One Free Miracle

To paraphrase Terence McKenna, science can explain everything so long as we grant it just one free miracle: the inexplicable singularity that started it all, AKA the big bang. 

It's a good line, and I wish I'd thought of it, but in reality we need at least two miracles, since nothing in the material world explains, or ever will explain, the immaterial -- unless the material is a consequence of the immaterial, in which case we can indeed reduce the world to one miraculous principle.

Bob, I think you're confusing a miracle with a necessity: God is necessary being, the rest a consequence of this first principle, from accidents to miracles. God is not a miracle. Rather, everything else.

Here's a passage by Schuon we've often playgiarized with:

The first thing that should strike a man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- whence the incommensurability between it and material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

I seems the universe spans vertically from the created to the Uncreatable, the former being a re-verberation of the latter, i.e., a Word from our eternal Sponsor. In one sense creation is a miracle, but if God's nature is to create, then it's more of an inevitability.

Which can't be right. It's like saying John Lennon was a creator, therefore I Am the Walrus was inevitable, when it was full of unforeseen twists and happy accidents. 

Also, real creators never stop creating. If Bach or Mozart we're still alive, we'd have more masterpieces than we could ever consume. Even I have more CDs than I can ever listen to. My collection isn't infinite, but it might as well be. 

In any event, if the creation reflects the Creator, nowhere is this more evident than in the miracle of subjectivity alluded to by Schuon. Really, this is the One Free Miracle needed by science, otherwise there could be no scientists:

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will have not explained anything. 

Or, it will have explained everything, minus One Free Miracle. 

But at poppermost,

Being only falsifiable, a scientific thesis is never certain but only current.

Ultimately, 

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery. 

It reminds me of Meister Eckhart: 

I’ve said many things, but at the heart of them all is this: There is a light within you, in your soul, uncreated and uncreatable; it simply is.

We might say that the business of isness is this uncreatable light, and why not? Elsewhere he wrote of "something in the soul that is so akin to God that it is one with him... It has nothing to do with anything created." 

This Something abides "in a place between Time and Eternity: with its highest powers it touches Eternity, with its lower Time."

Here we have the quintessence of both verticality and of vertical causation: 

 (↓) and (↑), respectively.

Which is a good enough introduction to our next book, Wolfgang Smith's Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology:

To the extent that modern physics possesses an ontology at all, it has tended to be the Cartesian doctrine of "bifurcation." Not only, however, does this thesis prove to be untenable, but since the advent of quantum theory it has rendered physics de facto incomprehensible. 

On the scale of untenability, it's an eleven. Ironically, Cartesianism itself is founded upon one free miracle, this being the veracity of God: God is not some evil demon who would deceive Descartes about something as important as the Cogito.

Now, if there is an evil demon, he is nowhere more active than in throwing man off the scent of reality.

Does reality have a smell? 

Sure. Orwell spoke of "all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls,” but he didn't go far enough: 

He who does not smell sulfur in the modern world has no sense of smell.

Nothing makes more evident the reality of sin than the stench of the souls that deny its existence.

Now, Smith speaks of a "pre-cosmic principle" which "casts 'consciousness' in what is for us a brand new key."

This is a key that unlocks a door, but also like a musical piece that modulates to a higher key.

I Am the Walrus?

Not quite: "The three-measure refrain provides the ultimate arrival on V, sounding almost like a modulation," but it's more of  a "harmonic Moebius strip with scales in bassline and top voice that move in contrary motion."

Speaking of harmonies and voices moving in opposite directions, the cosmos is not a "monotone," rather, it's more of a sym-phony, which connotes a "sounding together" or "concord of sound." 

Smith writes that the cosmos is comprised of "not only quantities but qualities as well." 

Extending the musical analogy, a note can be specified as a certain vibrational frequency, a quantity. But what happens to a chord when we change a single note and the key shifts from major to minor? A very different quality we can feel in the soul.

We're getting ahead of ourselves, but later in the book Smith uses this as an example of irreducible wholeness. In a chord -- which is a whole composed of parts --

a single half-tone can take you from the active "solar" world to the introspective "lunar," which anyone who has heard this himself will understand very well...

I Am the Walrus?

Sure: the "happy major pattern" is "broken by weird minor chords" throughout.

George Martin provided a wonderful score of sawing, grinding, bottom-register cellos, like sarcasm-made-melody, in which further insults, irony, and smut were hidden below the waterline. The Mike Sammes Singers, radio's coziest middle-of-the-road vocal group, were hired for the play-out chorus of "Oompah-oompah, stick it up your jumper!" and "Everybody's got one!"

Sarcasm-made-melody, with a pinch of irony and a dash of insultainment thrown in.

I suppose this post has wandered far from the rails, but we'll tie it all together in the next post.