Langan accepts the theory of evolution, but believes it could not be responsible for the specified complexity of the biodiversity we see today.
Why not? He seems to be introducing the creationists' 'irreducible complexity' idea there, and it needs to be defended.
He believes on various levels intelligence is responsible for the evolution of life, the ultimate level being "GOD" or the Global Operator Definor (or Designer), which is compatible with the monotheism found in the God of the Bible, he even believes there is a logico-mathematical explanation for the phenomenon of a "messiah", which suggests Jesus wasn't the only one, however he describes his personal approach as "logical theology" in his words,
Langan's excursion into heterodox Christian theology isn't really relevant to this thread. But it does make him sound rather crankish in my opinion.
What does this say about God?
All we've been given so far is Langan's unsupported belief that biological evolution doesn't explain biological complexity, along with his redefinition of the word "God" as "Global Operator Definor", an assertion that his idea is consistent with the Bible, and an assertion about his having some as yet unrevealed "logico-mathematical" argument for the existence of a multiplicity of "messiahs".
First, if God is real, then God inheres in the comprehensive reality syntax, and this syntax inheres in matter.
Langan derives this from what was already written up above? How in the world does he do that?
What does "comprehensive reality syntax mean"? How did he arrive at the idea that God "inheres" in this "syntax"?
Conventional Christianity would say that God is a thoroughly transcendental being who created the natural order (which is what I'm guessing that "comprehensive reality syntax" means). Though there is indeed a strand of Christian Neoplatonist speculation that imagines that Plato's forms and maybe natural laws exist as eternal ideas in God's mind that are kind of manifested in time and space here in the physical world.
Ergo, God inheres in matter, and indeed in its spacetime substrate as defined on material and supramaterial levels. This amounts to pantheism, the thesis that God is omnipresent with respect to the material universe.
Langan seems to be pushing God's immanence a lot harder than Christian Platonism would. But apart from Langan calling God "Global Operator Definor", we still haven't been given any reason to believe that God even exists, let alone is somehow identical with the natural order. It's all just been a non-sequitur so far.
Now, if the universe were pluralistic or reducible to its parts, this would make God, who coincides with the universe itself, a pluralistic entity with no internal cohesion. But because the mutual syntactic consistency of parts is enforced by a unitary holistic manifold with logical ascendancy over the parts themselves - because the universe is a dual-aspected monic entity consisting of essentially homogeneous, self-consistent infocognition - God retains monotheistic unity despite being distributed over reality at large.
What's a "unitary holistic manifold"? What does it mean to say that it has "logical ascendency over the parts themselves"? This may be what I was addressing in an earlier post when I said that it's probably a philosophical mistake to suggest that a pile of sand consists both of physical grains of sand, along with some much more mysterious being called a "pile" that somehow distributes itself among all the grains and has "logical ascendency" (whatever that means) over them.
Saying that the universe is a "dual-aspected monic entity consisting of essentially homogeneous self-consistent infocognition" looks like a pretentious way of restating the pantheistic conclusion. Trying to justify the pantheistic conclusion by linking it to this new phrase by use of the word "because" appears to render the whole thing circular.
What's more, the word "infocognition" appears to be gratuitous. We still need some reason to believe that the entire universe, or the abstract natural order that underlies it (or whatever Langan's talking about) really is a mind-like entity that's capable of thought and cognition. He just seems to have thrown that one in there because he likes it.
My impression is that Langan may be operating in the opposite direction from most of the rest of us. We start out from 'Why should we believe that?' Langan seems to be starting out from his own theological conclusions, which he seems to embrace a-priori simply because he likes them, and then tries to work backwards from there to reasons that he hopes might justify them.
Thus, we have a new kind of theology that might be called monopantheism, or even more descriptively, holopantheism.
This does appear to be theology, as opposed to philosophy. It's basically an intellectual elaboration of things that Langan already believes for his own religious reasons.
Second, God is indeed real, for a coherent entity identified with a self-perceptual universe is self-perceptual in nature, and this endows it with various levels of self-awareness and sentience, or constructive, creative intelligence.
The panpsychism is just being assumed there. And the whole whole "unitary holistic manifold" thing is being assumed as well, along with that idea that the manifold must itself be sentient.
Indeed, without a guiding Entity whose Self-awareness equates to the coherence of self-perceptual spacetime, a self-perceptual universe could not coherently self-configure.
Why should people believe that space-time is "self-perceptual"? If we snip that assumption out, then this looks like the familiar creationist claim that a creator is necessary to "configure" the universe.
Holopantheism is the logical, metatheological umbrella beneath which the great religions of mankind are unknowingly situated.
There are many religions out there that don't imagine a cosmic creator, don't imagine that the creator is somehow the universe itself (how does that work?) imagined as a sentient being, or believe in any of Langan's speculations.
Why, if there exists a spiritual metalanguage in which to establish the brotherhood of man through the unity of sentience
Another speculative a-priori religious idea of Langan's.
are men perpetually at each others' throats? Unfortunately, most human brains, which comprise a particular highly-evolved subset of the set of all reality-subsystems, do not fire in strict S-isomorphism much above the object level. Where we define one aspect of "intelligence" as the amount of global structure functionally represented by a given sÎS, brains of low intelligence are generally out of accord with the global syntax D(S). This limits their capacity to form true representations of S (global reality) by syntactic autology [d(S) Éd d(S)] and make rational ethical calculations. In this sense, the vast majority of men are not well-enough equipped, conceptually speaking, to form perfectly rational worldviews and societies; they are deficient in education and intellect, albeit remediably so in most cases. This is why force has ruled in the world of man…why might has always made right, despite its marked tendency to violate the optimization of global utility derived by summing over the sentient agents of S with respect to space and time."
That definitely looks like gibberish. Translating it into English, Langan seems to be claiming that only people of sufficiently high intelligence can perceive the cosmic connections that he sees. ("Brains of low intelligence are generally out of accord with the global syntax D(S).") And remember, he's the (self-proclaimed) world's smartest man. So if you don't agree with all of his highly peculiar speculative theological premises, then that's simply because you're stupider than he is.
Once again, I don't think that this is really philosophy at all, even if it consciously tries to assume the form of philosophy. It's ultimately Langan's claim to possess a kind of religious revelation that only he, and others like him (if there are any) can possibly enjoy. And as with all assertions of unique religious experience, the problem for everyone else is distinguishing true revelations (if there are any) from what might just as easily be called psychotic delusions.