The Reason for the Cosmos

I'm still waiting for Edward Feser's Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature, which I'm hoping will provide blogworthy material, but it is on backorder. 

Meanwhile, I've been scouring the hull of the arkive for something worth reposting, but my standards are too high for the likes of me. This one, however, maintained my interest. It's actually two posts edited and woven into one:

Why a cosmos? Seems like an awful lot of trouble. But what if it takes a cosmos for man -- self-conscious persons -- to exist, and man is the point -- the telos -- of the whole existentialada?

According to Charles De Koninck, 

Man is manifestly the raison d’être of the whole of nature. Moreover, nature could not be ordered to God except through man. God being the end of the universe, it is necessary that the universe be capable of a return to the Universal Principle…. But only an intellectual creature is capable of such a return.

In other words, man as such is the missing link in existence. After all, the material world is self-evident, and the existence of the Absolute, the Universal Principle, isn’t far behind. Where's the connection? 

What else could it be but Man, since 1) we are the only creature that comes equipped with matter and an immaterial rational soul that is open -- both vertically and horizontally -- to the totality of existence, and 2) we have the entirely credible testimony of literally countless mystics, saints, and acidheads who have completed this cosmic roundtrip. 

I might add that in the absence of this roundtrip, our existence makes no sense whatsoever, for it would be analogous to a wire through which electricity passes but which is plugged into nothing, a skyscraper with no top floor, an endless joke with no punchline, or just a bad infinite in general. 

I would also say that our own self-consciousness is a circle that finds its principle in the circularity of God, not just in the extroverted sense of creation returning to itself, but in the interior sense of the Son returning to the Father via the Holy Spirit. But we’ll deal with this question later.

In any event, “only rational created nature is immediately ordered to God.” And if you don’t like that latter word, just say that the intellect is ordered to a metacosmic Truth without which it is little more than a cancer on the surface of being. 

Which, come to think of it, it all too often is: because we can know truth, we can know and even love falsehood. Things can only go wrong if it is possible for them to go right.

Lesser animals “do not attain the universal but only the particular.” But our rational intellect,

because it knows the universal formality of the good and of being is thereby ordered immediately to the universal principle of being. 

In other words, only a creature capable of making a tour of being can rejoin the source of being.

This is where things get a little obscure even for Petey, but it seems that man was originally plugged into the Vertical Socket, so to speak, but for reasons we won’t argue about unplugged himself from the source and decided to go it alone, which resulted in a kind of vertical blackout with intermittent and unreliable reception.

I mean, there’s still plenty of electricity down here, even if its rather weak, like static electricity compared to current electricity. The Great Electrician created both, but supposing he comes down and repairs the line, such that the current once again flows all the way to the top? I AM, a lineman for the cosmos.

2

We left off pondering the sort of creature capable of making a roundtrip tour of the cosmos and rejoining the source of being. Some people deny this possibility: call them flat earthers universers. 

Last I heard, any straight line in our universe ends up where it originated. Does this mean that if we could only see far enough, we’d see our own backside? 

Could the universe actually loop back on itself? And if you traveled far enough in a straight line, would you eventually return to your starting point, just as if you traveled in any one direction for long enough on the surface of the Earth? 

While it’s easy to see how a positively-curved space can be finite and closed, it’s a little less intuitive to realize that a flat space could be finite and closed as well, but that’s also the case. To understand, simply imagine a long, straight cylinder, and then bending that cylinder into a donut-like shape until the two ends connect. This shape -- known as a torus -- is both spatially flat and also finite and closed. 

Well, that's a relief. I always suspected the cosmos resembles a donut, hence the ʘin ONE CʘSMOS.

Let’s jump to the bottom line: in theory a straight line would return to itself, but there hasn’t been enough time for it to do so:

The Universe may, on some very grand cosmic scale, truly be finite in nature. But even if it is, we’ll never be able to know. While we can travel through space as far as we like, as fast as we can, for as long as we can imagine without end..., there is a cosmic horizon that limits how far we can travel through the expanding Universe, and for objects more than ~18 billion light-years away at present, they’re already effectively gone (ibid.).

Yes, but there is a real world from which the world of physics is but an abstraction. This latter is what De Koninck refers to as "the hollow universe." And even though it is hollow, no one could actually live inside it:

The objects available to us in experience are much richer than those described in modern mathematical physics…. Mathematical physics deals, literally, with abstractions and there is a tendency to take these abstractions for the whole of reality. The result is what De Koninck meant by the expression “hollow universe” (Armour).

Remember: it is always we who understand the cosmos, not the cosmos that comprehends us. It reminds me of a somewhat cryptic utterance by the Aphorist, that

The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world. Man is a given reality; the world is a hypothesis we invent.

The point is, we begin with the concrete reality of our own existence, which includes an intellect capable of unpacking the intelligibility of the world via abstract concepts. This doesn’t mean we can begin at the other end, as if we could somehow deduce our existence from our own abstractions -- including the abstraction of materialism:

Of all the vicious circles one could imagine, that in which the materialist encloses himself is the most primitive, restrictive, and binding (De Koninck).

We've belabored this before, but consider the fact that if we are able to explain natural selection, then natural selection is unable to explain us. In other words, we transcend the mechanism that supposedly explains us. Conversely, it it were an exhaustive explanation, we could never know it, because truth transcends the mechanism.

Which is a convenient place to insert De Koninck’s bottom line:

Every natural form tends toward man…. in this perspective, subhuman forms are much less states than tendencies.

Things are not opaque, but rather, transparent to our intelligence, which, to paraphrase Einstein, is the most surprising fact of our universe. Everything “speaks,” but only with the arrival of man is it “heard.” 

For example, the universe was shouting about how E = mc² for billions of years before Einstein came along and heard it. Likewise, it was raving about Gödel’s theorems before Gödel took the time to listen.

So, the universe literally tends toward man, i.e., has the homosapiential tendencies alluded to above. We literally complete a circle that otherwise makes no sense without us, for the message presupposes a sender and a recipient. 

This is the concrete and dynamic circle in which we always find ourselves -- and in which God finds us:

the cosmos is open to another world which acts on it. And this cause can only be a living being; it is necessarily a pure spirit, a transcosmic being.  

Good place to pause. Meanwhile, Google Gemini, create an image: