The Strange Attractor at the End of History

I no longer recall if I stole the idea of God as the ultimate strange attractor from Terence McKenna, or if I arrived at it indepunditly. Here is how he describes it:

McKenna, who was influenced by Whitehead, elevated the emergence of novelty to the ultimate category, but I don't see how this is possible, because novelty without constraint is meaningless. He also has an essentially pantheistic vision, again, similar to Whitehead.

Instead of novelty I would say Creator, of which we are, of course, the image and likeness, thus all the endless human creativity and ingenuity for both good and ill. For example, there are creative sadists, e.g., Nazis, Islamists, and neo-Stalinist progressives, and no one calls this a good thing outside elite universities and fake newsrooms.

I would also highlight the fact that the strange attractor (of which we are the I. and L.) is itself a kind of dynamic system, thus all the lesser dynamic and open systems that predate even the emergence of life. Indeed, if the cosmos itself were not an interiorly related dynamic system, then life -- let alone mind -- could never have emerged out of it.

I found a more adequate conception of the Great Attractor in the works of an obscure philosopher named Errol Harris. He too has his flaws, having been excessively influenced by Hegel. Nevertheless, you know what they say: the philosophers are generally correct in what they affirm but incorrect in what they deny. And I affirm everything, i.e., the full spooktrum from matter (and below) to spirit (and above). 

Conveniently, this is also the Catholic position -- that any and all truth, to the extent that it is true, has God as its principle; God is not just Truth as such but the ground and possibility of both intelligence and intelligibility. 

Here is a passage by Errol Harris from his book Reason and Revelation: 

We may be sure that the series of forms does not lead on into infinite progress; it must have a definite completion. The very nature of the scale necessitates this conclusion, because it is a scale, and an ascending one.... It must culminate in what is absolutely whole and self-sufficing, for anything else would contradict and negate all that makes the prior progression recognizable as an ascending scale.... 

In short, the very nature of the scale necessitates its completion by a reality answering to St. Anselm's definition of God -- that than which nothing greater (or more complete, or more perfect) can be conceived.

The Strange Attractor at the end of history, AKA point Omega. Which, in a Christian context, suggests the incarnation of Point Omega in human form, or what in the book I suggested isn't just "the Word made flesh" but the end (of time) made middle, AKA the Kingdom of Heaven now (in every now) at hand.

The modern conception of nature is of a continuous evolutionary process, linking the purely physical with the biological, the biological with the psychological, and the psychological with the social, moral, artistic, and religious experiences of man (Harris).

Concur: it's why all the evolution, whether Darwinian or any other kind. In other words, evolution is anterior to natural selection, and is its very principle.

For the temporal unfolding is in reality no more nor less than the serial self-articulation of the whole, which, as realized, is eternally complete. The eternal whole is therefore, without qualification, prior to the temporal process, and to speak of temporal posteriority in reference to it is to misunderstand its character. It is not what comes last but what includes and sublates all temporal series (ibid.).  

Correct:Alpha and Omega. This atemporal Whole dwells amongus. 

Another good one:

What is intelligibly diverse must be unified and whole, and only what is whole and unified can be intelligibly diverse. At the same time, only what is diversified can be intelligibly one. This is because change requires continuity if it is to be change of anything at all, and the parts of what is continuous must be distinguishable or else it congeals to a dimensionless point (or instant).... 

Although a whole is a single unity, it is at the same time a unified diversity. The reality of time, therefore, establishes concurrently the reality of a whole which is nontemporal.

He just -- in my opinion -- described the Trinity, the "single unity" that is also a "unified diversity." 

Here's another helpful passage from an old post:

"It is therefore in and through the human mind in its moral organization and its social setting that the cosmic process fulfills itself, and the completion of its fulfillment would be the final perfection of conscious personality. The perfection of man thus merges into the perfection of God" (Harris).

He quotes Charles Raven, who remarked that "If history is the completion of the story unfolded in its earlier stages by biology and psychology, [then] theology, whose primary data are the lives and experiences of the saints through whom God most fully reveals himself to us, should be at once the culmination of the whole."

Each saint is, in a way, the End of History. And sanctification is the process of ending it. Hence Paul's comment about the whole durn cosmos groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

[T]here must be some principle of unity, creating and maintaining coherent wholes, already inherent in the process of the world from which life originally emerged (Harris).

In consciousness there is the implicit presence of an

organizing principle of the whole, active in my finite subjectivity -- the whole which embraces both me and my world. Consciousness is both finite (and temporal) and transcendent (ibid.).

A few related Bobservations I've made over the years: 

--The primordial nature of God is the ordering principle of wholeness.

--Only the present has a vertical dimension through which floods being, consciousness, life, eternity, etc.

--Biology embodies life; life presupposes wholeness.

--The moment of eternity is the universal ordering principle which constitutes the processual flow into the serial structure of time.

--History is the time it takes for humans to explicate humanness in its wholeness.

--The reality of time establishes the reality of a whole which is nontemporal.

Strange, but strange enough?