The Eternal Dynamism of Infinitude

Before moving on to the next urgent question -- whatever it is -- I want to highlight one last point in The Philosophical Approach to God, having to do with the image of God in man.

This can mean a number of things, depending upon how you look at it. But whatever it means, it would have to be among the most consequential principles or axioms in our metaphysical arsenal. In way, everything hinges on it, for if we're not theomorphic then we're purely...

I suppose we could say we're not even morphic at all, because we would have no form, no essence, and no soul at all. There would be no forms, period. No transcendence for you! Mandatory nominalism.

Which, like materialism or determinism, is an impossible philosophy. No one can consistently maintain it. Which is a critical point: if it's impossible in principle for your actions to line up with your philosophy, you're not just a hypocrite but flat out tenured.

Anyway, Clarke has an interesting take on the meaning of our theomorphism, which I like so much that I think I'll run it by Petey to see if he can declare it to be Infallibly Settled Doctrine.

Clarke makes the point that it cannot be a question of our having the "positive infinite plenitude" which "is proper to God alone." In other words, we are not God. Nevertheless,

there can be an image of the divine infinity in silhouette -- in reverse, so to speak -- within man, precisely in his possession of an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less.

Now we're talking, and I have a feeling this will indeed segue nicely into our next subject. Because when you think about it, infinitude of any kind is a queer thing. True, other animals are infinitely ignorant, but they don't know that they don't know, nor is their ignorance ordered to anything that transcends their ignorance.

As it so happens, I've been rereading the three volume edition of Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty, which you might think has nothing whatsoever to do with God, but truth is truth no matter where we find it.

What do I mean? I don't want to get too far ahead of the present post, but it's unusual enough to recognize that we don't know. But how many people understand that 1) we can't know it all, and that 2) this is a good thing?

Among other things, this means it is wholly unreasonable to be a mere rationalist, i.e., to imagine that reason alone is sufficient to describe reality, much less human beings. If reason doesn't recognize its own limits, tyranny is right around the corner. To put it another way, would-be tyrants from Rousseau to Newsom always want to enclose us in their little rationalistic worlds, with catastrophic consequences.

Gavin Newsom? Aren't you giving this twerp a little too much credit for the decline and fall of California?

Yes and no. Consider his fidelity to the religion of global warming. I was about to say it has nothing to do with the state going up in flames, but radical environmentalism actually has everything to do with it, since it is responsible for the failure to clear forests, for pouring money into renewable energy instead of upgrading our ancient and fire-prone electrical grid, and for eliminating the nuclear power plants that would give us cheap, plentiful, and clean electricity.

But back to Hayek for a moment. What is his thing, his one Big Idea? Yes, the Fatal Conceit that we not only know more than we think we do, but that we can know things that we cannot possibly know and can never know. For a motley bunch of contingent primates, these metaphysical Darwinians sure presume to know a lot!

The fatal conceit applies in particular to complex systems such as the economy, but what if I told you the cosmos itself is a complex system? And that it is a fundamental error to believe that ultimate reality is characterized by the simple systems described (and describable) by physics? What if the universe of biology is actually larger than the universe of physics, rather than a subset of it?

Is this a "paradox"? No, not at all. Not if you examine the interior of your own skull and consider just what it contains. Which brings us back to Clarke; recall that man is, as it were, the negative image of God's infinitude:

This negative image points unerringly toward the positive infinity of its original, and is intrinsically constituted by this relation of tendential capacity.

I don't think that word -- tendential -- means what he thinks it means. Rather, he's thinking of "tending toward," certainly not "tendentious": that our own negative infinitude is always dynamically linked to God's positive infinitude, thus the ceaseless flow of energies. Polarization. That's how it works. Unless your battery is dead.

Come to think of it, someone said Joe Biden is a flashlight with a dying battery. That's true, but what's wrong with the battery of anyone who would actually vote for this blinking idiot? That's a deep question which will take us too far afield. But there is a kind of battery-powered darkness, isn't there? Moreover, it mimics the human-divine dynamic described above. Hmm. What could be the source and nature of this dark power?

Clarke continues:

It is as though -- as with the ancient myths -- God had broken the coin of his Infinity in two, holding on to the positive side Himself and giving us the negative side, then launching us into the world of finites with the mission to search until we have matched our half-coin with his.

Yes, I'm actually stroking my chin. This is true, as far as it goes. But what if, in this launching of infinitude into the world, God also launches himself into the world? What if this kenotic circle is the last word, or better, the Alpha and Omega of what we can say of the total metacosmic situation?

I don't want to end a post with a question. Was it a rhetorical question?