The Observer and the Observed: Valuable Personhood and a Theory of Everything

This book approaches the God-question in a different way than normal: from the perspective of psychotherapy. In a world of machine intelligence, the key idea is an analogy of being between human personhood and divine personhood as the only satisfactory way of showing that our inner conscious awareness (nourished by the validation of the self) is responded to in ultimate terms. It aims to extrapolate "from below," from our psychological experience to asking ultimate questions, drawing lines between: -Observation in quantum physics -The maternal gaze -Recognition in social worlds that confer perception in place of invisibility -The power of inter-subjectivity in relational neurobiology and therapy What has to be accounted for is our sense of personhood and how that fits in with a cosmos that is at best neutral. The metaphor of a "wifi" universe is proposed but rather than a soulless device being switched on, how a human psyche comes to a sense of consciousness of its own value is the issue here. A personal God is the best explanation for the evidence of how our personhood and subject status requires correspondence. As engaging with a neutral AI entity is bound to be "soulless," the first-person perspective requires an I-thou relationship. A universe constructed from "nature" by itself or one where the ultimate is impersonal energy just does not cut it or respond adequately to what is inside us. This book offers an account of how the realm described by physics and our inner world can tie up--perhaps the only way they can!

Chris Steed is head of theology and counseling at London School of Theology. He is the author of a dozen books on society, psychology, and theology.