The Spirit is Unwilling and the Post is Weak

Just some notes to myself that may or may not turn into a post. I only show up at the keyboard. If the inspiration decides not to show up, there's nothing I can do about it. Except maybe build a workmanlike post with bricks of common nonsense.

Again, we're just flipping through C.S. Lewis' Miracles, contained in this bargain compendium of his seven most popular works of Christian apologetics. I'm surprised at how good it is, but this is because I had thought of Lewis as a mere popularizer, providing a bit of sustenance to Christians who find themselves in one of those anti- or nonintellectal denominations cut off from the main trunk.

True, he was a popularizer, but the popularizer of 75 years ago is not the popularizer of today. Back then it required no more than a high school diploma to grasp his arguments, whereas today you need a college degree in order to have no idea what the hell he's even talking about.

Anyway, my notations.

"Naturalists would rather deny their own existence than affirm God's." As usual we mean this literally, because if there is no free will (and there is no free will if it isn't anchored in a transcendent reality), then we are merely cogs in an interlocking network of necessary entailments. We are simply the end-product of causes leading up to us, no different from any other machine. Therefore it is an illusion that anything exists in its own right. Rather, there is only the One Thing doing its thing, in which we are embedded.

Conversely, in Christian metaphysics there is still one thing, but this thing -- existence -- is grounded in a meta-thing -- being. In this view, the fundamental line is between Creator and creation, and it illuminates all other lines and distinctions. Creatures are on this side of the line. Except for human beings, who are somehow on this side and yet in conscious contact with the other; as if we are in this world but of another.

In the case of naturalism, there are literally no lines, or rather, any lines we discern are imaginary, because in reality there is only the One Giant Thing that determines everything within it. Monism means monism: you can't have your monistic cake and eat it too. Because if you can eat it, you have obviously transcended it.

In other words, you can't be nothing but a piston in the engine of nature and then pretend to know about the whole car. Indeed, to even say "cosmos" would be pure fantasy, like a blind person speculating about color.

For us, God is Necessary Being. Everything else is contingent upon this. But for the naturalist there is only existence, and everything "within" existence necessarily follows upon everything else. There is still necessity, and yet no freedom.

But here's a clue: knowledge of necessity is freedom. To know cause-and-effect is to have transcended it. I know that 2 + 2 = 4, every time, no matter what. Therefore, I am beyond mathematical necessity. Gödel's theorems merely prove this in a more systematic way -- ultimately that the human mind always transcends and escapes its own attempts to model nature.

"No account of the universe can be true," says Lewis, "unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight."

In other words, let's say physicists arrive at the very thing that is the implicit ground and sponsor of physics, the T.O.E., the universal equation that is the cause of all others, and which finally unifies all the loose ends, from quantum theory to general relativity and everything in between. Well, first of all, Gödel, who appears nowhere in these pages, at least explicitly. Yet, he's here in spirit, for

A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would simply eat its own tail..... [T]hat theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.

Of course. Back then a popularizer could affirm such an obvious truth without insulting your intelligence.

Back a couple thousand posts ago, I wrote one called Proof of Proof is Proof of God. I don't recall what I wrote -- I'll reread it later -- but I probably thought it was a novel insight or something. So, what's Lewis doing in MY attractor?

In any event, we agree that a theory promulgated by the very thinking it demolishes

would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound -- a proof that there are no such things as proofs -- which is nonsense.

Of course. Like anyone could not know that.

I'm going to stop now. As usual, I have to get some work done.