What Man Really Wants: An Ecstatic Adventure

You could say the Experience of God. Which is much preferable to the mere concept of God. But I like the adventure of God, since experiences and concepts are neither here nor there. After all, there are painful experiences and idiotic concepts, but who doesn't like an adventure?

Okay, but exactly "where" are we going on this adventure? In general, I would suggest we are venturing beyond ourselves in order to discover ourselves; or, sometimes we venture inside ourselves in order to move beyond ourselves, as in psychotherapy (or any other form of disciplined introspection).

Both movements are necessary in order to avoid a certain circularity in one's movements. In other words, if you don't know what's going on inside, you're liable to just discover it outside, via projection. And if you don't know what's going on outside, you are vulnerable to remaining in a pseudo-omniscient fantasy world. You know, a liberal.

As to where the movement leads, Hart writes that "all knowledge involves an adventure of the mind beyond itself."

Thus, we could say that knowledge involves an adventure in truth. The same applies to other transcendentals, e.g., love, beauty, creativity, unity, virtue, etc. Orient yourself toward any one of these, and you are in for a lifetime adventure. But orienting to one is orienting to all, so these ultimately represent different paths on the same adventure.

Small-r rationalists can't help wondering what the payoff is in religion. It is this sense of adventure, which is in turn wrapped up with the ananda-bliss described by Hart. Our transcendent desire (↑) is teleologically oriented "toward an end, real or imagined, that draws it on." This draw is quite real (and universally recognized), and it is impossible to understand religious phenomena in its absence.

As we said yesterday, even the atheist is involved in the same passionate pursuit of nonlocal truth, except his end is imaginary, not real. One quick way to know it isn't real is if it is possible to reach it, for if God doesn't exist, it follows that you aren't him.

In order to avoid saturation and to facilitate experience, I like to call this divine draw, or lure, O, i.e., the Great Attractor. O is the answer to the following series of questions posed by Hart:

"What is it that the mind desires, then, or even that the mind loves, when it is moved to seek the ideality of things, the intelligibility of experience as a whole? What continues to compel thought onward, whether or not the mind happens at any given moment to have some attachment to the immediate objects of experience? What is the horizon of that limitless directedness of consciousness that allows the mind to define the limits of the world it knows?"

Shut your mouth!

But I'm talkin' about O!

Then we can dig it!

One little area where I might deviate from Hart is where he says that this represents a "longing for an ultimate abstraction." I think rather that this is a longing for the ultimate concretion, a la Whitehead and Hartshorne. As with subject-object, we may think of abstract and concrete as ultimate complementarities. But of the two, which is the more inclusive? One might be tempted to say the abstract, but for Hartshorne it is the concrete.

It seems to me that this follows Aristotle's tweaking of Platonism, whereby there is no abstract and disembodied realm of ideal forms or archetypes. Rather, form and substance are always found together.

Just so, everywhere we look, the abstract is in the concrete, hence the total intelligibility of the world. And I should think that Jesus represents the Last Word of this point of view, i.e., the ultimate abstract within the concrete.

Furthermore, to say that God is "concrete" is to say he is found in us. If not us, then where? Is not the whole point of the Adventure to "concretize" more of the Creator in the creation? Or is it to just to be aware that there exists this ultimate abstract concept?

In any event, Hart identifies man's flight beyond himself with ecstasy. If we consider the literal meaning of the word, it essentially means to be outside oneself -- or, to put it colloquially, to be "beside oneself" with joy, or bliss, or enthusiasm, or exaltation. Thus, in a way, experience as such is always "ecstatic," because it carries us outside ourselves:

"in all experience there is a movement of the self beyond the self, an ecstasy -- a 'standing forth' -- of the mind, directed toward an end that resides nowhere within physical nature as a closed system of causes and effects. All rational experience and all knowledge is a kind of rapture, prompted by a longing that cannot be exhausted by any finite object" (ibid.).

I ask you: what would life be in the absence of this ecstasy?

Matter, that's what, for Life is already an audacious movement of matter beyond itself, is it not?

And what is Mind but the movement of life beyond the closed circle of biology, into a "new" transcendent world of meaning, truth, love, beauty, etc.? Thus, just as there is a biosphere, there is a psychosphere and a pneumosphere.

Which goes to the "third thing" I never got to in yesterday's post. The third occasion for wonder is that these latter two realms (Mind and Spirit) should exist at all. In other words, it is one thing for an animal to be naturally selected based upon its adaptation to the physical world.

But in human beings, we have a creature who is adapted to higher, nonlocal, transcendent worlds. The most shocking thing is that these worlds are not "empty" or devoid of content. It very much reminds me of how the physical eye was "discovered" via a number of separate biological lines -- as if lured there by some nonlocal end.

Just so, once man entered this nonlocal space -- well, for one thing, this is precisely when man becomes man (in the vertical sense), for humanness is the state of being in contact with the transcendent object. I attempted to depict this reality in pp. 86-93 of the Coonifesto, as in

The boundary of life did not end with its own precarious little dance along the precipice of non-being.... Crossing that radiant upper threshold, we are witness to another startling explosion -- or perhaps implosion -- this time into a subjective space that was somehow awaiting the primate brains that had to learn to navigate, colonize, and eventually master it.... This third singularity was was an implosion into a transdimensional subjective space refracted through the unlikely lens of a primate brain.

Or, just say the flesh became -- or becomes -- word, and that this becoming is the essence of the Adventure.

To be continued...

Atheism: Getting Nowhere Fast

I suppose there are no less than three immediate sources of wonder, each of which being prior to and beyond any scientific explanation.

There is existence as such, i.e., a cosmos that cannot explain itself; consciousness, for which there isn't even a decent scientistic fairy tale; and all the superfluous spiritual joy connected with the whole transnatural dimension, e.g., love, truth, beauty, etc. -- or what Hart places under the heading of ananda-bliss.

For example, why is it such a literal joy for me to blog? What's up with that? Is it really reducible to some crude, anti-intellectual Darwinian explanation?

In other words, is the blog just a babe magnet in disguise? First of all, I already have a babe. Besides, if it is, then your own tyrannical Darwinism is no different, just another way to get chicks and tenure. If Darwinism is true, then we can at least stipulate that the pursuit of truth is a delusion, and get down to the real question of who's got the bigger blog.

But for a Darwinian to ask "who's got the more encompassing truth?" is like asking "who has the reddest genes?" Genes don't have color, nor do primates built of contingency have access to truth.

This makes me want to skip ahead to chapter five of The Experience of God, Bliss (Ananda). As with so much of the book, it covers the same essential territory as One Cosmos (in particular, section 3.1, The Big Bang of the Mental Universe, but other parts as well), albeit in a more sober, even borderline tenured way (bearing in mind that there are always exceptions to the rule that the sinmates run the looniversity bin).

Example?

Well, in my assessment of the Big Bang of human self-consciousness, I zero in on three strange factors: first, the idea that a supposedly material cosmos should have interiority at all. This is something that science can't even know of, much less explain.

In other words -- and this is an absurdity, but just go with it -- if one weren't already personally acquainted with consciousness, one could never know of it. That is, the most complete description of any physical object -- including a brain -- would reveal nothing of its interior, i.e., its subjectivity.

Which reminds me of the ultimate antinomies we've been discussing, one of which is subject-object. One reason we know materialism cannot possibly be true is that the "distance" between objective and subjective is truly absolute. No amount of mere quantity can give rise to qualities: you can't get here (inside) from there (outside).

Since there is no other way to shoehorn subjectivity into the cosmos, we begin with the principle that subject and object are complementary. However, of the two, which is the more encompassing, the more inclusive? The answer is obvious: the subject can include objects, as we all know by way of personal experience, being that the soul is the form of the body. If this weren't the case, I couldn't be invisibly commanding my object -- my body -- to be typing this sentence.

Now, this doesn't mean that God is merely the form of the cosmos. However, it also doesn't mean that God isn't the form of the cosmos, since the cosmos is indeed logocentric right down to the ground, and the logos is always "with" God. You can lʘʘk it up.

Onto the second factor (the first being interiority): this is the profound mystery of intersubjectivity. It is one thing for there to exist intelligent bits of matter. I mean, it's still miraculous (intelligence being intrinsically transcendent and therefore supernatural), but it's another thing entirely for this intelligence to gain access to other intelligences, and for one's own intelligence to be accessible to other intelligences.

In short, human beings aren't just intelligent, but rather, members of one another. We retain our individuality, and yet, this individuality means nothing if it isn't plugged into the intersubjective grid. You could say that this intersubjectivity makes (among other things) love possible.

Or, you could turn the cosmos right-side up and say that Love is what makes intersubjectivity possible. This is the Raccoon doctrine -- that the intersubjectivity of the Trinity is mirrored in the herebelow in the form of love, charity, self-sacrifice, humility, etc., each of which Darwinism is incapable of explaining in a nonself-beclowning manner.

Instead of the two factors I have described, Hart focuses in on intentionality, which, it seems to me, describes the same phenomena from a slightly different angle. Intentionality is "a kind of agency, directed toward an end. We could never know the world from a purely receptive position." Rather, "To know anything, the mind must be actively disposed toward things outside itself..." (Hart).

In other words -- or better, in symbols -- we could say that the mind is inherently (↑), always reaching beyond itself toward a transcendent end that we call O. Thus, (↑) is oriented to a reality that surpasses the material world. In so doing, it comes "to know the endless diversity of particular things within the embrace of a more general and abstract yearning for knowledge of truth as such, and by way of an aboriginal inclination of the mind toward reality as a comprehensible whole" (ibid.).

And this drive or divine instinct or what have you is always bound up with faith (o), in that our psychopneumatic adventure is always sponsored by an implicit belief that existence is intelligible and that we may know it. And when we do know it, there is a kind of joy associated with it, i.e., ananda-bliss. This is why truth not only sounds right, but "feels good," so to speak. It tickles.

This marriage of mind and world is just like a... a marriage. "Consciousness," writes Hart, "enters into intimate communion with... the form of things," revealing "a natural orientation... toward the infinite horizon of intelligibility that is being itself."

Speaking of our cosmotextual orientation, just as there can be no such thing as "homosexual marriage," there can be no such thing as an intellectually consistent "atheist truth-seeker," since to seek truth is to orient oneself toward, and open oneself to, this transnatural ideal, or O. In short, "all knowledge involves an adventure of the mind beyond itself" (ibid.).

Atheists book their passage for the same cosmic adventure we do, except they throw the maps and compass out the window. This allows them to travel much faster than we do. But where's the fun in getting nowhere fast? We prefer to take our time, which is what this old but colorful bus is for. After all, to travel well is better than to arrive. Or in other words, I don't want to be God. I just want to know God.

BTW, I never got to the Third Thing, but we'll continue this trip tomorrow.

Mystical A-theology and the Experience of Godlessness

I mentioned in a comment yesterday that Hart really elevates his game in the second section of The Experience of God, dealing with consciousness.

However, the first section, on being, is nevertheless a highly insultaining takedown of atheism in all its forms. Upon reading it -- assuming he is capable of understanding the arguments -- no intellectually honest atheist can remain one. Or, at least he can have no rational basis for clinging to a doctrine that explains nothing, not even itself.

Which brings up an interesting point. Atheists -- very much like liberals -- naturally believe they have a rational basis for their beliefs. This is not only untrue, but not even untrue, since these beliefs do not meet the minimum standard of being susceptible to falsification (e.g., global warming, Keynesian economics, socialized medicine, etc.). Hart demonstrates how easy it is to obliterate the childish arguments of, say, a Stephen Hawking, who is so brilliant when confined to his own wheelhouse of mere physics.

Speaking of which, it reminds me of coach-pitching in little league baseball. My son is in his first season of all kid-pitch, which can be a difficult adjustment, since the pitches aren't all right in the hitter's wheelhouse each time. You might say that atheists have no trouble hitting fat, lazy tosses right down the middle of the plate. But they are utterly baffled by a metaphysical curveball.

However, any half-educated psychologist -- as most are -- can confirm that David Hume was correct in characterizing reason as a "slave of the passions" which "can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

I wouldn't go quite that far, since it is indeed possible to detach reason from emotion and think in a purely abstract and disinterested manner, mathematics being the quintessential example. Likewise, the pure metaphysics of a Schuon is bracingly free of sentiment, like climbing to the peak of a bare and majestic mountain.

But this is not the manner in which most people approach religion, or science, for that matter. Rather, these enterprises are filled with passion, commitment, and adventure.

Thus, as Sarah Ruden describes it in the October 28 National Review, "for the great mass of the religious and nonreligious alike, these debates are not about pure, abstract intellection, but about making sense of experience -- which is to say, personal experience, because what other kind is there?"

Which is the point I made in yesterday's post, that there is no way to avoid the fact that we begin in experience, not with logic per se. That is, logic is obviously powerless unless there first exist experiencers to experience it. In short, experience is prior to logic -- although it does follow a subtle logic of its own, which I summarized in the post.

Again, that logic reveals experience to be intrinsically temporal, and shows the experience of time to essentially be a function of memory. Thus, the past contributes to, and is retained in, the present, as it hurtles toward the novelty and surprise of the future. In this movement nothing is lost, since everything contributes to the present moment, just as everything in the present moment contributes to the future

So, there is experience as such, and there is personal experience, which is experience inflected through a person. And any philosophy that fails to illuminate personal experience is going to be a nonstarter for the vast majority of persons.

This is why the arguments of atheists are irrelevant to a person who has experienced God, just as the abstract theological arguments of a Hart or Schuon will make no sense to an infertile egghead who has deprived himself of such an experience. Rather, based upon his own sterile experience, materialism "makes sense" to the materialist, irrespective of the deficiency of the logic.

In a way, it comes down to natural theology vs. mystical theology. Mystical theology is very much rooted in experience, so it turns out that materialism, scientism, and Darwinian fundamentalism are really forms of "mystical a-theology."

Thus, the only way these latter doctrines can prevail in the culture war is not through argument, but rather, by depriving people of the experience of God. Which is why, at the nasty core of leftism, there is always soul murder. How could this not be the case, when leftism involves systematically seeing the world as it isn't in order to bring about a world that can never be? Assuming they could accomplish this impossible project, there would be no souls left to experience reality.

My son, for example, attends a religious school, and it is not so much that he is learning some religious doctrine, but rather, that his day-to-day life is enriched beyond measure by being suffused with a constant awareness of the divine (even -- or maybe even especially -- if it is a non-conscious awareness). Rather than being something imposed from the outside, it is in the very air he breathes, in an experiential way.

Thus, for example, he experiences Christian love (agape) in the way his teachers relate to him, whereas liberals have succeeded in criminalizing the very thought in public schools. Now that I think about it, I don't so much want to thank his teachers for teaching him, but rather, for really loving him.

But I don't see how real education can take place outside this loving context, being that love and truth converge on the same object. Sadly, I can already see the coarseness setting in and the light being extinguished in some of his public schooled friends. It's kind of creepy, really. I do see how good parenting can compensate, but for the kids with coarse and lightless parents, there is no escape from the slide into barbarism.

Well, I had wanted to get into the second main section of The Experience of God, on consciousness, where Hart really takes flight. The flight has been postponed until tomorrow.

Nothing is Impossible

To extend yesterday's metaphor, now that my head and feet are fully aligned, I'm not sure I even understand the terrain on which I had previously been attempting to walk.

Which means what, exactly?

It essentially means that I was attempting to speak as a traditionalist while ambulating in the manner of a process philosopher. Sort of a distant cousin of hypocrisy, which is when one's actions don't conform to one's values.

This book by David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God, presents a timely summation of the traditional view, so as to provide a vivid contrast with my old New Truth.

Of course, suffice it to say, no one is under any pressure to agree with me. This is not that kind of cult. I realize this is a contentious area, and I still sometimes wonder if I am falling into some sort of ontological trap. I mean, one doesn't lightly disagree with 2000 years worth of people who are wiser or smarter or holier than thee. However, there is no question that they were laboring under an extremely misleading but nevertheless presumptive picture of reality.

Reader Van plucked the following passage from bobscurity, adding that he was on pins and needles waiting to hear about the many implications! Okay, I added that last part, but here's the passage:

"There was a time, not too long ago, when I would have explicitly agreed with Hart, even while implicitly agreeing with Hartshorne. And that's a problem, i.e., when what one explicitly thinks doesn't jibe with what one implicitly feels, experiences, or 'knows' in a direct and unmediated manner. Call it cosmic dissonance"

In many ways, The Experience of God is structured just like One Cosmos, except that, instead of Matter (or material existence), Mind (or psyche), and Spirit (nous, pneuma), Hart -- whom I believe is an Orthodox Christian -- uses the Hindu triad of Sat (Being), Chit (Consciousness), and Ananda (Bliss). However, he covers much of the same ground, albeit coming at it from a more purely logical and metaphysical perspective, whereas I begin with the world as we experience it and as disclosed by science.

If you were going to be uncharitable, you would say that he begins with a priori concepts, whereas I begin with reality. However, if you were going to be uncharitable to me, you would probably say that one cannot derive metaphysics from empirical reality.

Which is a little ironic -- I think -- because, if I am not mistaken, Thomas Aquinas begins with the proposition that there is a real world external to us, and that, in order to know it, the knower must conform himself to it.

But more generally, where can we begin but with experience? And there is no experience that is not "of" something. So it seems to me that it is rather critical to understand the "experience of experience." In other words, we cannot just take experience for granted, but must try to get beneath it and understand just what it is.

Now, here's the rub -- or at least a rub: experience is intrinsically temporal. Indeed, I would say that it is impossible to conceive of "nontemporal experience" -- that it is an oxymoron. And just as there is no experience without time, there is no time without experience.

If you have difficulty wrapping your tail around the latter statement, you need only examine your own experience of time, which is intrinsically bound up with memory of the past. Without this memory -- this conservation of the immediate past -- there would only be an atemporal now; being, but no becoming.

To jump ahead a bit, in the process view of Whitehead/Hartshorne, this examination of our own experience reveals how all of reality is structured. Clearly, just as in our own mental experience, nature exhibits continuity with, and conservation of, the past. And yet, nature ceaselessly flows forward, always manifesting novel configurations. Therefore, just as in our own minds, nature is a combination of conservation and change, memory and creativity, sameness and novelty, boundary conditions and adventure.

This further leads to the view that creativity is woven into the very fabric of being. But oops! That word being: it no longer makes sense in this new context. In the traditional view, becoming is just a persistent illusion (there is no other way to put it), completely parasitic on changeless Being.

But in the process view the terms are reversed: Being is just an abstraction from Becoming -- and an empty abstraction to boot. It is either literally unthinkable or only thinkable, for it is not anything we can actually experience, experience once again requiring duration.

Now, my point about feet and heads is that no one (or do they?) really treats God or relates to God in this abstract manner. Indeed, from my perspective, perhaps the most earth-shattering implication of the Incarnation is that it should be an inoculation against the Greek ideal of the immutable, unmoved mover.

This is probably going to rattle some cages, but Hartshorne dismisses the notion of "nothing" being a meaningful concept, as in "creation from nothing." There is frankly nothing in the Bible that mandates such an interpretation.

But for Hartshore, nothing is impossible -- that is, it's just another human abstraction. Nothing is the negation of something, and therefore something.

For my part, I have never really wondered "why there is something rather than nothing." Rather, there's gotta be something, right? Might as well be this. Nothing isn't even thinkable unless we have something with which to compare it. I'm still in awe of this particular something -- just not in comparison to nothing, but rather, compared to all the other possible somethings.

(This is not to be confused with the big Nothing that opens and closes the Coonifesto, because that Nothing is intrinsically at play with Something; you might say that it is part of the rhythm of eternity, like diastole and systole, inhalation and exhalation, catabolism and anabolism, etc. It is ultimately how creativity happens. Don't get me wrong -- I still believe in nothing. I just think it is eternally in relation to something -- not either/or, but both/and. Or as old Heraclitus put it, The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.)

Hart fundamentally disagrees, affirming that "the 'distance' between being and nonbeing is qualitatively infinite..." True, but is nonbeing real, or only a mental abstraction? For me, the important distance is not between an absolute nothing and a fulsome something per se, but rather, between reality as it is and reality as it could be: in other words, creativity. Creativity is what links nothing to something, but that link is everything. It's not as if you can start with nothing and then get all creative with it, because where did the creativity come from?

Excuse me, but are we getting into angels dancing on pinheads territory? Is anyone else on board, or just bored?

Well, we've come this far. At least allow me to complete the trip and drop you off at the station.

In the traditional view, of course, God is "the infinite to which nothing can add and from which nothing can subtract..." Therefore, in order to properly think about God, we can really only unthink about him -- that is, if you hold to the traditional view.

Thus, we arrive at a "deductive negation of all the obvious conditions of finitude," which basically leaves us with nothing. I mean, right? Again, experience is temporal and time is finite, ergo, no experience of God is possible. Yes, you can certainly have spiritual experiences, but God is "beyond change" and "cannot be affected... by anything outside himself." Frankly, he's really not that into you.

Okay, I get that. In theory, anyway. But does anyone actually live as if God couldn't care less, which must be the case if he is completely immune to any form of change whatsoever? Is change really so intrinsically bad a thing that it must not contaminate God? It seems to me that there is literally no way to relate to such a being, not even by way of analogy. Is that really the way It Is? Just asking.

Metaphysical Podiatry: Know Your Cosmos

Know your cosmos. Like anyone could do that, Napoleon.

Besides, is it even important that we do so? Man inhabits a variety of worlds, and it seems to us that the cosmic is the least of our worries.

For example, understanding the world of interpersonal relations is an urgent matter, because a human being isolated from his fellows will be stunted beyond recognition -- just a primate freak, really. Likewise, failure to pay heed to the physical environment will result in death or serious injury.

And failure to get politics right -- i.e., the science of group order -- results in even more death and serious injury, while failure to understand economic order can result in Obamacare or even worse, e.g., untreatable Krugmania.

There are various subworlds as well, such as the bacterial and quantum. Of the two, the former has obvious implications for survival (e.g., antibiotics), whereas the latter goes more to our flourishing (e.g., the resultant technology).

There is also moral order, sexual order, religious order... So, who cares if the cosmos is floating on a sea of quantum foam or sitting on the back of a giant turtle? Either way, there's nothing we can do about it.

Well, Yes and No. To say there's nothing we can do about it is to say that it represents necessary knowledge; and to say something is necessary is to say it is eternal, since it always is, and cannot not be. Therefore, to know the necessary truths of the cosmos is to touch eternity, and touching eternity is its own reward.

In other words, knowledge of eternity is utterly useless knowledge, since it is a means to no end. Thus, it is the most gloriously liberal (and therefore liberating) of all liberal arts, in comparison to which every other form of knowledge is just another servile art. Or in other words, we're ultimately talking about the primary distinction between slack and slacklessness (or O and Ø), so ironically, nothing could be more useful than this useless knowledge.

Or, in the inadvertently cosmic words of Lileks, "I think one's happiness and ability to feel at home in the world is directly related to one's ability -- one's incessant compulsion -- to invest the most commonplace observations with the most grandiose conclusions." Then again, one man's bleat is another man's prison.

It actually works both ways: we may proceed downhill, deploying the most grandiose principles to illuminate the most commonplace experiences; or uphill, seeing how the most commonplace experiences can lead to the most grandiose and far-reaching implications. So, it's really a two-way street -- in fact, the two-way street, in that it goes to the permanent dialectic between principles and experience, which is none other than metaphysics.

For what is metaphysics, really? Yes, it is "beyond physics," which means that every occasion of physical reality is just a special case of more general principles. These principles must be true, not just in this cosmos, but in any cosmos. In other words, they are the very principles of existence as such.

Some people think metaphysics is impossible. Which, ironically, is a transparent example of an impossible metaphysic. In reality, it is not possible to be human and not have a metaphysic, whether implicit or explicit. So the debate is not between metaphysics and no metaphysics, but simply between good and bad metaphysics.

Actually, that's an oversimplification, since, like mothering, there can be "good enough metaphysics," by which I mean that it is close enough to get one to the phoenix line.

What is an example of something that must be the case, and cannot possibly not be the case?

Interestingly, I am currently reading two authors who take antithetical positions on the subject, Hartshorne and Hart period. But it's not really correct to say they are antithetical to one another, since both are even more antithetical to any possible a-theistic position. In other words, both affirm that the non-existence of God is an impossible absurdity. But they have a fundamental disagreement as to the nature of God, or of ultimate reality.

There was a time, not too long ago, when I would have explicitly agreed with Hart, even while implicitly agreeing with Hartshorne. And that's a problem, i.e., when what one explicitly thinks doesn't jibe with what one implicitly feels, experiences, or "knows" in a direct and unmediated manner. Call it cosmic dissonance.

Most so-called liberals of my acquaintance suffer from a form of this malady, in that they support the liberal cause even while living very conservative lives. Thus, instead of preaching what they practice, they practice truth while preaching fashionable lies, tenured kookery, and general dysfunction.

For example, these well-to-do liberals are far more likely to get married and stay married than the dysfunctional lower classes for whom marriage is just another optional lifestyle, of no intrinsic value.

So that's a useful way to detect someone's metaphysic: don't pay attention to what they say, but what they do. People vote with their feet, and their feet are planted firmly in their implicit ground of being.

This instantly clears up so much metaphysical confusion. For example, no one who supposedly believes in determinism lives his life as if free will doesn't exist. No relativist behaves in a perfectly chaotic manner. No Darwinian derives his values from nature. No anti-gun nut refuses to defend himself. No pregnant woman believes in her bones that her fetus is just a part of her body, like the heart or spleen, only worthless. No one who believes in redistribution voluntarily redistributes his wealth. No Marxist behaves as if history is inevitable. Etc.

And when I say "no one," there are obvious exceptions, these being the true crazies. There are liberals who actually "walk it like they talk it," for example, demented parents who insist there are no intrinsic sexual differences, and raise their children to be post-gender freaks.

Anyway, if we examine feet instead of minds, perhaps we can have more widespread agreement about the nature of reality. Call it metaphysical podiatry.

To be continued...

Making the Most of Our Cosmic Home

About the problem of evil: if the existence of evil proves the non-existence of God, then this implicitly affirms that an "entire absence of evil" would be "deducible from the presence of God."

Right. But this assumes the possibility of creatures "wholly without freedom, able to make no decisions except those duplicating what God decides for them." Thus, they wouldn't actually be creatures at all, just extensions of God. So it seems that if free human persons are to exist, evils must come.

Okay. But what about nonhuman evil -- if it even makes sense to attribute evil to natural phenomena such as hurricanes, viruses, and gardening accidents? This, I think, actually poses more of a problem for the traditional view, since human evil may only contribute a small percentage -- depending on the case -- to the evils experienced by man. Do the existence of these evils preclude a good God?

Here I think the process view is the only one capable of adequately addressing this question. That is to say, in process philosophy, we don't begin with a rigidly deterministic cosmos that inexplicably manifests freedom with the appearance of human beings.

There is no materialistic explanation for such a shockingly discontinuous development, which is why scientism can cope with neither freedom nor ethics. Rather, it tries to eliminate the former entirely and reduce the latter to some sort of glorified animal instinct or impersonal genetic strategy.

But process philosophy begins with the principle of creativity, and therefore freedom. Thus, a degree of freedom is present in every process, every occasion, every event. Of course, it is much more attenuated in the quantum world than in the human world, but still, over time, we see what the cosmic creativity brings forth.

If there were no such creativity latent in matter, then it couldn't bloody well come to life, now could it? Likewise, if there were no creativity in the genes, they'd just produce more effective killing machines, certainly not poems, novels, and symphonies.

Creativity, like freedom, cuts both ways. For example, think of the tricky flu virus that each year finds a new way to get around our immune system. So, with the existence of freedom and creativity comes "risk as well as opportunity."

Now, there appear to be three long-term cosmic possibilities: either the cosmos is unchanging; it is getting "worse"; or it is getting "better." Physicists such as Einstein insist -- appearances to the contrary notwithstanding -- that time is just a "persistent illusion," and that the cosmos is really just a big brick.

Traditionalists adopt the view that everything is necessarily going downhill since the creation, as if subject to a kind of metacosmic entropy. Therefore, the past is better than the present, because it is "closer" to the first cause. Time in this view is essentially corrosive.

The converse of this is the evolutionary view held by people such as Teilhard de Chardin and various new age yahoos, in which the cosmos is "winding up." It's not getting older, it's getting better!

