Having Said That,

Gödel was legitimately nuts, subject to paranoid delusions, hypochondria, depression, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Of course, this doesn't affect the validity of the theorems, but it may impact his opinions about them -- about the kind of world they imply. 

When depressed he dwelled on the fact that "all of his contributions" to philosophy "were of a negative kind -- proving that something cannot be done, not what can be done." 

About this he is correct: the theorems tell us only what definitely cannot be the case, not necessarily what is the case. 

They tell us, for example, that "it is impossible to define the concept of truth within a formal system itself," but they do not tell us what truth is. Likewise, they tell us a formal system cannot be both consistent and complete.

Gödel's leap to a Platonic conception of truth is in no way entailed by his own theorems. For example, postmodernists go to the other extreme and say the theorems bar us from knowing any truth at all, enclosing us in language about a reality we can never reach.

Thus, before he was a logician, mathematician, or anything else, Gödel was a seeker of truth, which already implies a worldview -- one in which truth exists and is accessible to man. He would have rejected the alternative a priori. 

Again, he regarded mathematics as not only a search for truth, but for "pre-existing truths that inhabited a reality separate from the human mind." He was likewise "committed to accessing the immaterial world of higher philosophical truths through the power of sheer abstract logical reasoning."

But his forays into *mere* philosophy 

dismayed more than a few of his mathematical colleagues, who did not hide from him their disappointment that he seemed to be squandering his genius on trivialities.

Now, the mind is designed to detect connections between things, but for this reason man can be prone to the over-detection of agency -- thus the sometimes fine line between genius and madness. 

Gödel found "hidden meanings, or mystical significance in things large and small," for example, in "the incorrect listings of movies shown on television." ("One has the impression it is sabotage.")

Ironically, this means that, although he considered himself a seeker after extra-mental truth, he was often very much confined to his own intra-mental projections. Even more ironically, such delusional ideation could crystallize into a kind of rigidly consistent and pseudo-complete system the theorems forbid.

Nevertheless, he argued that the human mind "could not have come about through any mechanistic process," and disagreed "with the entire worldview that 'regards the world as an unordered and therefore meaningless heap of atoms.'" But it seems his paranoia made him vulnerable to finding too much meaning, and in all the wrong places.

On the one hand, a possible interpretation of the theorems is that mathematics -- and by extension, language -- is "a mere game played with symbols according to certain rules." Again, this would be the postmodern view. But this is not how Gödel saw it; rather, he believed

that the human mind can literally see mathematical realities through a kind of perception, no different from the direct sensory perceptions that the empiricists decreed to be the only valid basis of physical laws.

Here again, this latter interpretation is in no way a necessary consequence of the theorems. Moreover, it begins to converge upon someone like Schuon, for whom the necessary truths of existence are indeed directly "perceived" via intellection:

Intellectual intuition comprises essentially a contemplativity which in no way enters into the rational capacity, the latter being logical rather than contemplative.... 

[Rationality] perceives the general and proceeds by logical operations, whilst Intellect perceives the principial -- the metaphysical -- and proceeds by intuition (Schuon). 

Gödel saw no reason "why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception" than in the lower kind, and he's not wrong. Nor was he wrong to wonder

what kind of sense would there be in bringing forth a creature (man), who has such a broad field of possibilities of his own development and of relationships, and then not allow him to achieve 1/1000 of it.

In other words, what kind of irrational -- not to say perverse -- Creator gives infinite potential to a finite being? Gödel thought this was sufficient proof of an afterlife: 

it follows directly that our earthly existence, since it in and of itself has at most a very dubious meaning, can only be a means to an end for another existence.

Again, he had little use for religions but was very much open to Religion, perhaps one that hadn't yet been discovered. He thought that the great majority of philosophers were as guilty as "bad churches" in turning people away from these deeper questions.

"Gödel's public renown continued to grow after his death" in 1978, partly because "The general idea that there are truths that cannot be proved has an irresistible appeal." 

But in his own way he has been misappropriated for as many dubious agendas as quantum physics: "probably more wrong things have been said about his proof than any other mathematical theorem in history."

Interestingly, his ideas seem to inspire two kinds of skeptics, those who recognize "that their knowledge is limited," which "troubles them deeply." The other kind acknowledge "the same thing but find it liberating." Gödel was in the latter camp, believing that

Humans will always be able to recognize some truths through intuition..., that can never be established even by the most advanced computing machine....

In place of limits on human knowledge and certainty, he saw only the irreplaceable uniqueness of the human spirit. 

So, having said all this, where does it leave us?

A Pleasurable Journey to the Edge of Reason, and Beyond

What is beyond reason? Madness? Or Truth? Or both?

All other animals are confined to the fixed nature assigned by heredity. Only in human beings do we see the peculiar combination of a fixed "species nature" with an open-ended process of personal development -- as if the task of each man is to become his own species, so to speak. 

Which they say is true of angels, each being its own unique species. But aren't we a little like that -- as if freedom is individuality lived or actualized? 

In any event, human nature doesn't change on a collective basis, but we never stop changing on an individual one. What's going on here? How did we escape genetic necessity? And I wonder if Gödel has anything to say about it? (I'm reading a biography of him called Journey to the Edge of Reason.) 

If passing along one's genes is the Prime Directive, how to explain someone like Gödel, for whom "the highest aim" of his life was the "pleasure of cognition"? It seems he was a hedonist, but on an immaterial plane which isn't supposed to exist, certainly not in any real way (i.e., as real as the material/biological realm to which it may be reduced.) 

Nevertheless, in college Gödel was increasingly drawn "away from the more practical worlds of physical science to the ethereal realms of pure thought."  

How does pure thought get detached from pure biology, anyway? Or even pure physics, from which Gödel decided to turn away because the discipline was "logically so messy to him."  

