Missing Link Discovered!

No time for a proper post. But perhaps enough time to toss out some controversial sentiments by Hartshorne, and start a fight.

Think about this, for example: "a knowledge coextensive with truth, does not imply the immutability of truth," especially if God's Prime Directive is creativity (infused with love). If so, then it seems there will always be more truth to love.

Having said that, I see a potential problem here, in that people can forget the essential, unchanging truths, and instead focus on the continuous novelty. Clearly, there must be a balance between the changing and the unchanging.

Interestingly, this perfectly comports with information theory, about which we were rambling a few weeks ago. Remember the distinction between high entropy and low entropy carriers? In order to permit high entropy, upside change, we must have stable low entropy carriers that are not subject to change.

Could it be that this is the secret of God's "two sides," i.e., perfect stability and perfect growth? Don't get hung up on the word "change"; rather, think perfect change.

"If there is genuine freedom or creativity, if consequently truths are to some extent new each moment, then to know all in advance or eternally is to know falsely, for there is no final totality of definite truths to be known; rather, additions to truth occur with every new act of creativity."

Here again, I could only endorse such a view with certain reservations, because there are absolute truths and there are contingent truths, and the latter can only be true in light of the former. If there is no absolute truth -- i.e., truth as such -- then there is no truth at all, and we couldn't even be having this diatribe.

One point emphasized by Hartshorne is that "sufficient cause" is a misused concept. We all understand the distinction between necessary and sufficient causes: necessary causes are those in the absence of which something cannot occur; while sufficient causes are those with which something may occur.

But sufficient causes are never sufficient to explain any phenomenon. Rather, there is always a degree of "wiggle room," of freedom, of creativity -- an x-factor that prevents us from reducing anything to its antecedents.

And when I say "anything," I mean everything, because for Hartshorne (as for Whitehead), reality is "psychical" through and through, so the greater creativity and freedom experienced by human beings extends all the way down -- most famously, to the quantum realm of fundamental indeterminacy.

Importantly, Hartshorne does not root human freedom in quantum indeterminacy, as some have attempted to do. Rather, the freedom is more fundamental than the physics; in other words, physics is the way it is because God is the way he is.

Another key point is that the necessary -- and this is touched upon on p. 72 of the Encirclopedia -- cannot come into existence, because coming into existence involves a transition from not existing to existing.

In fact, "transition" isn't quite the right word, because it implies too much continuity. In point of fact, for anything to come into existence, there is a radical discontinuity with the past.

Please think about that one for a moment, because it's Really Important. If something is necessary, we have to think of it as extended through time. Even though it may appear different at differing times, it is nonetheless fully itself, just extended in time in a deterministic way.

Therefore, any real creativity implies radical discontinuity. To express it another way, to the extent that creativity is real, then the cosmos is discontinuous. It makes leaps -- which goes totally against Darwinian dogma, even though the discontinuity is an easily confirmable fact, empirically, experientially, and metaphysically.

For example, the gap between ape and man is real -- just as are the gaps between matter and life, life and mind, mind and spirit -- and no "missing link" will ever explain it. There is indeed a God of the gaps, and in fact, in the absence of God, there would be no blessed gaps at all -- nor any freedom, any creativity, any love, any novelty -- nothing distinct from the preprogrammed past.

In fact, to say "distinct" is to say freedom, and therefore individuality.

And that just made me think of a spontaneous composition by the singular Charles Mingus called Myself When I Am Real.

Well, that's all the reality we have timelessness for today...