These three positions are entangled with the nature of God -- or of the absolute principle, if one denies God.

For example, Aristotle posits a First Cause, the Unmoved Mover, which was later incorporated into Christian metaphysics. Such a view implicitly argues that to cause is intrinsically superior to being caused. And if we consider this temporally, it "implies that the past is in principle better than the present," since the present is wholly caused by the past.

This, it seems to me, accounts for the romantic gnostalgia of traditionalists who exalt the past and denigrate the present. Like the "block universe," it is a highly problematic view, because it means that what looks to us like creativity is just a form of decay.

Ultimately it must mean that "whatever the creative process produces is in no way an enrichment of the divine reality, who must be cause only, in no way effect." Thus, "the creation is literally of no value to God."

This comes close to the Gnostic heresy that creation itself is a fall -- that existence as such is a sin, since it implies separation from God. In other words, sin isn't located in human freedom, but way before that, in the mere act of creation.

To insist that to cause is superior to being caused is also to say that necessity is intrinsically superior to contingency. Is this possible? If true, it would mean that a machine is superior to a human being. It would essentially define freedom as a bad thing, something wholly deviant, with no upside.

The third view, of an evolutionary cosmos, is also problematic, because it essentially embodies a mirror image of the fallacies of the second.

Indeed, this is why it is so compatible with a bonehead progressivism that denigrates the past -- tradition -- and exalts the future. Just as the implication of traditionalism is that people of the past were "better" than us, the implication of evolutionism is that we are just stepping stones to the future human beings who will be superior to us.

More ominously, it reduces human beings to a means to some future end. And this is precisely where the genocidal left jumps in to accelerate the process.

In my opinion, the only way out of these metaphysical muddles and nul de slacks is the Raccoon way, because it balances and harmonizes conservation, creative surprise, and evolutionary adventure.

(All of the quoted material in this post is from Hartshorne's Insights & Oversights.)

Obamacare and Other Cosmic Errors

One of Robert Rosen's central conclusions is that the sort of systems described (or that are describable) by physics are actually the exception, not the rule. Being that Rosen sits in the Raccoon emeritus chair in theoretical biology, we should listen to him.

The reason why physics is powerless to explain life is that physics is not nearly general enough, applying as it does to special cases. Such a simplistic model doesn't allow for creativity, indeterminacy, organicity, information, holism, complementarity, incompleteness, relation, complexity, upside surprise, or positive entropy, all of which now appear to be fundamental.

While I'm working on my coffee, I'll let this more alert amazon reviewer summarize Rosen's views in a more turgid way than I can manage at the moment:

Rosen lays "the groundwork for a relational biology based on functional organization and methodically investigates the theoretical limits of mechanistic systems.... The distinction eventually becomes clear that any such algorithmic mechanisms cannot embody the kinds of unpredictable complexity that are characteristic of an organism. Because the syntax of Newtonian physics can express no such closed loops of entailment,'life' cannot even be described in that model of physics, much less modeled in any complete way. Thus it is that biological organisms are not a mere subset of current physics, but are representative of complexities that require physics to be enlarged."

Or you could just say that life is the rule, not the exception. I don't think you need to completely master the science in order to intuit the consequences. Even in a fully caffeinated state, Rosen is a daunting read. Rather, you may simply suspect -- as I do, and as another reviewer puts it -- that "the present axioms of science are much too limiting to explain anything we really would like to know about the universe," because "we are trying to solve problems in too limited a universe of discourse."

I mean, right? The existing toolbox of the tenured is "only useful for predicting the N+1 [i.e., quantitative] state for some dead (and therefore uninteresting) mechanistic universe." But it's nice to have the prestige of science -- or the science of the future! -- on our side.

The problem is, none of these futurians seem to know of or talk to one another. The reason for this, I think, is that, in order to climb the greased pole of tenure, one must internalize the existing paradigm, whether one is a physicist, biologist, neurologist -- even theologian! In short, academia is is full of conformists and secondhand intellectuals.

Therefore, the nonconformists who resist the indoctrination must either be very stubborn, independent, and creative; or just eccentric crackpots. The softer the science, the more room for psychoceramic flights of fancy, which is why my field, psychology, is plagued by so much mandatory bullshit masquerading as science.

When I say that none of these folks talk to one another, I'm looking in the indexes of Rosen's books, and see no references to such luminous predecessors as Whitehead, Polanyi, or Errol Harris, whose many books touch on some of the same themes.

Hartshorne -- an acolyte of Whitehead -- proves with logic what Rosen proves with science, that determinism is "incapable of being true." This is because "necessity is a special case, not the universal principle." Again, the universal principle, if not "life," must at least permit life! It cannot render life inexplicable, or else we have a theory that is held by people who don't exist.

As we've been saying, necessity cannot explain creativity, novelty, progress, etc. Therefore, just as disorder must be parasitic on order, necessity must be parasitic, so to speak, on creativity. Creativity allows for disorder, indeed, requires it, in order to break out of an existing pattern and reorganize at a higher level.

Thus, just as pure necessity explains nothing, so too does pure randomness explain nothing. These are just complementary positions at the extremes of metaphysical error. And no human being (or community) could actually live at these nonsensical extremes, of leftist tyranny at one end, anarchy at the other. This suggests that the ordered liberty of our founders works because it is an image of how reality works.

The same goes for certain religious doctrines. Say what you want about Vedanta or Buddhism, but no functioning society could be built around people who don't regard reality as real, and who dissolve the individual into the formless void. Rather, in order to even allow for such useless people (and I mean that in the best possible sense), we need an awful lot of useful people.

Indeed, it is the identical problem with Obamacare, and with socialism in general -- that in order for it to work, we need millions of healthy and productive people compelled to do things they don't want to do, in order to support unproductive people who don't have to do anything but vote for Obama. Leftists don't like to admit it, but in order for it to work -- for a while, anyway -- it needs reality to support all the unreality.

Note that the reverse can never be true, i.e., unreality supporting reality -- which is why the ideas of the tenured only "work" within the artificial confines of the looniversity bin, not in the real world. Let's see Enron advisor Paul Krugman run a business.

Harshorne proves that God exists necessarily. However, he believes that a metaphysical blunder was committed along the way, which conflated God's necessary existence with an existence of pure necessity -- which, ironically, is the identical error of scientistic fundamentalists. But not so ironic, in that western science emerged in the context of the Christian metaphysic of a rational and law-abiding Creator.

The problem is, they used too restricted a definition or reason, and too narrow a definition of law. Because if the law is creativity, this places everything in a different light.

One of the features of the Coonifesto is it's circularity. This can be taken in two ways -- the right way and the wrong way.

The wrong way would be to equate it with Nietzsche's dreary "eternal return," whereby the same things keep happening over and over, in a deterministic way. That would be awful, and I can't imagine a Creator who would actually enjoy an eternity of summer reruns instead of a new bleat every day.

The correct way to interpret it is in the process way, whereby the Godhead is "enriched," so to speak, by its own cosmic adventure. I am hardly the first to posit this divine-cosmic circularity. Precursors include Origen, Denys, Maximus, Erigena, Eckhart, and more. Likewise, that little quote from Voegelin in the comment box expresses the same idea, of "reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable."

But given the divine creativity, it must be a creative spiral, not a closed circle, because otherwise, in the words of Hartshorne, the creation was just "a nonaction, effecting nothing."

The Unexamined Lie is Not Worth Loving

Two points: I don't see what purpose religion can serve if it doesn't speak to man as he is, i.e., in his essential nature; or if it affirms principles (such as determinism) that no one can actually live (i.e., no one lives their life as if they lack free will). In other words, a religion can't do us much good if it applies to a different species.

I found the Hartshorne quote I was looking for the other day, that "every major mistake about God involves a mistake about human nature."

In short, erroneous anthropology necessarily leads to erroneous theology. Which is why, for example, liberation theologians worship a Marxist God, or why Islamists worship a genocidal one, or why Al Sharpton worships an angry pimp. That is, they simply worship their own projections, which amounts to idolatry.

That's all well and good -- or unwell and bad -- but just how are we supposed to distinguish truths from mistakes about human nature? Isn't this an area that is hopelessly subjective? After all, since the 1960s we've "evolved" into the view that there are no permanent truths of human nature -- let alone good and bad ways of being human -- and that we should celebrate all these wonderful differences.

So instead of hewing to the principle that the unexamined life is not worth living, our elites tell us that the un-diverse life is not permissible. If you should examine your life and discover unalterable truths, you're not just wrong, but evil.

For example, if you should examine human life and discover the truth that marriage involves the union of a man and woman, the prerogatives of an omnipotent diversity -- of political power -- trump truth.

Which itself is a great perversity, for humans, alone among creatures, have access to truth. To deny this principle is to prevent man (and maim him in the process). And yet, this is precisely what diversocrats and relativists do. And in so doing they cause collateral damage to God, given the above noted analogy between God and man.

Hartshorne writes that "We can only conceive God by analogy to ourselves as conscious beings, but we destroy the analogy if we impose requirements upon God that contradict the very meaning of consciousness."

I hope I don't have to remind anyone that the purpose of the analogy is not to reduce God to human proportions, but rather, to elevate us beyond our own limitations. For example, God knows truth perfectly, while we see it through tinted -- or sometimes frosted -- glass.

So, we don't only want to examine ourselves in our own peculiarities and idiosyncrasies -- although that's part of it -- but rather, examine ourselves with the view of discovering universal truths that apply to everyone -- or to consciousness as such.

Now, what are some universal truths of human consciousness? Well, not to belabor the point, but there is no such thing as a consciousness that is not intersubjective and in relation. We are not sealed off monads, but interiorly related: we are intrinsically members of one another. I suggest -- no, I insist -- that the notion of a "closed" consciousness is both inconceivable and impossible.

Which certainly goes to this otherwise bizarre and inexplicable idea that God is both one and three. His threeness is not to be understood in a quantitative, but rather, a qualitative way. If you ask how it is possible for three to be one, the answer is simple, because the same principle is reflected in us: a man whose consciousness is not open to the other is not superior, but rather, severely autistic. Every act of cognition involves knower, known, and knowledge, just as love involves lover, beloved, and loving.

In this context, God is not only sympathetic to (moved by) human suffering, but, in the words of Hartshorne, possesses an omniscient sympathy. He is surely the Mover, i.e., the Creator; but there is no reason to insist he is the absolutely unmoved mover.

Along these lines, he quotes the eminent Rabbi Heschel, who said that God is the most moved mover. In fact, Hartshorne tweaks the phrase, suggesting that God must be "the most and best moved mover" -- or in other words, the most perfectly sympathetic being.

Another grave fact you will unearth if you exhumine yourself is that you are free. No, not wholly free -- which is indistinguishable from Sartre's nothingness -- but rather, a mixture of necessity and freedom.

In fact, we can conceive of freedom in no other way, because unconstrained freedom -- like an unrelated consciousness -- is an inconceivable absurdity. It is just meaningless chaos, not meaningful freedom.

Here again, our own freedom is an analogy to, or reflection of, God's principial freedom. But is God's freedom a completely unconstrained chaos? I don't think so.

Rather, it seems that God is "constrained," so to speak, by his own nature. The difference here is that man can indeed violate his own nature, and in the pursuit of a spurious freedom, become unfree, which is to say, become -- or unbecome -- someone else entirely.

Leftists elevate this error to a principle in their struggle to create a new man who is no longer man at all. Thus the Raccoon tradition (or running gag) of greeting leftists with a sarcastic, Hello, new man.

Conversely, when we imitate God and become true to our own nature, this "sets us free."

Holy Change, B'atman!

I want to expand upon what was said yesterday about creativity, individuality, and the discontinuity of time, which must all be functions of one another.

Even though parts of this post may seem tediously pedantic, I am going to try to make it as painfully clear as possible. Still, you may want to read it slowly, and make sure you digest one sentence before gradueating to the next.

Hartshorne mentions the same passage from Kierkegaard that I independently discovered back when, to the effect that "Everything that comes into being proves precisely by coming into being that it is not necessary."

In this context, remember what was said a few posts back about the implicit relationship between necessity and eternity -- that the "unconditionally necessary" and the "always" are essentially synonymous.

This is because to say that something must be (i.e., is necessary) is the same as saying that it cannot possibly not-be (i.e., always is).

Therefore, "a thing is eternal if its 'being' is necessary; and if it is eternal its 'being' is necessary." A corollary is that "no eternal thing exists potentially," again, since an eternal thing must be unconditionally necessary, whereas potentiality means that something may or may not come into existence.

Thus, becoming is never necessary; or, to be perfectly accurate, it is necessary that becoming exist, but its specific contours are left open. In other words, to say that things can only become in one particular way is to be a determinist, and to therefore reduce becoming to necessity.

Now, "Coming into existence is the change of actuality brought about by freedom." Freedom -- if it is really free -- must be indeterminate, right? If it is determined, then we are once again back in the world of necessity and therefore eternity.

This is one reason why predestination must be "vigorously opposed," because it obviously robs man of his freedom and dignity, but more subtly, renders him eternal because necessary.

Frankly, it shouldn't even be necessary to say this, since the whole doctrine of determinism is absurd on its face. Nevertheless, there are people who believe it, both religious and secular (e.g., neurologists who claim free will to be an illusion).

Let's simply follow this line of reasoning where it leads. Everyone has their favorite Bible passages. Bearing in mind that the devil and even Cousin Dupree can quote scripture, one of mine is 2 Corinthians 3:17, "Now the Lord is the Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

Indeed, for a Jew, it seems to me that the dominant theme of the Hebrew Bible is exodus and freedom. The same themes obviously infuse Christianity, only presented in a novel and surprising way that no one could have guessed -- and indeed, even had difficulty comprehending retrospectively. In other words, a man nailed to a cross doesn't look like anyone's idea of freedom -- nor escape, for that martyr.

Both God and human beings are persons, which is to say, subjects. God, being the very principle of freedom, must be "wholly free," whereas man, a reflection of the principle, is only "partly so."

In other words, we are a mixture of chance and necessity, of contingency and determinacy. In fact, I prefer to say that we are the adventure of freedom and constraint. The tension between these two sort of creates the drama of life, does it not?

For Hartshorne, "where necessity does not hold, freedom decides." This is consistent with Polanyi's emphasis on how the boundary conditions of a lower level allow for the emergence of the higher (e.g., how the stability of an alphabet allows for the novel emergence of words, words for sentences, sentences for paragraphs, etc., all the way up to Ultimate Meaning).

Here is where things get a little ticklish, but one must not be afraid of the guffah-HA! experience. To be free is to make decisions. This is axiomatic, since freedom shows us an array of potential paths, and we must choose one.

Hartshorne notes that "the merely necessary does not decide, it simply is." Therefore, to the extent that God "decides," then this implies noneternal qualities in God. In other words, he can choose this, or he can choose that. Conversely, if he has no choice, than he simply "is," and is not free.

Hartshorne references Karl Barth, who, according to wikipedia, is considered by many to be "the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century." I can't say I've read much of him, and I don't mention this as an appeal to authority, only to show that there is mainstream precedent for the views we are exploring. And for Barth, "There is a kind of holy change [as well as holy constancy] in God."

This is not paradox, but necessity. We have to invert the traditional understanding, and affirm that to deny God the capacity for "holy change" is to limit him in an all-too-human way.

Missing Link Discovered!

No time for a proper post. But perhaps enough time to toss out some controversial sentiments by Hartshorne, and start a fight.

Think about this, for example: "a knowledge coextensive with truth, does not imply the immutability of truth," especially if God's Prime Directive is creativity (infused with love). If so, then it seems there will always be more truth to love.

Having said that, I see a potential problem here, in that people can forget the essential, unchanging truths, and instead focus on the continuous novelty. Clearly, there must be a balance between the changing and the unchanging.

Interestingly, this perfectly comports with information theory, about which we were rambling a few weeks ago. Remember the distinction between high entropy and low entropy carriers? In order to permit high entropy, upside change, we must have stable low entropy carriers that are not subject to change.

Could it be that this is the secret of God's "two sides," i.e., perfect stability and perfect growth? Don't get hung up on the word "change"; rather, think perfect change.

"If there is genuine freedom or creativity, if consequently truths are to some extent new each moment, then to know all in advance or eternally is to know falsely, for there is no final totality of definite truths to be known; rather, additions to truth occur with every new act of creativity."

Here again, I could only endorse such a view with certain reservations, because there are absolute truths and there are contingent truths, and the latter can only be true in light of the former. If there is no absolute truth -- i.e., truth as such -- then there is no truth at all, and we couldn't even be having this diatribe.

One point emphasized by Hartshorne is that "sufficient cause" is a misused concept. We all understand the distinction between necessary and sufficient causes: necessary causes are those in the absence of which something cannot occur; while sufficient causes are those with which something may occur.

But sufficient causes are never sufficient to explain any phenomenon. Rather, there is always a degree of "wiggle room," of freedom, of creativity -- an x-factor that prevents us from reducing anything to its antecedents.

And when I say "anything," I mean everything, because for Hartshorne (as for Whitehead), reality is "psychical" through and through, so the greater creativity and freedom experienced by human beings extends all the way down -- most famously, to the quantum realm of fundamental indeterminacy.

Importantly, Hartshorne does not root human freedom in quantum indeterminacy, as some have attempted to do. Rather, the freedom is more fundamental than the physics; in other words, physics is the way it is because God is the way he is.

Another key point is that the necessary -- and this is touched upon on p. 72 of the Encirclopedia -- cannot come into existence, because coming into existence involves a transition from not existing to existing.

In fact, "transition" isn't quite the right word, because it implies too much continuity. In point of fact, for anything to come into existence, there is a radical discontinuity with the past.

Please think about that one for a moment, because it's Really Important. If something is necessary, we have to think of it as extended through time. Even though it may appear different at differing times, it is nonetheless fully itself, just extended in time in a deterministic way.

Therefore, any real creativity implies radical discontinuity. To express it another way, to the extent that creativity is real, then the cosmos is discontinuous. It makes leaps -- which goes totally against Darwinian dogma, even though the discontinuity is an easily confirmable fact, empirically, experientially, and metaphysically.

For example, the gap between ape and man is real -- just as are the gaps between matter and life, life and mind, mind and spirit -- and no "missing link" will ever explain it. There is indeed a God of the gaps, and in fact, in the absence of God, there would be no blessed gaps at all -- nor any freedom, any creativity, any love, any novelty -- nothing distinct from the preprogrammed past.

In fact, to say "distinct" is to say freedom, and therefore individuality.

And that just made me think of a spontaneous composition by the singular Charles Mingus called Myself When I Am Real.

Well, that's all the reality we have timelessness for today...

Know Thyself, Know ThyGod

Good news. I understand the books will finally arrive here this afternoon.

True enough, I arranged for the cheapest possible shipping, but matters were further delayed because the mule was not permitted to cross federal lands. I asked the rider why he couldn't simply maneuver around the sawhorses, but it seems he's not here legally, so he didn't want to risk exposure.

