If someone took the gamble of an object-oriented theology, the omniscient God of monotheism might be abandoned in favor of something resembling Cthulhu, theNow, while I am rather drawn to Graham’s challenge, I must simply state that he is probably correct. OOO cannot be reconciled with monotheistic deities as they stand; and, more than this, it probably cannot be reconciled with the theologies and philosophies of any of the major religious denominations or traditions of the world. Any wedding of OOO and theology would, I contend, have to take place within a rather special sacred space and would likely (1) be "weird" - prompting me to play with the term 'weird theology' alongside Graham’s term ‘weird realism’ - and/or (2) require a shotgun loaded with some exotic conceptual buckshot.
sleeping monstrosity of H.P. Lovecraft.
If one wishes to find any easy alliances between OOO and religion, one probably needs to consult the more ontologically democratic worldviews of animists (many of which can be interpreted in a broadly panpsychist terms), or else some forms of pantheism. However, I suspect that even with pantheists, including those of the process theological varieties, the subsequent alliance (or translation) would be rather odd and unpalatable. The pantheist deity would likely be, in Latourian parlance, a black box (and one could quite reasonably ask whether there are more of them, i.e. Gods/boxes all the way up); and, while this could lend itself to an interesting re-thinking of natural theology, the degree of fit would be questionable. Graham addresses some of his concerns with panpsychism in Prince of Networks (212-214) and I think that he hits the mark when he says that he doesn’t have too much too worry about anymore (apparently he had concerns in Guerrilla Metaphysics). OOO can I suspect be a useful complement to a panpsychism. He does, though, have worries about the pan- aspect of panpsychism because not all entities can have psychic life, only real objects. I am still thinking through some of these points viz. Graham’s metaphysic, but I did immediately think that animism might be suitably different to permit an interesting dialogue. Their may be an article here examining the crossover and possible alliances between Graham Harman’s OOO and Graham Harvey’s new animism, which usefully unpacks the worldviews of a numbers of indigenous peoples and their relations with other-than-human-persons. But nothing on this before I get a better grasp of OOO. Interestingly, though, Graham Harvey reads Latour too.
More of this later, at the moment I think the religious value of OOO is fairly limited and clear (either a distinctly weird theology or metaphysical underpinning for animism), while Speculative Realism is too diverse to offer useful comments on. Meillasoux clearly has some views about God that warrant unpacking.
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