I wish I had thought of that one back in 11th grade physics. "These equations are all very nice, Mr. Lamberth, but isn't this whole subject of physics a bit of a mess compared to pure thought?" 

For Gödel's "abiding interest" was "in getting to the very root of things," in both "science and in life." So he switched majors from physics to logic, and why not?

Gödel could never reconcile himself to the positivist standpoint that knowledge derives solely from empirical observations of natural phenomena. Mathematical objects and a priori truth were as real to him as anything the senses could directly perceive.

He regarded mathematics as

a search for truth, and more specifically a search for pre-existing truths that inhabited a reality separate from the human mind. 

Then -- to the embarrassment of all and sundry -- he went and proved it, i.e., that "it is impossible ever to prove the consistency of a consistent system" from within the system, or in other words, that "it is impossible to define the concept of truth within a formal system itself." For him this meant that

the human mind can perceive evident axioms of mathematics that can never be reduced to a finite rule -- which means the human mind "infinitely surpasses the powers of any finite machine."

Therefore "If the human mind is not a machine, then the human spirit cannot be reduced to the mechanistic operation of the brain, with its finite collection of working parts consisting of neurons and their interconnections."

But it's a catch 22, because supposing the mind "is nothing but a calculating machine," then it too "is subject to the limitations of the Incompleteness Theorem," so we once again escape its presumed completeness. Thus, "if I am not mistaken," there is

a whole world which is the set of mathematical truths, into which we gain access only through intelligence, just as there is a world of physical realities...

Gödel was "committed to accessing the immaterial world of higher philosophical truths through the power of sheer abstract logical reasoning." 

So, Plato wins again? For what is this "immaterial world of higher philosophical truths" but the light streaming in from outside the cave? 

Here are some of his bottom line truths:

--There are other worlds and rational beings, who are of the other and higher kind.

--The world in which we now live is not the only one in which we live or have lived.

--Materialism is false.

--There is a scientific (exact) philosophy (and theology)... which deals with the concepts of the highest abstractness.

He also concluded that "Religions are for the most part bad, but not religion." (His early religious exposure was pretty inadequate, as is true for most people.)

Perhaps such-and-such a religion is the attempt to symbolize Religion as such? And religion as such "deals with concepts of the highest abstractness?"

Exact philosophy and theology. I don't know about you, but this is something I'm always thinking about. As things stand, it seems that both philosophy and theology are a bit messy. Is it possible to clean them up via pure thought? 

I don't know, but it would be a pleasure to try.

A Few Words About the Wordless

If we -- Homo sapiens sapiens -- are 75,000 years old, and philosophy doesn't get underway until a few thousand years ago, what did we argue about for 70+ thousand years? 

We all know about the so-called "axial age," which involved "broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE." New symbols for new experiences, apparently.

I remember reading a book by William Irwin Thompson called The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, in which he claims that "at the edge of history is myth," such that "the matrix out of which events arise does not appear to be an event at all." 

Which reminds me of dreaming, which we can also never trace to a "beginning." Rather, we always already find ourselves in the middle of the dream, before which is.... 

Whatever it is, words can't go there. Rather, they can only come out of there. It is pregnant with language, even while being beyond speech. Like the Logos-Tao or something: once you name it, it is no longer the thing -- or experience -- named.

Or Eckhart's ground, which he symbolizes in various paradoxical ways, for example "The naked God is without a name and is the denial of all names and has never been given a name." And "For the intellect to be free, it must become naked and empty and by letting go return to its prime origin."

But let's not get carried away, at least yet. Supposing we could drill down to the bottom of the psyche, what might we find there? Or is it like quantum physics, whereby our perceptions are conditioned by what we expect to see, i.e., wave or particle?

Grad school was much like this, involving various theories of the mind which were all plausible and consistent within themselves, even if they contradicted every other theory.

Now do religion.

It's difficult to do religion for the same reason one cannot know the beginning of a dream. Dreams must start somewhere, or come out of something, but we cannot go there, at least while awake. Joyce of course tried, but that's another post.

Voegelin refers to this mysterious and inexhaustible matrix as the unKnowable depth which we symbolize in more or less adequate ways. 

The depth itself is "beyond articulate experience"; it is "the one depth underlying all reality experienced in the primordial field of God and man, world and society," and "a mode of participation in the process of reality as a whole." This participation is the "site" where the depth "becomes consciously luminous."  

Now, is any of this helpful? Does it have any practical implications? Or is writing about this just a weird way to spend one's retirement? Back before Mr. Google changed the comment box, there was a quote there by Voegelin to the effect that

The quest has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. 

If this is true, then we need to do something about it, because man has been going about things in the wrong way.

What Was the Question?

This essay on Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History is just too obscure. I'm moving on to the next one, called The Gospel and Culture, in which Voegelin discusses one of our perennial concerns, which is

the Word's difficulty to make itself heard in our time and, if heard at all, to make itself intelligible to those who are willing to listen.  

It seems I already wrote a number of posts on this very essay, so let's find out if any of it still makes sense.

***

Voegelin takes a "scientific" approach to revelation, seeing it as a long historical process of successive insights into the ground of being: thus, "in the end,"

the Unknown God revealed through Christ is the conclusion of a long "historical drama of revelation."

 ***

Now, if we are still trying to make sense of the Word in our historical time and cultural context, this is no different from what the early fathers did; and furthermore, if they hadn't -- if 

the gospel had not entered the culture of the time by entering its life of reason, it would have remained an obscure sect and probably disappeared from history. 

At the time of the early church, "the culture of reason"

had arrived at a state that was sensed by eager young men as an impasse in which the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth.

***

If Christ is the answer, what is the question?

Voegelin cites the Dutch Catechism, which "begins by asking what is the meaning of the fact that we exist?"

We must always be ready and able to explain how our faith is the answer to the question of our existence (Dutch Catechism).

Now, there is a kind of answer that is technically correct but existentially wrong, or at least incomplete. It is the difference between, say, knowing how to swim and actually diving into the water and doing so; the former is abstract and secondary, the latter embodied and primary.

