reality. Langan is often described as “controversial” by the mainstream media; “controversial” here being an adjective that means “to disagree with the contemporary consensus on key points while using sentences that are too complex for journalists to understand.”

The CTMU is far too complex for me to summarize in this essay. Here I just want to highlight one particular strand of thought within the CTMU that struck me as exceptionally important: unbound telesis. From the CTMU wiki we learn:

Unbound telesis (UBT) consists of pure ontological potential… [It] is the ground-state of existence arrived at by stripping away the constraints of reality.

As pure ontological potential, Langan’s unbound telesis is a precise metaphysical correlate to Plutarch’s Second Principle, Plato’s Indefinite Dyad, and Aristotle’s Pure Potentia.

But what does he mean when he writes “stripping away the constrains of reality?” Langan seems to have thought more deeply about the concept of “nothing” than almost any thinker before him. He asks us to try to imagine what it would mean for nothing to exist. Literally nothing.

Now, most of us imagine “nothing” as something like the vacuum of space, or perhaps as the sea of quantum foam bubbling up virtual particles at Planck scales. Not so, says Langan. Because in both of those cases, something still exists - the laws of nature that govern the vacuum.

True nothingness, says Langan, means not just the absence of that which is constrains, but the absence of the constraints themselves. As Langan puts it:

Since there are no distributed constraints to limit its content, UBT is all-inclusive, infinite potential, and the source of all freedom.

According to Langan, then, nothing necessitates everything.

Gell-Man’s Totalitarian Principle

To understand how that might be the case, we have to turn to Gell-Man’s Totalitarian Principle: “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.” The principle refers to the surprising fact that, in quantum physics, “any interaction which is not forbidden… is not only allowed, but must be included in the sum over all "paths" which contribute to the outcome of the interaction. Hence if it isn't forbidden, there is some probability amplitude for it to happen.”

Outlandish as it sounds, the Totalitarian Principle is used by mainstream cosmologists to explain how the Big Bang occurred:

The simplest explanation is that the Big Bang was caused by quantum fluctuations. That scenario had very little chance of happening, but, according to the totalitarian principle, even the most improbable event will eventually happen. It took place instantly, in our perspective, due to the absence of perceived time before the Big Bang

So, if nothing exists, then no constraints exist; if no constraints exist, then even the most improbably event will eventually happen.

Now, Langan could rightly criticize the account above for two errors. First, it assumes that quantum fluctuations exist during the condition of nothingness. Quantum fluctuations are still something. Because of that first error, it makes a second error: It assumes that the Big Bang is the most improbable event. It’s not. The most improbably event is the movement from Pure Potentia to Pure Actuality. The most improbable event is the manifestation of God. And, in fact, this is exactly what Langan claims happened.

Is he right? Well, the mainstream materialist would assert that there’s “no reason” to assume anything like God. He’d assert that the Big Bang, not God, came into existence from nothing. He’d probably even write an article for Space.com and publish a peer-reviewed article making that claim. But…. But…. the contemporary materialist would then immediately be forced to explain why the universe created by the Big Bang came out so fine-tuned for life. Since no explanation is available within our universe for that, the contemporary thinker would be forced to conclude that there must be an infinite multitude of universes, of which ours is just one. To deny the possibility of Shakespeare, contemporary thinkers must imagine the Infinite Monkeys.

Now, if we use Langan’s framework to examine our classical Greek doctrine from earlier, then we see what Langan has really done: He has shown us that pure potentia necessarily exists without constraint, and (because of the totalitarian principle) therefore pure actuality necessarily also exists. He has shown that if we assume nothing existed before time, then that nothing was the same as the Platonic Indefinite Dyad; and that since the Indefinite Dyad existed before time, then the One necessarily came into existence — self-created in the absence of a constraint preventing it from doing so.

Thus we reach the Classical Theistic position of the One — God — as a self-created and necessary being. And note that God was not created by the Indefinite Dyad, nor did he “come into existence” in time. Rather, God was “always the case” because before Actuality came into existence, there was no such thing as time.

The state that exists after God comes into existence, Langan refers to as bound telesis:

When bound, telesis becomes… the structured, dual-aspect substance of which reality consists.

Langan’s Dual-aspect Substance is the classical world’s Form and Matter.

Smith’s Vertical Causation

And that leads us back to Wolfgang Smith, who I discussed last month. In that article, I explained:

Smith believes that the solution to the quantum enigma can be found by abandoning the false metaphysics of Cartesian bifurcation and returning to the “sapiential” metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas. In Thomistic terms, the quantum world does not fully exist in actuality. It partly exists in potentiality. It is not quite prima materia, which is pure potentia without any actuality, but it is not substance either. It becomes substance only when a substantial form is imposed upon it by an observer who is something more than purely corporeal. Smith labels this process, of consciousness collapsing the wave function, as an example of vertical causation. He contrasts this vertical causation, which is non-local, with the horizontal causation of ordinary physics, which is bound by space or locality.

Wolfgang Smith is, of course, not just a mathematician but also a Christian, and he has written elsewhere that vertical causation is the means by which God created the universe by bringing it from pure potentia to pure actuality.

So, to summarize:

• Plato’s Indefinite Dyad, Plutarch’s Second Principle, Aristotle’s Prima Materia and Privation, Langan’s Unbound Telesis, and Smith’s Pure Potentia are all the same thing, namely, the lack of substantial being due to the lack of form, the state of total privation that is called chaos and nothingness.

• Gell-Man’s Totalitarian Principle guarantees that if the Nothing ever existed, then the One, Second Principle, Form, and Pure Actuality — that is to say, God — also necessarily has always existed.

• All these philosophers agree that the existent universe is created by the imposition of Form on Matter, of the One on the Infinite Dyad, of Pure Actuality acting on Pure Potentia. Since that which is acted upon is nothing but ontological potential, the distinction between “creation ex nihilo” and “creation from chaos” dissolves.

• Smith’s theory of Vertical Causation interprets the empirical findings of quantum mechanics in a way that enables us to explain how God imposed Form on Matter, because we ourselves do it every time we collapse a wave function.

Does this mean that Buddhism is right about nothing? Let’s contemplate this on the Tree of Woe.

1. Some translations refer to this as “Deprival” but “Privation” is the term that caught within Christianity.

2. While I suspect that Plato would be rather displeased that his unwritten doctrine is now being widely disseminated in a freely-available encyclopedia using public crowdsourcing, I think the great philosopher can rest secure in the knowledge that almost no one can understand Plato anymore.

3. I am aware that Aristotle himself did not use precisely these terms to formulate his concepts, which were developed more fully by his Scholastic followers. Sadly, all we have left of Aristotle is his lecture notes, written in Ancient Greek, and interpreters disagree about what they mean. I hope the reader will forgive me the simplification of my presentation on this.