I tried to assure him that the officials usually responsible for ignoring immigration laws weren't even there on the job to ignore them, but his only frame of reference is his own government, which is at least serious about keeping Mexicans out of Mexico.

So, where does this leave us?

We were just wondering whether it is true that change is intrinsically bad, while immutability and independence are always good. The Greeks looked at this vale of sorrows and quickly concluded that it was essentially a trainwreck in comparison to the beautiful, abstract, unchanging realm of platonic ideas. Their advice: get out. Tune in (to the Ideas), turn on (to the One), and drop out (of the many).

Which is one big reason why the Incarnation represented such foolishness to these gentiles. It essentially turned common philosophical sense upside down, by suggesting that there was something intrinsically noble, valuable, and redeeming about this crazy world.

For, why in heaven would God, the absolute principle, infinitely distant, free of change, unsullied by hand or tongue, ever submit to such indignity? Why would eternity ever consent to time, of all things?

Besides, how could the intrinsically changeless ever even have knowledge of the intrinsically changeable? To know something is to be changed by it, since it requires the conformity of knower to known; thus, the knower is partly determined by what he knows.

Think about it: just as it would be impossible for a being of pure contingency to know the absolute, it is impossible for a being of pure necessity to know -- and therefore be changed by -- the contingent.

Hartshorne relates this way of thinking to (what he believes to be) a common fallacy whereby irrational extremes condition and relate to one another -- for example, one vs. many, unity vs. plurality, matter vs. spirit, chance vs. determinism, exterior vs. interior.

But what if the truth is in the middle -- not in terms of some weak-minded compromise, but rather, an ultimate principle that is always two-sided?

Looked at this way, immutability is just human nonsense, a pure abstraction that can't even be thought, since it conforms to no object or experience (experience itself being experience of change). Could it be that immutability is an instance of (-k), just as is radical determinism, or materialism, or a logical atomism of exterior relations only?

Well, I say: what's your problem with time? Hartshorne maintains that the Greek prejudice against time persisted into the middle ages, envisioning a God for whom "the entirety of things is eternal, spread out immutably as datum for omniscience. Nothing is really past or future, and nothing is first nonexistent and then existent."

That's all well and good, but have you really considered the implications? For one thing, it implies that God's "decision" to create the world is "both eternal and yet not necessary," which -- recalling what was said above about extremes of logic -- makes the world a kind of "eternal accident" (an example of an unproductive paradox as opposed to a fruitful orthoparadox).

Again: what if we simply take the words "create" and "creator" seriously. Thus, "in the beginning" the Creator creates. And he never stops creating, for the vertical beginning is always now.

And having created, the Creator is "changed." How do we know he has changed? Because he sees what he has created, and sees that it is good. I'm not usually a biblical literalist, but what's wrong with taking this literally?

"Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness." So, "male and female He created them" (note the Us-them parallel, implying intersubjectivity both above and below).

If we are in the image of God, it very much matters what God is like. And if God is free of change, then so too should we strive to be that way. We should be more like progressives, who never learn, who never change, and who never create.

But what if there are "additions to truth" in "every new act of creativity?" Well, for one thing, what a blast it would be to be God! And what a joy and privilege to participate in his infinite creativity! Otherwise, if it's just the same old same old forever -- well, to quote the book:

Vishnu were here, but just His lux, God only knows only God, and frankly, ishvara monotheotonous -- no one beside Him, no nous, same old shunyata yada yada...

Literally!

Power, Truth, Freedom, and Proof that Liberals Don't Exist

Dennis Prager often says that he prefers clarity to disagreement. In other words, rather than arguing per se, it's more productive and less threatening to simply express one's position as clearly and dispassionately as possible, without dissembling, prevarication, evasion, logical fallacies, and other tricks of the tenured.

At the same time, when he has a fundamental disagreement with a guest or caller, he says that, just as he acknowledges the weaknesses or problems entailed in his position, they should have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge those in theirs.

For example, I will acknowledge that liberty has its downside, in that it requires a mature and responsible citizenry, and who wants to grow up if he doesn't have to? But liberals refuse to acknowledge the problems resulting from a massive and intrusive state that provides "security" while inducing passivity, immaturity, and a sense of entitlement in its beneficiaries.

I think we can apply Prager's two principles to our venture into process theology. That is to say, I am happy to acknowledge any difficulties that arise from a point of view that seems to limit divine omnipotence and omniscience (as conventionally understood).

But a person holding the traditional view needs to be honest about the insoluble problems to which it gives rise, most notoriously, the problem of evil (and that is far from the only one). Try as you might, so long as God has the power to mitigate evil, then he is complicit.

This is ironic, in that Christianity, unique among the religions, seems to convey exactly the opposite lesson -- i.e., that even God himself is subject to great evil.

For me, one of the most shocking implications of the Incarnation is that God submits to his own creation -- to history, to human nature, to suffering, and to cosmic injustice. This is unlike any other notion of God, either before or since. And clearly, the apostles had a great deal of difficulty wrapping their minds around it. I mean, what is the point if your god can't just go all Chicago on his enemies, like, say Allah or Obama?

If memory serves, there are some illuminating passages that touch on these questions in chapter four of Meditations on the Tarot, The Emperor. Let's see if we can pull out some relevant nuggets.

First of all, our Unknown Friend emphasizes that God governs by authority and not by force -- force in this context being synonymous with necessity. If God is omnipotent in the traditional sense, then everything ultimately reduces to force and therefore necessity.

But for UF, "Compulsion is only an expedient in which one takes recourse to remedy a lack of authority." Thus, the Emperor "does not have a sword or any other weapon. He rules by means of the sceptre, and by the sceptre alone."

Divine authority only reaches through to the person through a love of the good. It seems that this is the lesson God wishes for us to internalize, for "omnipotent force" doesn't turn out well, neither on heaven nor on earth.

After all, the most successful nation on earth has also been the most free of compulsion (at least BOE, Before the Obama Era) and most oriented to the God of freedom, whereas the most cruel and oppressive ones have been rooted in omnipotent force -- and not only the secular ones. For example, the compulsion of sharia mirrors the force of Allah; as above, so below.

For Unknown Friend, the true Emperor mirrors the divine emptiness (kenosis) in his own humble submission (via love) to a higher authority. For "God governs the world by authority, and not by force. If this were not so, there would be neither freedom nor law in the world..."

And the "first three petitions of the Lord's prayer" are recalled for "the purpose of affirming and increasing divine authority and not divine power." After all, there would be no need to petition a God of force only.

Finally, Unknown Friend emphasizes what was alluded to above, that in the Crucifix we see "the image expressing the paradox of almighty God reduced to a state of extreme powerlessness. And it is in this paradox that one sees the highest revelation of the Divine in the whole history of mankind. One sees there the most perfect revelation of the God of love."

If God is omnipotent in the more vulgar sense, then atheist vulgarians have a valid point: "Why does he not give a visible sign, if not of his power, at least of his existence? Why does he not defend his own interests?" Or in short, Come down from the cross, and then maybe we'll believe you!

A subtle point: truth and power are easily conflated. So, how can this pathetically powerless victim possibly be a reflection of the highest truth? For UF, those who "worship the idol of power" will never see this. But at the same time, there are those who explicitly believe it, but who implicitly draw the wrong lesson, and convert divine love to power.

UF says there are actually two forms of this mischief. There are "those who aspire to the ideal of the 'superman'"; and "those who believe in a God" who is "responsible for all that happens." In other words, omnipotence is either introjected or projected.

For the latter, "Their faith in God depends only on the power of God; if God was powerless, they would not believe in him. It is they who teach that God has created souls predestined to eternal damnation and others predestined to salvation; it is they who make God responsible for the entire history of the human race, including all its atrocities." Again, omnipotence implies necessity, and therefore no freedom.

The bottom line is that "the idol of power has such a hold on some human minds that they prefer a God who is a mixture of good and evil, provided he is powerful, to a God of love who governs only by the intrinsic authority of the Divine -- by truth, beauty and goodness -- i.e., they prefer a God who is actually almighty to the crucified God."

Interestingly, we come back to the meaning of liberty mentioned above in paragraph three. For real freedom is synonymous with real existence. In other words, if I am not free, I am just an extension, or prolongation, or effect, of something else, something necessary.

This being the case, freedom must be "the highest gift," since it is nothing less than the gift of real existence. So: "Love existence, and you have chosen heaven; hate it and you have chosen hell" -- one iteration of the latter being the liberal fascism that renders one a mere extension of the state or of some tinpothead dictator.

God is all powerful in history so long as there is faith; and he is crucified so far as one turns away from him. -- Meditations on the Tarot

Memo to God: Surprise Me!

Yesterday we were discussing the things that can be, those that can't be, and those that must be (or cannot not be) -- AKA, the possible, the impossible, and the necessary.

Every conceivable thing or event falls into one of these three categories, and each is the negation of the other. For example, what is possible isn't necessary, and what is necessary cannot be impossible.

In some ways this is wrapped up with the nature of time -- i.e., of time's arrow. For example, the past is the completely necessary -- for it cannot not be -- whereas the present is the node of possibility, or the "place" where the possible becomes actual.

Hartshorne introduces an interesting twist here, suggesting that the "unconditionally necessary" and the "always" are essentially synonymous. This is because to say that something must be is the same as saying that it cannot possibly not-be.

Therefore, "a thing is eternal if its 'being' is necessary: and if it is eternal its 'being' is necessary." A corollary of this is that "no eternal thing exists potentially" (remember what was said above about the categories excluding one another).

The bottom line is that Unconditional necessity and eternity are equivalent.