Except this relation can often be reversed, such that one begins living in the abstract theory, so everything one sees is conditioned by it. Such a one has all the answers but has forgotten the Question. 

In this way, the Answer becomes a kind of existential defense mechanism -- a matrix or second reality superimposed on the first. (Which is reminiscent of how ideologies are lodged in the LH, to such an extent that they can eclipse RH contact with reality.)

***

One of Voegelin's main themes is how we deploy symbolism in order to capture and convey a more primary experience. Again, whatever the field or discipline, this relation can be reversed, such that the dogma displaces the experience:

a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a "good Christian" but is a questionable man (Voegelin).

Harsh, but we all know the type. This process occurs when

the character of the gospel as an answer has been so badly obscured by its hardening into self-contained doctrine that the raising of the question to which it is meant as an answer can be suspect as "non-Christian attitude." 

*** 

The very "life of reason" is 

This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and the asking the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer... 

Question and answer are held together, and related to one another, by the event of the search. Man, however..., can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible.... 

The answer will not help the man who has lost the question, and the predicament of the present age is characterized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer...

***

Back to the present, I suppose we need to recover the question to which Christ is still the answer.  

Seems to me that the Question of questions is always the same -- pardon my French, but it is a startled  WTF?! in the wake of the raw experience of being. And many layers of superficial, ideological, conventional, and defensive answers must be peeled away before we get down to the experience of this Question.

An extreme question calls for an extreme answer? 

"Existence," says Voegelin, "is not a fact." Rather, "if anything," it

is the nonfact of a disturbing movement in the In-Between of ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death.

Only "in this In-Between of darkness and light arises the inquiry concerning the meaning of life."

So, where does this leave us? I don't know, but it calls to mind the alcoholic who must hit bottom before putting his faith in a greater power that can restore him to sanity. Come to think of it, there's an aphorism for that:

We should not believe in the theologian's God except when He resembles the God Who is called on in distress.

On the Experience and Symbolization of Cosmic Depth

Next up is an essay by Glenn Hughes on Voegelin's essay Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History. Records indicate that I too wrote a meditative essay on this essay back in 2012, and let's see if anything holds up. 

One reason this essay interests me is that it confronts one of the problems addressed in the bʘʘk, which is to say, the equivalence of experiences that use diverse symbols to describe them (or sometimes the same symbol for different experiences).

Because these symbols differ, people may be misled into believing they are describing different realities.

Voegelin writes that "What is permanent in the history of mankind is not the symbols but man himself in search of his humanity and its order" (emphasis mine). Too often, it seems that we either conflate symbols that are distinct, or else distinguish symbols that are roughly equivalent (or symbolize the equivalent experience).

For example, the Allah who is so akbar to Islamic terrorists is not the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Conversely, Schuon maintained that Buddhists have the experience of God even if they lack the name. 

Voegelin criticizes philosophers who adopt "the belief that the truth of existence is a set of propositions" which are "demonstrably true and therefore acceptable to everybody." 

"In vain [the philosopher] will look for the one set of true propositions," for which reason we can "hardly blame him if in the end he decides that skepticism is the better part of wisdom and becomes an honest relativist and historicist."

Voegelin suggests that "The Logos has been operative in the world from its creation; all men who have lived according to reason, whether Greeks or barbarians, have in a sense been Christians." 

Regarding that last comment, a later essay in this book has a quote by Justin Martyr to the effect that

"Christ is the Word (logos) of whom every race of men were partakers," so that "those who lived reasonably [in accordance with the Word or reason] are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists."

Hmm. It seems that this Logos is always available to man in the experiential order, for example, "among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus and men like them," not to mention Abraham, Moses, Elijah, "and many others."

And why not? To put it the other way around, why reduce the living experience to a narrowly objective proposition? The letter killeth, and all that.

In the past we've often spoken of the "depth" dimension of the cosmos. Without it, we would have no way of perceiving the shallowness of so many people, philosophies, experiences, explanations, politicians, works of art, etc. 

I attribute this perception of cosmic depth to what we call the soul, which is why soullessness (relatively speaking) and shallowness are always found together, change my mind.  

Voegelin says something similar, and now I wonder if it's the symbolization of an equivalent experience (such equivalences again being the subject of the essay under discussion). "For Voegelin, the 'depth of the cosmos'"

is an elementary fact; further, it is a fact that requires... for each of us adequate expression, or "symbolization," if we are to successfully orient ourselves in existence.

So, we all must find a way to adequately symbolize the experiential depth of cosmic existence, or, -- as described in yesterday's post -- 

We lock out one part of reality, we ridicule it, deconstruct it, psychologize it, and then throw it out the window, with nothing seemingly having been lost or destroyed, since there was nothing there to begin with.

Depth is one of the things we can toss out the window and then fail to notice it because it has been tossed out the window: experientially "there was nothing there to begin with" and no one there to experience it.

Now, some -- many -- people recoil from depth, in my experience because it covaries with unity, or with making connections between things they would prefer to leave unconnected. Which is why it is difficult to conduct psychotherapy, since there is a part of the patient fighting against the unsettling depth and the disturbing connections.

On a societal level this is of course the role of journalism, i.e., to fail to notice obvious connections and to always keep things on the surface. But at some point in the past half century academia began to serve the same function, and here we are. 

But these are all just my opinions. We've hardly touched on the essay. Hughes goes on to say that "symbols of the cosmic depth may be more adequate or less adequate to the reality of this depth," and ain't that the truth. 

What happens when one has an experience of the depth but there are no symbols available to symbolize it? I'm pretty sure that a religious vocabulary is perhaps the most common way to express this vertical depth for the average man.  

There's also poetry or music, but to try to use a scientific vocabulary to symbolize the experience is to deny the experience. Indeed, how can a world-immanent ideology speak of transcendence?

