Circles Within Circles

It's circles all the way down. What about up? Seems to me that the lower epistemological circles must be fractals of the one big circle at the top. 

Somewhat paradoxically, we have to imagine a series of concentric circles, only instead of getting smaller as we approach the center, they get larger until infinitude is reached at Celestial Central. Conversely, the peripheral circle of matter would have to be the least capacious.

That was just a random outburst, but as one author says in The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne,

In the last analysis all knowledge is circular; it is simply a question of who has the biggest circle. 

Yesterday we briefly alluded to the dynamic and open circularity of the immanent Trinity, which ex-centrically overflows into creation. To enclose existence in scientism or materialism or Darwinism is indeed to shrink things down to a comparatively tiny (and closed) circle, and why would anyone want to do that? 

In keeping with yesterday's post, it seems to me that the biggest imarginable circle would be an unrestricted desire to know ordered to an unrestricted act of intelligence. 

One could of course say that the latter cannot get any bigger, since it is already infinite and eternal. Nevertheless, from our side, it looks like the circle is always expanding.  

Let's get back to Science at the Doorstep to God and try knocking to see if anyone's home. Certainly the lights are on.

Knock knock.

Who's there?

An unrestricted desire to know who's there.

I AM.

I don't get it. 

Not sure I do either. Let's just move on.

Now, even if ∞ + 1 still equals ∞, we can nevertheless -- again, from our side -- posit a complementarity between science and metaphysics, the latter circle obviously enclosing the former. Moreover,

At this point, science has opened the door to the likelihood of a transphysical-transuniversal intelligent creative power whose nature is not fully known (Spitzer).

Science is enclosed in the circles of quantity and materiality, but 

If we do not fall prey to scientism, we may now enter another door to the realm of necessary truths through metaphysical method. 

Which is to say, leave the smaller circle for the larger, into a realm of truth that is "applicable to the whole of reality," not just to the empirical world at the periphery of the intelligible. 

Again, a complementarity between science and metaphysics can fill in a great many gaps inevitably left open by science -- for example, the gap between intelligence and intelligibility, which is more like an unbridgeable abyss if regarded from the perspective of materialism.

But instead of proceeding through this wide open door, the next chapter reverts back from metaphysics to science, reviewing all of the medical and scientific evidence of a transcendent soul, mainly from near death experiences (NDEs) during which the person is clinically dead (i.e., no brain activity, fixed dilated pupils, no gag reflex, and voting Democrat). 

Some of the stories are indeed remarkable, including those of people blind from birth who can see exactly what's going on around them during the NDE, and later describe it with perfect accuracy. 

The majority of people describe blissfully positive experiences during NDEs, but a significant minority undergo hellish ones. It would be nice to know if these are a result of hellish personalities, but Spitzer doesn't say. 

Despite their plausibility, it is difficult to know what to make of NDEs unless or until I personally undergo one. Nor am I in any rush to do so. Analogously, some people have taken psilocybin and come back convinced of the existence of God, and good for them, but I hesitate to venture down that path either.

The next chapter is more our style, going to the literally infinite -- and again unbridgeable -- gap between the lowest man and the highest ape. Spitzer shows that we cannot be "mere extensions of a bio-physical animal kingdom," but "are categorically distinct from other species." 

Here again, there are a lotta ins & outs, so I'll do my best to bottom line it for you. If we consider language, for example, the best a chimp can do is communicate via concrete, perceptual signs corresponding to, say, a banana. But they cannot abstract from this to the idea of "fruit," nor relate one higher order concept to another, something we easily do. 

Indeed, "about 3 percent of our words signify perceptual ideas, and about 97 percent, conceptual ideas" that are quite remote from images, instincts, or objects, or in other words, wholly immaterial. And

If the content of an act of awareness is transphysical, so also must be the act of awareness on which it depends. This act of awareness must therefore be substantially transphysical, implying a soul.

Concepts are abstract enough, but what about relations between concepts? These are even more remote from any material content, nor can one get there from any experience of the perceptual world. 

Again, this gap is unbridgeable, for "how could we have ever learned those higher-order concepts from the perceptual world? It is clearly impossible." If the capacity weren't already there, we could never have acquired it.

Which Spitzer describes as "the preexperiential conditions necessary for abstracting conceptual ideas (derived from the perceptual world)." 

Yada yada, there is simply no scientific explanation of the soul's capacities, because any such explanation presumes the conceptual capacities of the immaterial soul, speaking of larger and smaller circles.

There's much more, but this is as far as I've gotten in the book. Let's just say there must be a bridge over the abyss, only not from the bottom up, rather, the top down.