Our Escape is God's Inscape, Part One

So, man lives in the gap between appearances and reality. Unless one is a relativist, subjectivist, idealist, etc., in which case one pretends to live in appearances only. 

But we know there is a reality, if only because we can never know it exhaustively, rather, only asymptotically. To say that reality is intelligible being is not the end of the story, rather, only the beginning, since there's no end to its intelligibility. 

Yes, the soul knows all things -- potentially -- and our understanding extends to infinity. The world is a tapestry woven of mystery and intelligibility, meaning that we never stop weaving the rug that ties the cosmos together. At least I can't stop.

It reminds me of what they say about the Church: we have no way of knowing whether we are in the End Times or the just the beginning of the story. 

Two thousand years seems like a long time relative to a single lifetime, but what is it relative to the sun dying out in a few billion years? Like one of those mayflies who live but a day and know nothing of the seasons and all that. In any event, Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will never pass away. 

Hmm. That last remark implies something beyond the Gap where we live -- again, the ever-changing one between reality and appearances. 

As we mentioned yesterday, because this gap is always evolving, it can look as if we're plunged into a world of pure becoming, nor can you blame a fellow for latching on to something like process philosophy, at least until he thinks through the implications, in which case there's no excuse.

But if our immediate experience has only access to the shifting sands of the Gap, then what? It's not much consolation to be told, Sure, there's a reality. It's just that you can never know it! 

Granted, we can never know it in a purely logical or rational way, for reasons articulated by Gödel: whatever we come up with on our end will be either complete or consistent, but never both.

But God -- supposing there is one -- would not be limited by the Theorems. He could tell us what's what and who's who, and in way that would still be true even after the sun and earth pass into darkness.

As you know, I have a beef with... No, that's not the best way to put it. I was going to say "religious language," but it's really a problem with language as such. Now, I love the sound of my own voice as much as the next guy, but language is for communicating across the gap between minds, and in order to do this there must be an unsaturated space for it to accumulate meaning.

No, not for low-level communication like a shopping list, nor for things like math and engineering, where ambiguity is the enemy. Rather, for the whole world mapped by art and religion, which transcends the material world. 

Two ideas: first, one of our rock-bottom theses is that 

In each moment, each person is capable of possessing the truths that matter.

To which I would add that we are, gosh darn it, entitled to these truths, which implies that God is -- in a manner of speaking -- obligated to convey them to us in some form or fashion. And when I say "obligated," I'm thinking analogously of, say, the Constitution, which implies certain powers without which it cannot accomplish its main aims.

Likewise, man could never accomplish his purpose -- indeed, can have no purpose -- without a little assistance from outside the system and beyond the Gap. 

This much is obvious, or at least has been since Gödel; perhaps there was some wiggle room prior to him, but now there is no excuse: your world, no matter how impressively vast and complex, is ultimately an incoherent and meaningless tautology outside a vertical intervention we call "revelation" but I just call (↓) to keep it unsaturated.

I am happy to stipulate that life is utterly meaningless, and that there is no possibility of meaning, absent what we are calling (↓).  

Oh yes, the second idea, before we run out of time: it is that man is a dynamic open system on every level, both horizontally and vertically. This is self-evident as it pertains to biology, but equally so as it pertains to levels above, from psychology to religion.