Man is a Portal Beyond Himself

In the previous post we discussed how logic is to be avoided in attempting to turn the soul from God, if only because it is illogical to pretend the existence of logic requires no explanation. Bare logic is ultimately tautologous, and only operates on premises that cannot be furnished by logic. Who selects these premises, and on what basis? Don't ask!

Likewise, Screwtape warns his protege that he won't get far with science either, because this will only "encourage him [the mark] to think about realities he can't touch and see."

Screwtape mentions that "there have been sad cases among the modern physicists," which is entirely true. For example, the book Quantum Questions has essays by such luminaries as Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Jeans, Planck, Pauli, and Eddington, all explaining how their understanding of physics led them away from a materialist view of the world.

Let's briefly flip through the book and see what has Screwtape so exercised. Here's an awkward question posed by Heisenberg: "was it utterly absurd to seek behind the ordering structures of this world a 'consciousness' whose 'intentions' were these very structures?"

No, it's perfectly sensible, even inevitable if one simply listens to the evidence dispassionately. Or, one can dismiss the question as nonsense, as do positivists, but such a threadbare metaphysic leaves us "with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies." To which Screwtape might say: "Exactly. What's your point?"

Tautologies. This can't be sufficiently emphasized, because either man is self-enclosed, and therefore a cosmic tautology, or he is a vertically open creature, open to a hierarchy of influences that must ultimately be grounded in what we call God. You needn't call it God at this point, but you must logically posit a ground and source -- a sufficient reason -- for this vertical hierarchy.

In short, things have reasons. Of course, one popular way to ignore the reasons is to deny the reality of the thing. For example, if "consciousness" doesn't really exist, it requires no explanation. Likewise free will, morality, evil, beauty, etc. Most people will see something dodgy about this kind of pseudo-thinking, but it takes a genius to turn it into a school of philosophy.

James Jeans writes that our universe "appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician," such that "the mathematics enters the universe from above instead of below." No doubt true, but in the end this only gets us so far. Yes, it lifts us up and out of materialism, but we nevertheless hang there suspended unless our ascent is touched by a descent from the other side.

In other words, no amount of answers to our quantum questions can lead us beyond deism. Deism is a bit of a no-brainer. But why stop there? I don't recall if Screwtape says so, but I imagine he'd be perfectly content if we stop our explorations at the horizon of natural theology, because we will still be self-enclosed and cut off from the transnatural energies we call grace. Grace can be deflected by deism as easily as it bounces off inanimate or tenured objects.

So, we don't need physicists to tell us about the limits of physics, although it is nice when they acknowledge them, since many if not most are too incurious or too indoctrinated to wonder about such things. And Satan detests wonder, since it is the basis for philosophy, which is in turn the gateway to theology. Then you're hooked.

For too many scientists, their assumptions about the world are dressed as conclusions, such that their narrow method is elevated to an all-encompassing doctrine: what science can legitimately say about the world is conflated with all that can be said about the world. It's hard to think of a more stupid philosophy. Unless it's deconstruction, which is the equal and opposite absurdity of scientism.

It reminds me of the film Sully, which I watched last night. The NTSB investigators into his actions proved with computer models that he could have safely landed his plane at the airport instead of having to make an emergency landing in the Hudson. The models worked perfectly, so long as one ignores an irrelevant variable called the human being.

But this is literally what all infra-divine misosophic tautologies do, and must do, not based on the evidence, but because their a priori assumptions cannot escape their own absurd and self-negating entailments: garbage in, tenure out.

The most important things don't need to be proved, but rather, are the proof. And the most important of all -- because most all-encompassing of all -- is the person, because a person is ultimately not a "thing" but a kind of portal between them.

In other words, ultimate reality is not a substance but an irreducible substance-in-relation. So a person who isn't a portal beyond himself isn't a person at all, for all of the important properties and capabilities that define personhood come from an intersubjective openness to what transcends us, e.g., love, truth, beauty, grace, virtues, and all the rest. The human being is an open system the moment he becomes human, and couldn't be human absent this openness.

Conversely, if you can seal off the portals and enclose the world in itself, "you have almost won your man," says Screwtape, "and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing." It's not so much that Satan is the Prince of This World, but the Prince of only-this-world, or of this-world-only, with no doors, windows, skylights, ladders, or towrope from above.