Now, to say there are different expressions of equivalent experiences is not to say that some expressions aren't more adequate (nor some experiences more deep), for "some articulations are superior to others in representing a more refined or more differentiated understanding of a particular truth."

Sorry to leave you hanging, but it's getting late, so that's about it for this morning. To be continued...

Immortality While We Wait?

Our next essay is on an essay by Voegelin called "Immortality": Experience and Symbol. If that sounds familiar, it's because we blogged about it ourselves way back in 2014. Let's see if anything is worth recovering: 

For Voegelin, religion begins in a religious experience that is codified via symbolism. Thus, "the symbols in question intend to convey a truth experienced." 

Unlike more conventional symbols, these "are not concepts referring to objects existing in time and space but carriers of a truth about nonexistent reality." As such, the symbols are meant to facilitate "a consciousness of participation in nonexistent reality."

And when he says "nonexistent," he doesn't mean "unreal," rather, immaterial and transcendent. For example, the statement "all men are created equal" is not derived from any empirical observation, but is nonetheless real and true for all time. And it is true even if no one has discovered it, or if people have forgotten the experience that engendered it.

One of Voegelin's great concerns is what happens when the experiential reality from which the symbols derive their meaning is no longer conveyed or accessed. 

Sometimes this can occur because the symbol is overly reified in such a way that it excludes experience of the engendering reality that brought it about. Then religious symbolism becomes a kind of empty shell, or shadow of itself. 

For when "misunderstood as propositions referring to things in the manner of propositions concerning objects of sense perception," this provokes "the reaction of skepticism." 

Now, what could be the engendering experience symbolized by the word "immortality?" For it seems that no human group is unfamiliar with the concept. Indeed, one definition of humanness could be "awareness of mortality," and therefore immortality. 

That's about as far as we got before discretely changing the subject. Now let's see if this new essay advances the discussion. As alluded to above, Voegelin does not 

speak in terms of an idea. He wants to get to the heart of the experience that has engendered the symbol of immortality (which in turn has become an "idea" or even a "dogma").

Yes, but who has experienced immortality? Well, as we know, "Human existence is existence in tension 'between time and the timeless.'" And

the variety of symbols that point toward the timeless, immortality among them, are ways in which we as human beings attempt to understand and make sense of that larger reality and the structure of existence. 

So, the word immortality is a symbol of the experience of timelessness? Perhaps, but in any event,

When symbols such as "immortality," "soul," "spirit," or even "God" become dogmatic assertions, unmoored from the engendering experiences in which they were grounded, the skeptic or ideologue can demolish the symbols as meaningless...  

Now, this alienation from the experience can occur for the religious literalist no less than for the atheist, for both, in their own way, reify the symbol:

The only way to recover the truth is by a return to the experiences, the very real experiences... which engendered the symbols in the first place. 

Now, supposing we live in the tension between immanence and transcendence, it may equally be symbolized time and eternity, respectively. But this is a paradoxical space, because, properly speaking, we live neither in time nor eternity, but deploy those terms more as "directions" or "poles" of the tension in which we actually live. 

We are coming up against the limits of the expressible, but it seems that the immanentization of transcendence -- or the temporalization of eternity -- is both a cause and consequence of alienation "from the most basic structure of existence." As a result, 

We lock out one part of reality, we ridicule it, deconstruct it, psychologize it, and then throw it out the window, with nothing seemingly having been lost or destroyed, since there was nothing there to begin with.

Now that I'm thinking about this, something very similar must occur with the use of the symbol "providence" for the experience that engenders it. I'm thinking in particular of how easy it is to ridicule Trump for saying that it was providence that spared him from the assassin's bullet. 

Maybe, maybe not, but the experience is the experience, and he is hardly the first to experience it.

It reminds me of something C.S. Lewis said, and I wish I could remember what it was -- something to the effect that one man's religious experience will be inaccessible to another, and that each of us has access to only a piece of the puzzle, with no one able to see or experience the whole area rug.

Existential Normality?

Our next essay -- called Debate and Existence -- has to do with the impossibility of debating someone who not only has a different conception of existence, but actually inhabits a different existence -- one of those second realities alluded to in yesterday's post:

rational discussion with ideologues is unlikely to succeed, since their mode of existence is willfully untrue insofar as they ignore or deform one or more constitutive elements of reality.

The most obvious contemporary example that comes to mind is the impossibility of "debating" someone who exists in a world in which it is possible for one sex to change into the other. Might as well debate a mental patient over the reality of his hallucinations. 

The essay touches on "the breakdown of rational discourse caused by the prevalence of ideological thinking in the modern age." Here again, this breakdown is not a result of

an impasse owing to disagreement between two positions within the parameters of what might plausibly be true, but rather, a conflict between "two modes of existence, existence in truth and existence in untruth."

This occurs -- you will have noticed -- when one of the disputants "refuses to recognize and live within reality as commonly experienced, opting instead to operate in a 'Second Reality.'" This latter term refers to "imaginative constructs of ideological thinkers who want to eclipse the reality of existential consciousness."

Now, it is entirely fair to ask how we know we aren't the ideologues living in an imaginary second reality. Certainly an atheistic materialist would say this of us. What could be more real than good old matter?

This is addressed in a later essay, but for now let's ponder the fact that Voegelin posits what amounts to a normative stance toward the totality of reality (for which reason he uses terms such as "deformation" and "pneumopathology" for people who fall short of the normative stance). Such ideologues

refuse to accept the human condition as it is and construct alternate realities that are more to their liking. Ideology is thus rooted in revolt rather than error -- it is a state of spiritual alienation or... pneumopathology.

The human condition as it is. Well, how is it? And please be as concrete and specific as possible. No dodging, equivocation, or Krautsplaining. 

ancient thinkers seemed well aware of the possibility of rejecting reality.... [and] that existence in untruth is a perennial possibility. 

