One Giant Leap for Mankind, One Small Step from God

Richard Feynman remarked that 

The exception proves that the rule is wrong. That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.

No, this post is not about global warming models, rather, about any and all models of man, save one.

For man is the Great Exception, in that he surpasses -- without denying or nullifying -- the rules of every lower level, from physics to chemistry to biology. Perhaps this is just another way of talking about transcendence, which can never be reduced to any immanent quality, much less quantity.  

Think about, for example, the theory of natural selection. If man were actually enclosed in it, he could never know it. In knowing it we have transcended it, but there is nothing in the theory that can explain how the organisms subject to it can escape it.  

I wish a physicist were here, because I have a genuine question. The question is this: supposing I freely decide to, say, clench my fist, doesn't this mean that those trillions of atomic and subatomic particles of which I am constituted are obeying my command? In other words, that no bottom-up theory can account for our top-down control?

Are we or are we not the Great Exception to the rules of physics? Can physics account for the physicists who understand physics?

It's no big surprise that the world is intelligible. The shocker is that it is intelligible to man's intelligence. It doesn't take an Einstein to know that

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

He also said that 

 The more I study science, the more I believe in God.

But his was more of a deistic conception, not the metacosmic principle of personhood that we are about to get back to discussing. 

As alluded to in yesterday's post, the first issue to resolve is whether we are realists or idealists, for this resolves the matter of whether we can know reality or rather are confined to our heads. For once so confined to the head, there is no getting out. 

But to paraphrase Gilson, one has only to acknowledge that one has always been a realist -- and cannot not be one -- and move on. Let the dead bury the tenured. 

Of course, there are people who struggle to be realists, and who are tormented by their own persecutory projections. We used to call these demon-haunted wrecks mentally ill, whereas now they are called MSNBC hosts.

"For the consistent idealist, there can be nothing to differentiate illusion from reality," or One Cosmos from MSNBC, your jehovaial Gagdad from the joyless pursuits of Joy Reid. The horror.  

The realist proceeds from things to thoughts, whereas the idealist proceeds from thoughts to... other thoughts, never actually reaching things (or at least pretending not to). "Knowledge presupposes the presence of the thing itself to the intellect," and 

Knowing is not apprehending a thing as it is in thought but, in thought, apprehending the thing as it is.

That's a somewhat subtle distinction, because it is actually a middle position between two extremes -- of a radical idealism at one end, and a naive realism at the other, as if to say our ideas are a carbon copy of the extra-mental world. Our ideas are not the world per se, but of the world. Otherwise to hell with it.

To borrow a book title from Terence McKenna, the realist world is a true hallucination. Conversely, ideologies are false hallucinations -- just more subtle forms of mental illness. Or crude, depending. But enough about MSNBC.

Let's get back to the mystery of personhood, because it is again the mysterious portal through which streams everything from knowledge of matter, to other persons, to ourselves, to God. Chronologically, 

we are aware of the existence of beings outside our own minds more immediately than we are aware of the existence of our own selves.

Again, this begins in the intersubjective space of the mother-infant dyad; or rather, this is where we are ushered into an intersubjective world which we never actually leave, thank God. Literally, because the vertical world turns out to be the intersubjective space between man and God -- or between (¶) and O, if you prefer. In any event, one may

build up an argument for the existence of God on the basis of this inbuilt urge of the human mind to take all beings as its object and to press beyond the horizon of the material world toward the realm of subsistent being itself (Mascall). 

But why argue? For who lacks the urge to merge beyond the horizon of the material world? The purely horizontal, "finite world cannot contain within itself the sufficient reason for its own existence," to say nothing of its radical intelligibility. 

[I]f only we perceive finite beings correctly we shall perceive them as created and sustained by infinite and transcendent being.

Hold on a second. We're trying to proceed on a step-by-step basis without any leaps, and have we just made an unsupportable leap to God? Let's retrace our steps.

Perceive finite beings correctly. We've already established that we can indeed do this, because we are Realists and cannot not be Realists. Does this entitle us to jump to the conclusion that the intelligible extra-mental world is therefore created and sustained by infinite and transcendent being?

A few months back we were discussing Bernard Lonergan's Insight, wherein he goes so far as to suggest that

If the real is completely intelligible, God exists. But the real is completely intelligible. Therefore, God exists.

But again, no leaping! In the next installment we shall determine whether this is a giant leap for man or just a small step to, because from, God.