Now, God, who is "necessary being," is obviously eternal. Conversely, the cosmos is perpetually becoming. It is never in a final state; or, each moment is the final state of everything that has come previously, except there's no stopping the process. "Each moment a (partly) new total 'reality' comes to be, containing items not in a previous reality."

It very much reminds me of the structure of consciousness, and probably for very good reasons. In another book Hartshorne makes an observation that really clangs my bong, to the effect that most errors in thinking about God are rooted in errors in thinking about human nature.

Again, if we are "in the image of God," then it very much matters that we understand the nature of this image, not just for its own sake ("know thyself"), but in order to gain insight into the ultimate, the eternal, the necessary. There's really no other way, since we cannot comprehend God directly, only indirectly, via analogy. After all, God's most complete revelation is said to be a person. Sounds like a hint to me.

As we've been saying, Hartshorne insists that any form of radical determinism is an impossibility. For one thing, it conflates the three categories, with the result that everything becomes eternal (because necessary). A cosmos without possibility -- i.e., without freedom -- is nonsense; very pure (i.e., completely abstract) nonsense, but nonsense nevertheless.

We now come to a ticklish fork in the theological road, a sorting mechanism that will send you down one path or the other. That is to say, if God is omniscient in the traditional sense, then this eliminates the possible, or at the very least renders it an illusion of time.

For even if you try to escape the consequences by suggesting that we are really and truly free -- even though God knows ahead of time what we will do -- then you've still elevated the can-be to the must-be. Therefore, not only have you covertly made man eternal (because necessary), you've drained the cosmos of any possible human meaning, because meaning is always a relation. And frankly, in making man eternal, you've granted him the prerogative of a god!

Now, to say that the present is the node of possibility is not to say that it contains no necessity at all. Rather, the present is obviously a kind of crossroads of possibility and necessity, of contingency and determinism, of plans and luck. Necessity, while "outside" time, is also "in" time. Not so contingency, which is only in time.

Thus, we could also say that the present moment is the meeting point of time and eternity, bearing in mind that even eternity does not have the "power" to make time run in the opposite direction, which would be the equivalent of transforming the necessary into the contingent. And that would be absurd. There can be no such thing as "contingent possibilities not in time," nor "conceivable accidents in eternity."

Again, eternal things aren't just "possible"; rather, they must be. Which is one reason why we can know of their existence, since contingent things cannot be known before they happen, a priori, whereas eternal things may only be known that way (since they cannot fail to be in any possible cosmos).

Tradition insists that God is not only necessary, but utterly free of contingency, since the former is said to be intrinsically superior to the latter.

Well, says who? Taking your own life as an analogy, if it were completely plotted out in advance, utterly necessary, would this really be a superior form of existence? Well, you can have it. I'll take adventure, creativity, possibility, and surprise, which are only available now, in time.

"God may be wholly immutable, independent, and absolute in whatever senses it is good to be so, and uniquely mutable, dependent, and relative in whatever sense capacity to change, dependence, or relativity (as in sensitive sympathy) is an excellence" (Hartshorne, emphasis mine).

What Can Be, What Can't Be, and What Must Be

So, in this book I'm reading, Insights & Oversights of Great Thinkers, Hartshorne careens through the entire history of western philosophy, from the pre-Socratics through 20th century continental philosophy, showing why they were wrong and he is right.

Oh sure, he spends a little time on the "insights," by which he means "areas where they agree with me." So he can at times be a little overbearing. But perhaps this is because he was relatively isolated from the mainstream of philosophy, and had to fend off attacks (or worse, indifference) from every direction -- not just from non-theists but from theists as well. I suppose that can make a guy a little defensive.

I wouldn't say he reduces his predecessors to straw men. Rather, he clearly knows his stuff, having studied each philosopher in much greater detail than I would ever want to. Me, I prefer to just say what I think, minus all the, er, scholarship.

And while I don't hesitate to enlist cluminaries from the past to support the Raccoon cause, I don't think I spend that much time picking apart the ones who don't. That always strikes me as narcissistic, in the peripheral sense that a common associated feature of the narcissist is that he knows all about what he doesn't like, but won't come right out and say what he does value, or cherish, or hold as a first principle. That would make him too vulnerable, too subject to attack or ridicule.

In this regard, Obama is quintessential. His whole campaign revolved around the things he hates, mainly Bush, Bush, Bush, War, and the Successful. As for what he does believe, this was kept as vague as possible. And little about this has changed in the subsequent five years, as he spends most of his time demonizing opponents while downplaying his own beliefs.

Of course, another part of this is that he knows his beliefs are normative among the tenured but abnormative among the normal. Therefore, all leftists must lie about their beliefs. However, these beliefs were nurtured in the narcissistic jerk circle of academia, so it still comes back to inappropriate self-regard and inability to deal with criticism and dissent. Which is why they dismiss dissent by projecting malevolent motives into us, e.g., racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.

Anyway, this book can get a little tedious when Hartshorne gets into the details of why, for example, Leibniz or Spinoza were wrong about this or that fine point of metaphysics. I suppose this is why I am so drawn to Schuon, who is able to reduce opponents to jello with a barbed comment or two. Saves a lot of time.

Example?

Well, on this page you can click on the philosophy or -er you'd like to see Schuon eviscerate (or exalt, depending). Let's see. How about modern philosophy in general?:

"Modern philosophy is a liquidation of evidences, and therefore fundamentally of intelligence; it is no longer in any degree a sophia, but much more like a 'misosophy.'"

Biff!

"A science that is called 'exact' is in fact an 'intelligence without wisdom,' just as postscholastic philosophy is inversely a wisdom without intelligence."

Bam!

"rationalism properly so called is false not because it seeks to express reality in rational mode, so far as this is possible, but because it seeks to embrace the whole of reality in the reason, as if the latter coincided with the very principle of things."

Boom!

Okay, let's get personal. Kant?

"What is crucial in Kantianism is not its pro domo logic and its few very limited lucidities, but the altogether 'irrational' desire to limit intelligence; this results in a dehumanization of the intelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations of our century. In short, if to be man means the possibility of transcending oneself intellectually, Kantianism is the negation of all that is essentially and integrally human."

Furthermore, Kantianism is "the archetype of theories seemingly divorced from all poetry": "its starting point or 'dogma' is reducible to a gratuitous reaction against all that lies beyond the reach of reason; it voices, therefore, a priori an instinctive revolt against truths which are rationally ungraspable and which are considered annoying on account of this very inaccessibility. All the rest is nothing but dialectical scaffolding, ingenious or 'brilliant' if one wishes, but contrary to truth."

Most anyone who is aware of Schuon considers him to be the most brilliant metaphysician of the 20th century, if not ever. But the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes a similar claim of Hartshorne. Looks like we have a rumble on our hands!

Let's highlight some passages from Insights & Oversights, and see if we can avoid the rumble and instead aim for a synthesis. Let's begin with the nature of the Absolute, of God. We can quickly reduce this to three possibilities: 1) God does not exist, 2) God exists as immutable reality, or 3) God both exists and is subject to a kind of change.

One of Hartshorne's central themes is that the Greek bias for divine immutability wormed its way into Christian theology and western metaphysics more generally, obscuring the irrationality and inconsistency of such a view. For example, "Aristotle's God" -- AKA the unmoved mover -- is "totally uninfluenced by the course of [historical/human] events, in solitary immutable splendor." Thus, "he influences the world that cannot influence him."

Just on the face of it -- forgetting what we have been told about God -- does this make sense? Of course, it doesn't have to make sense, but Hartshorne is seeking something deeper; that is, he is looking for statements about reality which could, could not, or must be true -- or which are contingent, impossible, or necessary. And he believes an immutable God cannot exist, while the mutable God must exist.

In his chapter on Plato, Hartshorne references a statement in Gorgias, that "he who is incapable of communication is also incapable of friendship." This is self-evident, and yet, if God is immutable, then he cannot be our "friend." But aren't there scriptural passages that explicitly reference friendship with Jesus or the Holy Spirit?

For Hartshorne, "the capacity to be moved by others is inherent in awareness as such." This is quintessentially true of the human world, which is an internally related world of irreducible intersubjectivity.

For me, this is the key to understanding the Trinity, which we might say is the very principle of intersubjectivity and exchange -- of a primordial connectedness to the other, through which "influence" is both conveyed and received. Neither love nor knowledge are possible in the absence of this mutual influence.

As such, it is strictly impossible to have an intersubjective relationship with someone who is incapable of being influenced by us. Rather, this would be analogous to having a relationship with a rock, or a comatose person. We register the rock, but the rock cannot register us. We may learn about Obama, but Obama is completely ignorant of us.

It again comes back to what we mean by "love" and by "creativity." The Greeks tried to conceive of something "superior" to love, in positing a divine reality that is wholly closed off to influence -- like the stoic philosopher writ large.

We will pick up this thread tomorrow....

Announcing My Cosmic Orientation

Well, I guess it's time to emerge from the closet and declare my Orientation: I am a process philosopher -- or as least would be if I were a philosopher. So I guess I'm a process blogger. Or in the process of becoming one, since in this view, most nouns are actually quite verblike. But in any event, it's no use trying to hide the truth from myself. I am what I am.

Some people will say: big deal. It's not as if we didn't already know you were "different." Why, when you were a little boy, you even enjoyed dressing up as Alfred North Whitehead. Honestly, who did you think you were fooling?

So it's not really a case of being converted from one orientation to another. Rather, it's more a case of being "reminded" of what I already think; or, of making explicit what is implicit. It is much more an exercise in recollection than in assimilating something new, and of trying to develop a completely consistent view of things.

