If it Looks and Talks Like a Cosmos, it Probably is One

I'm afraid this post is barely a peek at the wild godhead. Partly due to the recent time theft, I woke up later and simply didn't have sufficient time for the timelessness necessary to bring back a big catch from O. In the coming days, as we return to Balthasar's brilliant Theo-Logic, we're going to be exploring some extremely deep, dense, and subtle ideas, and if I don't get an early start, eternity will elude me. So this is fairly brief.

Balhasar begins with an initial description of truth as "the unveiledness, uncoveredness, disclosedness, and unconcealment of being." Which in turn implies two corollaries: "that being appears; and second, that being appears."

In other words, the essence of being necessarily appears as appearance. Essence and appearance can be distinguished, but never separated. So what looks like a duality is really a singularity in the form of an objective complementarity: essence <---> appearance (which roughly mirrors sensation <---> intellect on the subjective human plane).

Importantly, this is not analogous to Kant's idea of the one-way noumena --> phenomena, because in that case, the noumena (which, as Schopenhauer pointed out, should really be the singular noumenon) is forever unknowable, while the phenomena show us only what amounts to an illusion, based upon our innate ways of knowing it.

In other words, we can never know the Real, only the forms of our own sensibility. In short, we are forever trapped in the world of appearances. This is essentially where modern science -- or, to be precise, scientism -- leads, but never in an honest and consistent way. It habitually speaks of a "reality" that it cannot know or even coherently think about. What Raccoon emeritus Alfred North "you can call me Al" Whitehead said some eighty years ago still holds true today:

Hmm. Can't find the quote I'm looking for, but this will do: with the dominance of scientistic materialism, "Clear-sighted men, of the sort who are so clearly wrong, now proclaimed that the secrets of the physical universe were finally disclosed. If only you ignored everything which refused to come into line, your powers of explanation were unlimited." Ho! Take that, Queeg!

Whitehead's point was that the advance of science had lead to the curious situation of "explaining" a world that is not only unfit for humans, but can never explain the most striking aspects of it -- not the least of which being our ability to explain it!

In other words, as explained on pp. 43-44 of the Coonifesto -- albeit very briefly -- science does not actually explain any of the things that most interest us, but relegates them to an ephemeral realm of "secondary qualities" that are not considered ontologically real.

For reasons that are just too bobvious to get into, this is an intrinsically self-refuting position. Suffice it to say that unexplaining the explainer pretty much ends your hope of explaining anything. For as Whitehead explains, "A self-satisfied rationalism is in effect a form of anti-rationalism. It means an arbitrary halt at a particular set of abstractions. This was the case with science," which necessarily severs things from values -- and which in turn engenders truly permanent and therefore hopeless confusion.

Also, as I have pointed out in the past, only a theist can actually believe in evolution, which is an absolutely necessary consequence of a created cosmos that is deployed in time (which it must be, if it is to be separate from God). On any materialistic basis, evolution is strictly impossible. Whitehead:

"A thoroughgoing evolutionary philosophy is inconsistent with materialism. The aboriginal stuff, or material, from which a materialistic philosophy starts, is incapable of evolution. The material itself is the ultimate substance.

"Evolution, on the materialistic theory, is reduced to the role of being another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive" (emphasis mine).

As I have said before, to say "progress" is to say God, for progress has no meaning except in the light of an unchanging standard. Which is why -- verily -- the political progressive should be called an ontologically spineless changeling, or tottery tower of teetering tapioca.

To put it another way, only the classical liberal can be a progressive, for his metaphysic understands time as the very field of evolution toward the nonlocal telos in whose light the whole existentialada may be measured and therefore understood. And as we shall see later, truth is the measure of being.

In fact, here is another relevant observation by Whitehead that comes close to summarizing the nature of our own religious coonception:

"Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet, waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest."

Of course, I would disagree with the "hopeless" part, unless he means the proper abandonment of horizontal for vertical hope. Again, progressives, who have no right to any kind of hope, are the ones who immamentize the eschaton and try to force their utopian tyrannies -- i.e., their unhappitat for subhumanity -- on the rest of us. Raccoons just want to be left alone by the progressives, who will never be content until every last person is wide asleep to the transcendent, and therefore human, reality. Everything else is just commentary.

For as Pope Benedict observed, "the destruction of transcendence is the actual amputation of human beings from which all other sicknesses flow. Robbed of their real greatness they can only find escape in illusory hopes.... The loss of transcendence evokes the flight to utopia."

He looks around, around
He sees angels in the architecture,
Spinning in infinity,
He says, Amen! and Hallelujah! --Paul Simon, You Can Call Me Al