Gnon: Nature or Nature's God

Re-Discovering the Ancient Cosmic Order, One Illusion At a Time

The Ancient Egyptians called it Ma’at; the Ancient Sumerians called it Me. The Ancient Persians called it Asha while the Vedic Indians called it Rta. The Ancient Greeks knew it as Logos; the Chinese, as Tao. Polymath Christopher Langan, creator of the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe, calls it the Supertautology. In the more interesting parts of the blogosphere, is often called Gnon, an acronym for “Nature or Nature’s God,” and that is what we shall call it.

But what is “it” - what is Gnon? Every ancient culture expressed the same insight, the same truth, of Gnon.

William K. Mahony, writing in The Artful Universe: An Introduction to the Vedic Religious Imagination, explains Rta:

Vedic sages understood Rta to be the inherent universe principle of balance and concord, a dynamic rule or order in which all things contribute in their own unique way to the smooth running of the cosmos. If they were aligned with Rta, therefore, all things would be true to their own given nature and, in so doing, would properly express their particular function… Rta was…inherent in or expressed by all things in the structured universe. Vedic poets associated Rta with satya, a word which, as an adjective, may be translated as “real” or “true” and as a noun as “reality” or “truth.”

Abolfazl Mahmoodi, in “ASHA” in Avestian Texts, defines Asha:

Undoubtedly a unified Order encompasses all the hierarchy of being. An ontological Order that has reached the deepest layers of theological, anthropological, and anthropological dimensions. The great set of being in a continuous and directional motion depicts the Cosmic Order in all its material and transcendental dimensions... The Cosmic Order has long been the focus of all human civilizations and religions, a pervasive, inevitable, and unchangeable Order that governs world affairs and human affairs… This unity and order encompasses the world in its genesis and legislation and gives human life in the individual and social dimension in the formation of relationships with oneself, other beings, and the original and enduring Creator.

Sladjana Ristic Gorgiev, in The Relationship of the Soul and the Logos in Heraclitus’ Fragments, explains Logos as:

…A universal law, immanent to all things, a law linking all things into a unified whole, establishing incessant change in the universe, in accordance with the general law. There is one immanent law and mind in the world, where human law should act as its embodiment. Logos is the principle connecting and supporting the universe, the law governing the universe… Logos is that which controls and governs all, that which permeates all… an all-prevailing, universal principle and law, which is first of all eternal. It is something which lasts even without us or this transient world… Logos is a general principle and a necessity and an individual thing given, system and order, a possibility and act, a total opposition to chaos and meaninglessness.

A broader survey of philosophic and theologic thought finds similar themes in Egypt, Sumer, China, and elsewhere. To put it in modern terms, the concept of Gnon means that:

• The universe (all of space and time and their contents) is a cosmos (a complex and orderly system) governed by a transcendent principle that acts immanently throughout.

• The function of the cosmos is to progress in time as directed by the universal principle that stands unchanging outside of time.

• The function of each thing in the cosmos is to contribute in its own way to the proper progression of the cosmos.

Order. Change. Purpose. It is not a coincidence that every single one of the great civilizations of antiquity, every civilization that has left a great and enduring edifice of culture and thought, shared these beliefs. A society that believes that the universe is a chaos rather than a cosmos cannot trust reason nor develop philosophy; a society that believes the cosmos is eternally static can never improve; a society that believes the cosmos is meaningless has no reason to do so.

What of our society, our decadent, postmodern civilization? Gnon is something our society remembers — but barely, as when a sleeper awakens from a dream knowing that the dream had some deep meaning but unable to recall what it was. We no longer believe in transcendent principles, though we still refer to the “laws of nature.” We worship Science as if it were God, because to us it is a God — but not God as Newton not Kepler knew God.

Newton, discovering the law gravity, proclaimed “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being!” Newton knew Gnon, Rta, Logos, Asha. So did Kepler - when the great astronomer discovered the laws of planetary motion, he declared “O, Almighty God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee!”

Today’s science is like the God who works in mysterious ways we no longer understand. In the early 20th century, physicists using advanced mathematics discovered the secrets of relativity and quantum mechanics. But even so great a mind as Eugene Wigner could not philosophically justify why or how mathematics could do so. In his essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Wigner wrote:

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.

But why is it unreasonable for mathematics to be effective? It is only unreasonable to find order if one presupposes chaos. Why is it a miracle? It is only a miracle if one believes that the natural is the irrational. Newton did not believe this, nor did Kepler, nor Bacon, nor any other founder of the scientific revolution. The atheism, the nihilism - these came later. Science does not entail them, and indeed, they are destructive of science, because destructive of an understanding of Gnon.

Society today refuses the Gnonic and thereby embraces the Gnostic. Gnosticism, that heretical Christian faith, believed that reality was fundamental unreal — an unreality that only the enlightened, those possessing Gnosis, could comprehend. Today we call the Gnostic priests by various names: poststructuralists, or neo-Marxists, or critical race theorists. They teach us that facts are relative and nothing is true, except that you are a racist and the science is settled.

What is Gnon? It is order, reality, and truth. Philosophers sometimes still speak of a “correspondence theory of truth," the beleaguered notion that something is true if it corresponds to reality. Gnon goes further. Gnon says: The truth is that reality is ordered. The truth is that order is real. The reality is that order is truthful. Reality is truly ordered. Order is truly real. Mathematics isn’t unreasonably effective, it is effective because true, and reasonable because true, and true because effective and reasonable. All is harmony.

When we deny Gnon, we deny reality. We pretend that Afghan tribes undefeated by any foreigner in two thousand years can be converted to progressivism in a generation, and are surprised when they throw us out. We pretend that money can be printed endlessly without inflation, and are surprised when prices rise. We pretend that consumption is investment, and are surprised when the power grid fails. We pretend that humans are blank slates, and are surprised when people act like animals. But we cannot pretend forever. For, as the ancients knew, and we have forgot, Gnon is a wrathful god.