Apophatic theology is concerned with what God is not. God is not finite, God is not knowable. Today I am concerned with what this manuscript is not: getting published, at least in its current form. While it contains some interesting ideas, ’Pantheisn't: God is the Gaps’ runs on too long at two hundred and fifty six pages. I wish the author a speedy recovery from the mental break they seem to have suffered somewhere around page 19.
The laws of physics dictate that no thing may travel faster than the speed of light. That space between ’no’ and ’thing’ in the previous sentence is quite intentional, for you see these laws only apply to constituents of our material universe, i.e. things. As the author relates to us, it is a demonstrable fact that shadows may travel faster than the speed of light. In fact anyone with a torch and sufficient patience may cast such a shadow. Simply point your torch into space. As the light travels further away from you the diameter of the beam will increase unboundedly. Running your hand in front of the torch will cast a shadow. No matter the diameter of the beam, the amount of time it takes for the shadow to move from one side to the other will remain constant. Hence for sufficiently large diameters the shadow will necessarily move faster than the speed of light.
Crucially, shadows are not things, they are the absence of things, in particular, photons. To quote the author ”Special relativity is unfazed by mankind's [sic] shadow puppets”. From this simple observation it is argued that apophatic theology is in fact necessitated by physics. To describe God in positive terms would be to bind God to the laws of our universe. Since God is (by definition) the greatest of all negations he must be the negation of the entire material universe. If you like, Pantheism is precisely wrong about God.
This immediately leads to a number of interesting theological conclusions. If God is the absence of the material universe then His opposite, Satan, is the material universe itself. A surface level reader may worry at this point that God is no protector of man, but instead his ultimate adversary, but our author argues that such a conclusion is premature. God is opposed to the entire material universe, not its constituent parts. In fact, a particular human may be equated to the absence of the entire universe except for himself. How close we are to God, so that once our material body withers and dies, there remains nothing separating him from us. The role of Christ is not explored, nor are connections made to Gnostic theology. A revision would do well to remedy these errors.
Note also that under this interpretation, God came into being at the same time as the material universe and so cannot be its cause. Our author snidely remarks that God was caused by the Big Bang.
While no doubt an interesting idea, it is at this point that the author lets their imagination run wild. They describe in the finest detail an anti-material hierarchy. At the top is God the negation of all things, at the bottom Satan the negation of nothing. Raphael is described as the negation our sun and the leviathan as the negation of our ocean. The Arabian Ifrit are the negation of oases and the Japanese Oni, the negation of cherry blossoms. The paper continues in this manner for two hundred and thirty seven pages.