Unresponsive. Exactly what is the reality we shouldn't reject, and what is existence-in-truth? 

Well, good: the next section is called Recovering the Truth of Existence, and let's see if it delivers on the promise.

Here we go: Voegelin defines "truth of existence"

as the awareness of the fundamental structure of existence together with the willingness to accept it as the condicio humana.

Well, what is this fundamental structure of the human condition?  It "takes place in the 'metaxy,'" by which he means

that we exist in the midst of tensions between poles of existence symbolized as transcendence and immanence, good and evil, immortality and mortality, and so forth.  

Nor can this tension ever really be eliminated -- short of death -- because we are always participants in it:

we are actors within reality rather than observers of it from afar. This means that we cannot obtain a Gods-eye view on reality -- we do not have access to complete knowledge of the whole of reality. 

At best we are participant-observers from within the Tension. We are oriented to transcendence but this nevertheless takes place in historical time and indeed constitutes historical time, for the alternative would be a static immanence (or I suppose the "static transcendence" sought by nondual mystics). 

Yada yada, does any of this have a practical application? 

Well, "everyone," it seems, is vulnerable to "the temptation to fall from uncertain truth to certain untruth," or to essentially barter the truth of existence for certitude -- to dogmatize experience in the Tension.

We all want to find a solid foundation on which to build our lives, but the participatory and metaxic character of existence means that a perfectly solid and objective foundation is unavailable to us.

Wouldn't a Christian say that this is the whole point of revelation -- to provide a rock of certitude on which to lean?

Well, yes, but with important qualifications, because it is possible for Christianity to be dogmatized and transformed into a kind of one-and-done frozen ideology, when it is the sine qua non of a dynamic, open, and living relationship with the transcendent person. Jesus doesn't eliminate the tension but renders it fruitful. 

We must bear in mind that 

forgetfulness and revolt are possibilities for each of us and that the struggle between ideologues and non-ideologies mirrors a "debate" that takes place within each individual. 

Hmm. Like a symbolic debate in a garden over a couple of trees?

Stringing together a few passages from above:

 --ancient thinkers were well aware of the possibility of rejecting reality.

-- everyone is vulnerable to the temptation to fall from uncertain truth to certain untruth.

--ideology results from a refusal to accept the human condition as it is and construct alternate realities that are more to their liking. It is thus rooted in revolt rather than error.

New Writ Has Come to Light

Or at least I'm reading a new volume on Eric Voegelin's Late Meditations and Essays. He has a ginormous body of work, but it turns out that much of what he wrote is rendered more or less obsolete in light of these last works. 

Which would have been nice to know before I slogged through all those earlier works.

Voegelin’s thought continued to develop at a rapid pace during the last two decades of his life, and his work found “not only its final but its most profound expression” during this period.... 

The meditative analyses and essays written in the culminating phase of Voegelin’s career not only expand and deepen his work as a whole, but also revise central components of it in ways that compel reconsideration of even his most widely read texts.

The book consists of essays about these late essays. I've only read the first one, which is about the rise of Nazism. How was this possible? What prior conditions were necessary for its emergence?

The same conditions that must exist for any ideology to hijack human consciousness and plunge it into a "second reality." Before this can occur, the person must somehow be alienated from primary -- AKA real -- reality. Which, it seems, is a constant temptation going back -- in my estimation -- to Genesis 3.

Man is a spiritual being open at both ends, i.e., to immanence and transcendence: closed off from the latter, "there occurs a loss of reality, insofar as this divine being, this ground of being, is indeed reality too." Again, total reality = immanence + transcendence.

The closure to transcendence typically results in the substitution of "a diminished or shrunken human reality for the Divine Ground of Being." And unfortunately, "dedivinizing is always followed by dehumanizing." 

Always? Yes, insofar as humanness and transcendence co-arise and are inseparable (or separable only in the imagination). 

Ever wonder why the rabble who disagree with us are so stupid?

First, because of a loss of reality, a human being becomes unable to properly orient his or her action in the world. Accordingly, he acts stupidly. 

Oh. That explains a lot. Because of a "defective image of reality" there is a loss of "experience of certain sectors of reality," and with it, a loss of "the language to characterize and evoke reality." Full reality, it seems. becomes an unknowable unknown:

That means that parallel to the loss of reality and to stupidity there is always the phenomenon of illiteracy. 

No offense though:

Voegelin warned his audience that terms such as stupidity and illiteracy (along with ignorance, rabble, and several others) were not terms of abuse but of concrete description.

Having said that, there is the "honorable stupidity" of the everyday dimwit, and "a higher or intelligent stupidity" that we know too well. The latter is "not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence," which "presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right." 

This is how the second realities of the contemporary ideologue "can become socially dominant," displacing the first (and only) reality. "Such a society perpetuates the highest betrayal of humanity," and here we are.

In summary, pneumopathology begins with "the initial non-recognition of reality and closure to the reality of the spirit." 

This "destruction of the ordering center" of the human being prevents "rational analysis" of the pathological appeal to disorder. There then "appears in place of the neglected reality the ersatz reality of the ideologies up to and including National Socialism."  

How does this square with present times? Conveniently, my inbox this morning contains an essay called The Importance of Knowing Reality, and let's find out what it says:

 “thought leaders” in many domains, from elite universities to athletics to airline CEOs to politics... seem to have departed from contact with reality in new and sharper ways.

No offense, but this sounds like intelligent stupidity and second realities. This malign combination

has given rise to calls for a return to prudence. Josef Pieper describes prudence as the “foremost of the virtues” and the “‘measure’ of justice, of fortitude, of temperance.” Prudence ‘“informs’ the other virtues; it confers upon them the form of their inner essence.”

Prudence is both an awareness of reality, of the order of “what is,” and the ability to act based on the reality of things. 

