As we all know by now, I often use the symbol (or pneumaticon) "O" to represent ultimate reality -- the Absolute, the Infinite, the Perfect; the transcendent source of the Good, True, and Beautiful; the eschaton, the beyond, the Final Frontier; or just God, if that's your thing.
But for purposes of a strictly scientific approach to ultimate reality, that little word "God" can miscommunicate as much as it communicates.
This is because most everyone -- believer and heathen alike -- has their own idea of what the word means. In short, the word is saturated with personal meaning, when we're trying to discuss something in as disinterested, universal, and impersonal a way as possible.
For example, we all know atheists who easily disprove the "God" who only exists in their imagination, but who has nothing to do with the real one. Suffice it to say that no one will ever disprove O without thereby proving it.
Having said that, the problem with the symbol "O" is that it implies ultimate reality is bound, when it's the opposite: the Great Boundless. In other words, it's the space inside (and outside) O that counts, not the circular boundary. But there is no symbol for Infinite space, since any symbol is finite.
I ran into a similar idea in an essay by Schuon called Cosmology & The Traditional Sciences. In it he discusses the same problems described above, from a slightly different angle:
Once can represent Absolute Reality, or the Essence, or Beyond-Being, by the point; it would doubtless be less inadequate to represent it by the void, but the void is not properly speaking a figure... the simplest and thus the most essential sign is the point.
In my case, if you thumb to page 6 of your Coonifesto, you will see that I attempted to represent the void by what amounts to a giant point, or completely black page. A footnote explains that "This black whole is not a blank page, but a page full of nothing," before referencing Meister Eckhart's crack about how the intellect properly so-called is in a sense continuous with God, who is himself unknowable, unnameable, and unconceptualizeable.
Which is why we are a mystery to ourselves unless we actualize this implicit connection to the infinite God. Only then are we really a mystery to ourselves!
God is of course knowable, just not ultimately knowable, hence the well known distinction between apophatic (negative) and cataphatic (positive) theology, the latter always and necessarily flowing from the former.
Which we have on excellent authority (more on which below) -- not just the anti-authoritative ortho-heterodoxical ravings of an Eckhart, who can sometimes say the right things in the wrong way, and thereby give aid and comfort to the wrong people, i.e, the Deepfake Chopras and Marianne Woowooliamsons of the world.
Another important distinction here is that when Schuon refers to the "void," he likely has something Vedantic or Buddhistic in mind, whereas when we deploy it, we are simply acknowledging the unknowability of God, i.e., that the finite can never contain the infinite, any more than a circle could exhaustively describe a sphere.
Which is not to say we can know nothing about the sphere, being that the circle provides legitimate two-dimensional points of reference for the 3D object, provided you use a little imagination.
It's the same in my view vis-a-vis revelation. Not to get even further sidetracked, but it seems to me that this is precisely the function of revelation: to provide man with humanly comprehensible points of reference for what quite obviously transcends them and abides in a hyperdimensional reality. A sign always point to something beyond the sign. Which is what makes it a sign rather than the thing itself.
How many dimensions are we talking about? Obviously we don't know, but it can't actually be a number, since a quantity is a limit and God is limitless. Let's just stipulate that there are a lot. Lots of d'mansions, as it were.
Bear in mind that the apophatic Christian God is different from the Buddhist void because, among other reasons, it is a Who, not a What or Which -- not even a Good Which.
Back to our venerable authority in defense of the apophatic God, or O. On the one hand, according to Thomas,
The end and ultimate perfection of the human soul is to transcend the whole order of created things through knowledge and love, and to advance to the first cause, which is God.
Moreover,
The end which the intellectual creature reaches by its own activity is the complete actualization of the intellect in relation to all intelligible things lying within its capacity; in this the intellect becomes most like to God.
Woo hoo! Omniscience!
Not so fast. For
This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know.
D'oh!
But this is how it must be if we are to adopt a strictly scientific approach -- not only to God, but to the material things studied by profane science.
For as we've explained any number of times, science can know a lot of stuff about a lot of things, and yet, it can never know everything about any single thing, not so much as a gnat or grain of sand, let alone more complex things such as DNA or the Cosmos itself, to say nothing of Being. Go ahead and try to exhaust Being, and see how far you get. It's like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble, or exhaust Hunter's drug supply one coke spoon at a time.
No one ever pauses to wonder what kind of cosmos allows for the endless accumulation of valid knowledge, without ever arriving at its end.
Long story short, only in a cosmos created by a rational being who transcends the creation and dwells in the hyperdimensional space alluded to above, and toward whom we are always journeying. Or not, depending upon how you exercise your (also God-given) freedom.
Here's another excellent orthoparadoxical crack by Thomas:
God can in no way be said to be like creatures; but creatures can truly be called like to God in a certain sense.
In the second paragraph I alluded to a strictly scientific approach to metaphysics. Well, that last statement by Thomas is as certain as any scientific theory, and in fact, more certain, as it is the very basis of the possibility of science, i.e., that we can know much about everything, and yet, never know everything about anything. Starting and ending with God.
Which is why we might fruitfully think of our Final Frontier as a kind of dynamic complementarity between the cataphatic God and apophatic O.
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