Having said that, I cannot say I am a Whiteheadian, nor am I a Hartshornean. There are still many details that need to be worked out, in order to reconcile process and Tradition. As we are about to discuss, Hartshorne says many things that bang my interior gong. However, he often says them in a slightly irritating way. He can be way too dismissive of tradition, not to mention of scripture, revelation, miracles, and other elements of religion as concretely understood and practiced. He is not especially charitable toward people with whom he disagrees, and there is hardly a whiff of the sacred or holy in his writings.

Rather, even when Hartshorne is talking about theology, he sounds more philosophical. More generally, it is as if he wants to reduce all of theology to natural theology. His God can appear so diminished that he hardly seems worthy of worship. But I think that is an example of an area that can be tweaked into a more expansive perspective.

On the positive side, I think the process view is definitely the way to go if we want to reconcile religion and science -- and everything else, for that matter. It furnishes a paradigm in which everything can be understood as a necessary consequence of everything else.

For Hartshorne, a world without God is literally unthinkable. That suits religious people just fine. However, such people will generally be uncomfortable with the corollary -- that so too is God without a world unthinkable! This is because creativity is elevated to the transcendental of transcendentals. God must create, on pain of violating his own nature. Another way of saying it is that God is free, and freedom is the absence of determination that makes creation possible.

Speaking of universal paradigms, let's begin with a discussion of Hartshorne's view of metaphysics. The book I'm working on is part of a series on "systematic philosophy," defined as "any philosophical enterprise that functions with a perspective from which everything can be addressed" (emphasis mine).

In short, we want to understand everything in such a way that nothing important is left out, or explained away, or subjected to question-begging reductionism. Thus -- to cite one obvious example -- any form of materialism is ruled out at the start, since it simply cannot cope with mind.

And on a more subtle level, Hartshorne points out that materialism is entirely abstract. Superficially one might think of it as overly concrete, but it's the opposite: the notion of "pure matter" is unalloyed abstraction, untethered to any human experience (or even experienceable experience). Thus, "matter"

"is just a word for our ignorance," and "the main charge against materialism is not that it fails to explain mind, but rather that it fails to explain anything. It merely tells us to pay attention to the spatial properties of things" (Hartshorne).

It is also to confuse prediction with understanding, so the same critique applies to determinism. Any form of radical determinism -- whether natural or supernatural -- is pure nonsense. It is a human construct, certainly not a divine one.

And yet, it is a perennial seduction for man, whether in the form of "predestination," or Islamic occasionalism, or physical determinism. For example, I ran across this article at Scientific American about a physicist who rejects the idea that "God plays dice," and believes that the indeterminism of quantum physics is just an illusory superstructure over a deeper realm of classical, local determinacy.

It is amazing to see the contortions one must go through in order to consistently maintain such a view -- and here it doesn't matter if one is a physicist or theologian, for the attempt to deny the reality of freedom in the cosmos results in some ugly-ass pretzel logic. Professor ’t Hooft

"thinks the notorious randomness of quantum mechanics is just a front. Underneath, the world obeys perfectly sensible rules." Now, why does be believe this? No reason. Just because he does. The idea bangs his gong, just as process bangs mine. The only difference is, he's wasting his life. Which I mean literally, since he believes in a scientific (or scientistic) version of predestination called "superdeterminism," in which

"free will is an illusion. Worse, actually. Even regular determinism -- without the 'super' -- subverts our sense of free will. Through the laws of physics, you can trace every choice you make to the arrangement of matter at the dawn of time."

But "Superdeterminism adds a twist of the knife. Not only is everything you do preordained, the universe reaches into your brain and stops you from doing an experiment that would reveal its true nature. The universe is not just set up in advance. It is set up in advance to fool you."

Ironically, this reminds me of creationists who insist that dinosaur bones are just there to fool us.

Has it not occurred to the professor that if the cosmos is "set up in advance" to fool us, there is no special exemption for him?

This goes to a much deeper metaphysical issue surrounding the whole idea of necessity. For Hartshorne, there is no such thing as necessity in the absence of its "complementary ultimate," contingency. Necessity is another word for determinism, and is therefore just another purely human abstraction. In point of fact, nothing is necessary except for God. And even God's a priori necessity is an abstraction compared to his concrete actuality.

In other words -- and I guess this is an example of one of Hartshorne's controversial positions -- God surely must be. However, the precise manner in which he is is undetermined -- just as it is for any other person! Descartes could say "I think, therefore I am." But who or what is this "I" that supposedly is? Just because I exist, it hardly means that I exist as a kind of static entity. If we believe that, we have once again been seduced into the realm of human abstraction, which is not the same as transcendence per se.

It seems that this seduction is rooted in the Greek idea that complete immutability and independence is superior to change, dependence, and receptivity. To "receive" is to be passive, and to be passive is bad. But passivity is how we learn about the world. We do not, as do the leftists, actively superimpose some ideological superstructure on the world. That is indeed "active," but is it good? No, because it renders knowledge of reality impossible.

So there are good and bad forms of both independence and dependence. This resonates with me, because this is one of the measures of psychological growth, one of the vectors of maturity. A completely independent person would be a kind of monster, unmoved by human sympathy, incapable of love or knowledge. At the other extreme is an infantile or childish dependence that prevents individuation from the family, tribe, or culture. Rather, what we want to see is mature dependence, which has much in common with what we know of as grown-up love.

I take 'metaphysics' to be the central concern of philosophy, meaning by the term the search for 'universal and necessary truths of existence'.... An unconditionally necessary truth... is one whose denial does not make coherent sense...., [involving] conceptions so ultimate and general that anything conceivable is a special case of them. --Hartshorne

To be continued. After all, it's a process, not a thing.

Priceless Cheap Book Offer

Good -- or indifferent, depending on your point of view -- news for One Cosmos readers! Long-time stalkers will recall the seemingly once in a laughtome offer of 2006, when I came into the possession of 100 copies of my book, One Cosmos Under God: The Unification of Matter, Life, Mind, and Spirit. Readers long ago snapped up the original 100, but I still get the occasional request for a personally enscrypted copy.

Well, the distributor is reducing its inventory, and my publisher gave me the option of taking them off its grubby hands. I impulsively and unwisely purchased a bunch more than I can possibly unload, so the offer is back on, only this time with twice the desperation!

Remember, these won't be merely "signed" copies, as my competitors deign to hastily scribble off. Rather, each copy is adorned with a lovingly handcrafted and personalized metaphysical wisecrack or insult, an official pronouncement of Raccoon membership, or perhaps a limerick of questionable taste, each different from the other, because no Raccoon is alike.

And remember -- the book will no doubt become a valuable collector's item if I am ever convicted of a well-publicized major crime or felled by a meteor.

A Love Offering of just $10 will suffice, and this pittance will even cover schlepping & fondling.

BTW, this is the new CORRECTED EDITION that fixes some embarrassing typos and other infelicities in the first printing.

If you'd like one, e-mail me at: earthtobob99@gmail.com

Or, just send a check, along with any instructions for enscribblement, to:

Robert Godwin

26141 Veva Way

Calabasas, CA

91302

*****

Back to the isness at hand. We were outlining Schuon's "universal metaphysic," to see if this can be harmonized with process theology.

Again, in order to visualize the spatial distinction between absolute and infinite, we may think of the former as point, the latter as extension; similarly, "in time the absolute is the moment, and the infinite is duration."

In terms of matter, the absolute is the ether, the "primordial substance" (prakriti in Vedanta) while "the infinite is the indefinite series of substances." In terms of form, the absolute is "the sphere" -- one more reason why we call it O -- which is widely considered the most "simple, perfect, and primordial form," whereas the infinite is "the indefinite series of more or less complex forms." Etc.

Now, there is an obvious conflict between Schuon's view and the Christian view of creation. Again, Schuon comes very close to an emanationist position, in which creation is a kind of inevitable vertical descent from plane to plane.

Conversely, Christianity always emphasizes the freedom with which God creates. In this view, creation is said to be completely unnecessary, an utterly free gift for which God receives nothing in return (since he is already complete, lacking absolutely nothing).

A few posts back I hinted at a way to harmonize these positions, and I think the key lies in horizontalizing Schuon's verticality, while converting a relation of dependence to one of complementarity.

For example, in Schuon's view, the absolute is prior to the infinite, even if the infinite is a necessary consequence of absoluteness. Another traditional way of saying this is that it is in the nature of things for the Sovereign Good to radiate its goodness outward. After all, a goodness that didn't spontaneously share it's goodness wouldn't be very nice.

But what if we tweak this formulation slightly, and see absolute and infinite as complementarity, whereby the one is impossible in the absence of the other? Here we can easily see how this would apply to Christian theology, since -- as far as I know -- it would be incorrect to suggest that the Son "emanates" from the Father in a vertical fashion.

Rather -- and this is a bit of an orthoparadox -- the Father is "primary," so to speak, but nevertheless, he has never existed without the Son. It is not as if the Father-Absolute (what we call Abbasolute) one day decided to have a Son. No, Father-Son is not a vertical relation but a complementary one.

And if I am not mistaken, this goes to the theological dispute that finally split the Eastern and Western churches, i.e., the filioque. In brief, for the East, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, whereas in the West the Holy Spirit proceeds from Father and Son.

I don't want to reopen old wounds, but it seems to me that the latter formulation is a defense against the vertical/emanationist view, in that it emphasizes the irreducible complementarity and intersubjectivity of Father and Son. In short, it characterizes ultimate reality in terms of relation rather than subordination.

It's like the old days, when we had three coequal branches of government instead of this peevish tyrant who thinks congress only exists to ratify his delusions.

Once again, I don't have sufficient time to get more deeply into things. All of this is still quite preluminary...