Prudence, it seems, is ordered to first reality. But

Modern philosophy has been skeptical of our capacity to know objective reality outside of our heads and the ideas we carry around between our ears.

Which is the very recipe for ideological second realities.

One essay down, thirteen to go.

Intellectual Abuse for My Own Demented Purposes

I wonder if the human genome -- or even the whole genetic program, from prokaryotes to humans -- is subject to Gödel's theorems? Is there something in the genetic program for which the program cannot account? How does the program even get to first base without a program to get there?

I shouldn't be abusing Gödel for my own demented purposes. However, I do have a couple books on him coming in the mail, and after digesting them I will presumably be in a more informed position to abuse his ideas. 

But let's think this through with our rudimentary understanding. Everyone knows there is a genetic code responsible for our lives. How then do we do transcend this formal system? For if we didn't so escape its entailments we could never even know of it. 

I touched on this in the book, but it is insufficiently fleshed out. But just as the mind cannot be reduced to any machine model, nor can Life be so reduced. Is DNA the secret of life, or Life the secret of DNA? Similarly, is the brain the secret of the mind, or vice versa?  

Theoretical biologist Robert Rosen writes that one implication of Gödel's theorems is that a universe "consisting of pure syntax" is "too poor to do mathematics in." 

From this he concludes that "contemporary physics is to biology as Number Theory is to a formalization of it," which means that there is always more to Life than can be contained in any reductive model: in short, semantics -- meaning -- can never be reduced to syntax -- order. 

Could Life ever be exhaustively expressed in a formal program? Nah: "Gödel effectively demolished the formalist program," and "There is always a a purely semantic residue that cannot be accommodated by the syntactical scheme."

Rosen essentially affirms that reality is always more complex than the simple formalizations in which we try to enclose it. Again, something always escapes the formal system, model, or quantification.

Let's ponder some paradoxical implications.

Can we prove free will doesn't exist? Absolutely, but only if we are free to know the truth of our condition.

Can we prove that evolutionary biology is a complete explanation of man? Sure, but only if we transcend the explanation.

Can we prove that the mind is the product of random evolutionary changes? No doubt, but only from a position outside or above those changes.

I would tie this back to what Voegelin says about our being situated between immanence and transcendence. Because there is always transcendence, no immanent explanation will ever be complete. 

Yesterday we touched on the need for revelation. What if -- just spiritballin' here -- the transcendent (Logos) becomes immanent (flesh) that the immanent may become transcendent?  

That would be a pretty good answer to Klavan's question at the end of yesterday's post -- "if the human condition is the puzzle, which of the oldest solutions endure and what has Christianity added to them?"

There's still the dynamic space between immanence and transcendence, but instead of our perpetual reaching toward the latter pole, it reaches down into human nature, so our own reaching can finally get somewhere.

This would be an advance in our attempt to solve the puzzle of existence, like some kind of good news or something.

In fact, this morning Klavan's son Spencer addresses the questions posed by his father: our pre-Christian brethren -- stoics and the like -- took things pretty far in the direction of transcendence (↑). But  "magnificent as they are," they 

tend to exude a kind of weariness at their pinnacle. Heraclitus and Democritus, the weeping and the laughing philosopher, compassed between them the full range of human reactions to the natural world. Both of them concluded that it’s an endless flow of change -- everything always happens, so nothing ever really happens....

Those who grope their way up [↑] the mountain of human wisdom seem to reach the summit exhausted by the climb. If Christianity has something to add, it must be something you can’t work your way up to from below -- something that comes down [↓] onto the mountaintop from above, like thunder onto Sinai.

Something from totally outside the system definitively enters the system? Something radically unformalizable and irreducible? Something that cannot be modeled because it is the Model? The original Semantics that can never be reduced to syntax? The Way and the Life, only quite literally?

Like I said, I need to absorb these books on Gödel and figure out which one of us is more misguided. 

A Consistent But Incomplete Post

Now, this business of revelation: is it necessary, redundant, irrelevant, neutral, or harmful?

I suppose it depends on the revelation, but who are we to pretend to judge something that purportedly comes straight from God? Nevertheless, some kind of judgment must be made, but on what basis? 

Perhaps in the same way we judge a scientific theory, which will explain a great deal -- i.e., unify the phenomena -- in such a way that it doesn't unexplain what had previously been understood. 

Looked at this way, the revelation in question needs to make more sense of our lives than anything else on offer. It must transcend science while not in any way negating it, because science (obviously) explains a great deal, even if it has necessary limits. 

Let's think this through. First of all, we either need revelation or we don't. In other words, either we can form an accurate and complete map of the cosmos via wholly natural resources, or we can't. If we can't, then there is either no remedy to our ignorance, or we are in need of a vertical murmurandom to complete the epistemological circle.

It seems that we can never arrive at a complete and consistent model of reality. Stanley Jaki, in his Brain, Mind and Computers, correctly notes that Gödel's theorems prove

that even in the elementary parts of arithmetic there are propositions which cannot be proved or disproved in that system (emphasis mine).

And if that isn't enough to put a crimp your day, his analysis implies that "no formal system" of any kind "is immune to the bearing of Gödel's conclusion."

So, the mind is not, and cannot be, a logic machine. If it were, it could never know it, because it would be confined to the closed circle of logical entailment. Which I suspect also goes to our freedom, since it too escapes necessity. 

A machine

can have only a finite number of components and it can operate only on a finite number of initial assumptions....  

Gödel's theorem, therefore, cuts the ground under the efforts that view machines... as adequate models of the mind.

A machine "can never produce at least one truth, which the mind can without relying on other minds.... No matter how perfect the machine, it can never do everything that the human mind can." 

So, it seems that our most perfect manmade system of thought will necessarily have to put its faith in at least one thought or principle or axiom or assumption or intuition or speculation or delusion or hallucination that the system cannot justify, and which comes from outside (transcends) the system.

Therefore, if I am following my argument correctly, there is no escaping faith. 

