We Can't Reach God, but God Can Reach Us

I just had the image of man as a kind of whirlpool produced by currents emanating from heaven and earth -- horizontal and vertical, celestial and terrestrial -- circling around a personal center. 

It's not that farfetched if you think about it; indeed, it is even a little near-fetched, since -- according the theories of Ilya Prigogine -- any biological system is a dissipative structure that exchanges matter, energy, or information with the environment.

If we could cleanse our windows of perception -- or at least take enough LSD -- then living things might appear as fantastically whirling process structures, or dynamic tornadoes of information. We're not in Kansas anymore! 

That image popped into my head upon reading this passage from Clarke regarding the soul, i.e., our mysteriously embodied spirit:

Unlike any animal or lower being on earth, it derives from the direct collaboration of both heaven and earth, so to speak. On the one hand, the human body results from the long slow evolution of life on our planet from the tiniest one-cell creature to the highest, most complex body that nature has so far been able to produce.  

But then evolution runs into a wall, which is revealed by the fact that Homo sapiens is genetically complete as long ago as 200,000 years, and yet, there is no evidence for the human soul until much later, around 70,000 years ago. Wha' happened? Or failed to happen?

In principle we can rule out any notion that material evolution can produce an immaterial soul. As mentioned a post or two back, there's not even a theory of how that theory could be possible. Perhaps, since material nature "can go no further," the Creator infuses 

a spiritual soul directly into this long-prepared living body, to take over and make its own, to live out its unique new mode of life as an embodied spirit -- a human person, a unique fusion of the two great domains of reality in our universe, the spiritual and the material -- "man the microcosm," a single being summing up all the levels of being in the universe itself, and so pointing to the unity of its Creator...

Hmm. I don't know. It still sounds a little ad hocky or God-of-the-gapsish to me. Can we do better? Or is it one of those things whereby if we were capable of comprehending it, it would be too simplistic to give rise to beings capable of comprehending it? In other words, above our praygrade, and that's all there is to it. 

As if God tells us: Best I can do is offer you a mythopoetic vision. Take it or leave it.

Perhaps our friend Nicolás has some ideas. Can't hurt to ask. Let's start with myth. What can you tell us, Nick?

The bridge between nature and man is not science, but myth.

Whoever does not believe in myths believes in fables.

Myths, like the aesthetic presentation, can be truths without being realities.

Every mythology is true in a certain way, whereas every philosophy is false in a certain way.

What about what we said above about man's ideas being too simplistic to give rise to man?

Happily, the world is inexplicable. (What kind of world would it be if it could be explained by man?)

Touché. More generally, man's intellectual systems can never climb over Gödel's wall:

“Irrationalist” is shouted at the reason that does not keep quiet about the vices of rationalism.

Therefore,

There are truths that can only be expressed in formulas that are evidently false.

In other words, we can know the truth even if we can never reduce it to a formula.

And there is no reason whatsoever to feel inferior to the scientist when discussing these lofty matters:

When it comes to knowledge of man, there is no Christian (provided he is not a progressive Christian) who anyone has anything to teach.

Besides, 

Man calls “absurd” what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence.

Now, I'm a pretty skeptical if not cynical if not totally disillusioned guy. Is that bad? No, not necessarily, for

There is some collusion between skepticism and faith: both undermine human presumptuousness.

Indeed, 

Two skeptics fit into every great Christian with space left over for Christianity.

We can try to account for the soul without revelation, but the bottom line is that

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

Concur. You can't reduce it to science, for

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

This post didn't actually end, we just ran out of time.