Welcome to my website as we attempt to navigate major issues in a troubled world as 2025 unfolds. Truly we live in an age of anxiety. How important it is to live as those that see the God who is invisible.
Is this God for real though? Cue a new book of mine called ‘The Observer and the Observed’ (available on Amazon).
This book approaches the God-question from a different way than normal: from the perspective of psychotherapy which shows the importance of valuable personhood. In a world of machine intelligence, the key idea is that of an analogy of being between human 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 confers perception in place of invisibility and the power of inter-subjectivity in relational neuro-biology 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 universe 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 how the evidence of how our personhood and subject status require correspondence 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 where the ultimate is impersonal just does not ‘cut it’ or respond adequately to what is inside us. This article signposts an account of how the realm described by physics and our inner world can tie up – perhaps the only way they can.
In short, is there anything out there that corresponds to what’s in here?
Amidst life and writing, I continue to work as per our London School of Theology training course in an integrative way with a psychodynamic core. That means we will look together at current emotional difficulties but also go deeper into wounded history. I offer therapy from my outside room in Charminster, Bournemouth. ACC membership 14228. BACP membership 085479. You can send me an email on chrissteed2012.cs@gmail.com if you would welcome a talk.
May you know peace and strength this year!
Chris