Back to our opening statement: either we need revelation or we don't. Looks like we do, but just because we need it, that doesn't mean it exists. What we call revelation could be -- and for materialist must be -- just self-deception. It is as if we are unconsciously trying to get around the theorems by pretending to a completeness that is forever inaccessible to us.

However, I recently found out that Gödel not only believed in a personal God, but thought he could prove the existence of an afterlife:

I am convinced of this, independently of any theology. It is possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning that it is entirely consistent with the known facts. If the world is rationally constructed and has a meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife] (quoted in Wang).

It is indeed ironic "that the greatest logician since Aristotle" thought "God's existence could be proved a priori" (Goldstein).  

Nevertheless, which God? What is he like?  

Andrew Klavan asks, "if the human condition is the puzzle, which of the oldest solutions endure and what has Christianity added to them?"  

Good questions.

The System of God

Talking about process philosophy is an exercise in gnostaliga for me, because this was the subject of my doctoral dissertation, which in part tried to reconcile developmental psychology with Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures. Now I'm wondering if the latter could also be reconciled with spiritual development. 

First let's skim to see if anything has changed with regard to the science of dissipative structures over the past 35 years. Yada yada,

A dissipative system is a thermodynamically open system which is operating out of, and often far from, thermodynamic equilibrium in an environment with which it exchanges energy and matter....

Back in the day, I understood it to be matter, energy, and/or information -- for example, the system of the economy, which is one big exchange of information centering around price signals.

If we're talking about far-from-equilibrium conditions, I suppose the conditions don't get further than Creator and creation, or man and God, finite and infinite, absolute and relative. However, at the very least, the vertical ingression (↓) of grace -- or something like it, e.g., shakti, shekinah, barakha, etc. -- implies  an open system between these terms.  

Or, more experience-near are the ubiquitous phenomena of truth and beauty to which man is always properly open. Likewise, when we understand something it is because we abstract the form from the matter -- in other words, the intellect qua intellect is open to the abstract essences that in-form it.

In the Orthodox east they talk about the distinction between God's essence and energies, the latter available to us herebelow.

It's hard to think of a more concrete example of vertical exchange than communion. Prayer too presumes an open system between man and God. In fact, all of the sacraments are vehicles of grace, therefore presupposing an open cosmos. 

We might also compare the tension between immanence and transcendence to the far-from-equilibrium conditions necessary for a dissipative system. Collapsing this disequilibrium kills the system. This is what Voegelin calls CLOSED EXISTENCE or CLOSURE:

the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental. Contrasts with "open existence."

So man is quite literally an open system, open to truth, love, beauty, unity, in a word, transcendence. 

Now, the Trinity is -- in a manner of speaking -- a sort of open system, is it not? Bracken touches on this, writing, for example, that "the essence or nature of God is not in the first place an entity but an activity," i.e., perichoresis. 

It seems to me that it is also analogous to the particle/field complementarity in physics, such that the Persons are the "particles," the shared substance the "field," two complementary sides of a single reality. One can also discern a kind of discontinuity-within-continuity, i.e., the Persons are distinct but not separate. 

For our purposes, 

if the Trinity is a community of divine persons, then the Trinity is a relational reality with the consequence that creation as made in the image of God is constituted by finite entities in dynamic interrelation.

And why not? As above, so below. 

I suppose this would be the last word in vertical openness:

human beings who attain close personal union with God retain their finite identity as creatures even as they enter into an I-Thou relation with the three divine persons.

In conclusion,

The triune God as the all-comprehensive system of the divine communitarian life is both the transcendent origin and ultimate goal of the cosmic process as a vast network of dynamically interrelated and hierarchically ordered finite systems whose progressive growth in order and complexity began with the Big Bang and will ultimately end with full incorporation into the divine life.

Works for me.

What Cosmos Are You From?

History is the series of universes present to the consciousness of successive subjects. --Dávila

Setting the stage for what we're about to discuss, it goes back to yesterday's post, in particular, to the idea that what is needed is proof of a certain vision of the world before proofs of God can be efficacious or operative and religion can make sense more generally.

Exactly what the world is is a rather big question, but it is among the first terms we must define. To repeat an aphorism from yesterday:

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible. 

We ended the post with Voegelin's key idea that "the order of the world is not of 'this world' alone but also of the 'world beyond.'" These "two worlds" always and everywhere constitute the one real world: any definition of our (immanent) world must include the world beyond that is its transcendent ground and telos.

This humanly irreducible complementarity of immanence and transcendence reminds me of other such irreducible complementarities, and let us count them: being and becoming, absolute and infinite, object and subject, time and eternity, interior and exterior, matter and spirit, wave and particle, brain and mind, left brain and right brain, individual and collective, part and whole, Creator and creation...

You could no doubt think of more, but these are not vicious dualisms, rather, dynamic and fruitful complementarities. 

It seems that Christianity alone -- at least today -- does not provide a vision of the world in which Christianity makes sense. Such a vision obviously existed at its origins, which is why it spread so rapidly. There was no friction, so to speak, between the world -- or the vision thereof -- and Christianity.

We no longer have that premodern vision of the world, nor is it ever coming back. And our new vision seems to render a religious vocabulary meaningless and talk of God to be implausible.

Seems to. In reality nothing has changed, in that our world is still situated between immanence and transcendence, except that modernity has collapsed this space into immanence, thus, as a side effect, negated all of the other complementarities referenced above. 

Which is why we are now confined to a flattened, one-sided, left-brained world. No dynamic complementarity for you!

Back to the series of universes present to the evolving consciousness of successive subjects. It seems we're gonna need a bigger question -- not just what planet, but what universe are we living in?

Now, the universe doesn't change. 

Check me on that: it never stops changing, and has been undergoing relentless evolution since it sprang into being 13.8 billion years ago. If the universe is evolving, as is consciousness along with it, where does this leave us? In a world of pure becoming with no being?

It's a tempting offer, but we must again insist on the dynamic complementarity between being and becoming, and also between consciousness and world. Again, for Voegelin this is the real cosmos -- the evolving order -- between immanence and transcendence. 

COSMOS: In Vogelin's usage, the whole of ordered reality including animate and inanimate nature and the gods. (Not to be confused with the modern conception of "cosmos" as the astrophysical universe.) Encompasses all of reality, including the full range of the tension of existence toward the transcendental (Webb). 

Religion makes a heckuva lot of sense in this cosmos, because just as science maps immanence without ever containing or exhausting it, so too does religion map transcendence without ever containing or exhausting it (certain literalists and fundamentalists notwithstanding). 

In short, we can never really eliminate the tension. Unless maybe Shankara and Buddha are correct, but that's another wormhole. On the other hand Christ spans the tension, but that too is a wormhole we won't dig into just yet.

With this prologue out of the way, I've been reading several books by a Catholic process theologian named Joseph Bracken, who actually tries to strike a balance between the being and becoming -- and immanence and transcendence -- of things.

Examples.

These are from a book called The World in the Trinity: Open-Ended Systems in Science and Religion. In keeping with the need for a vision in which Christianity makes sense, 

Bracken utilizes the language and conceptual structures of systems theory as a philosophical and scientific grammar to show traditional Christian beliefs in a new light that is accessible and rationally plausible to a contemporary, scientifically influenced society. 

Consider the following, which echoes what was said above about the complementarity of immanence and transcendence:

the natural order and the alleged supernatural order are in fact dynamically interconnected processes or systems that together constitute a richer reality than what either the natural order or the supernatural order, taken alone, can provide.  

In keeping with the theme of complementarity, "both change and permanence characterize our human experience of ourselves, others, and the world."

Another key complementarity: "coextensive with their Without, there is a Within of things." There is always and everywhere a Within, no matter how inchoate. In its absence, the thing would be unintelligible. 

Where does all the creative novelty come from? What is its principle? For me, a big hint is contained in the first sentence of the Bible, "In the beginning God created..." For Whitehead, creativity is indeed the ultimate principle, but he goes too far, placing it even above God.

As discussed in a recent post, there is both top-down and bottom-up causality, and "God provides a directionality to the cosmic process," i.e., a teleological attraction. 

Here's another one that goes to the complementarity of immanence and transcendence:

Aquinas has trouble explaining the immanence of God as Pure Spirit in the world of creation, and Whitehead has the opposite problem explaining the transcendence of God....

To be continued.... 

The Argument from Argument for the Existence of God

Supposing we argue, any argument presupposes the truth, otherwise why argue? Argument is a means to truth.

No it isn't.

That's not an argument, it's just a contradiction.

Not at all.

Enough of this. 

"The classical proofs of God," writes Schuon, are situated between "direct intellection" at one end and "materialistic rationalism" at the other. No form of rationalism can ever reach its object, while intellection bypasses reason altogether and proceeds straight to the transphysical object. 

I suppose the problem with direct intellection is that it only works on a retail basis. The experience of God is limited to the person having the experience. 

Schuon notes that "in the spiritual order a proof is of assistance only to the man who wishes to understand, and who, by virtue of this wish, has already in some measure understood; it is of no practical use to one who, deep in his heart, does not want to change his position, and whose philosophy merely expresses this desire."

Schuon's point of departure is that metaphysical ideas are innate to the intellect. Denying this principle "is equivalent to the destruction of the very notion of intelligence," for "our intelligence could never prove anything at all."

Way back in the early days of the blog I wrote a post entitled Proof of Proof is Proof of God. I just looked it up to see if I was serious, and its bottom line is as follows:

In a certain sense, proof itself is proof of the supernatural, being that it obviously exists in a realm above matter. The metaphysical transparency of the world is all the proof the Raccoon requires, but all men are not Raccoons, and I do not write for the wider non-Raccoon world....

There is a translogical component to the acceptance of any truth. We are not merely "logic machines." In other words, we must make a free act of assent to truth, and this cannot be reduced to the principles of logic. For example, there is no logical proof that one should abide by logic. What if I want to live a life a life guided by absolute spontaneity and transgression of logic, like people who live in San Francisco? 

Our point, I suppose, is that if the intellect knows the truth -- any truth -- then this has vast implications. For example, Schuon takes the view that

The Intellect "is divine," first because it is a knower -- or because it is not a non-knower – and secondly because it reduces all phenomena to their Principle; because it sees the Cause in every effect, and thus surmounts, at a certain level, the vertiginous and devouring multiplicity of the phenomenal world.

Call it the Argument from Intellect.

Intellectual intuition comprises essentially a contemplativity which in no way enters into the rational capacity, the latter being logical rather than contemplative; it is contemplative power, receptivity in respect of the Uncreated Light, the opening of the Eye of the Heart, which distinguishes transcendent intelligence from reason.

I think I see the problem here, for the average secular man is not just in need of evidence of God, but rather, evidence of a whole outlook or paradigm by which they could be moved by the evidence, otherwise all the evidence in the world proves nothing. The Aphorist essentially says the same thing with his customary pithiness:

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible.

This being the case, what is needed is proof of a certain vision of the world before proof itself can be efficacious or operative. Now, what world could this be, and how do we prove its existence?

That's a big question to spring on a fellow in the middle of a post. What in the world is the world? That phrase sounds familiar, and sure enough it was the title of a post last year. Let's see if it provides any answers. 

It has a good point made by Voeglin about "the meaning of the term world. It presents extraordinary difficulties to philosophical analysis," hence the title of the post.

Before we answer this difficult question -- what is the world? -- a few cautionary aphorisms:

As long as we can respond without hesitating we do not know the subject.

Whoever is curious to measure his stupidity should count the number of things that seem obvious to him. 

Only the fool knows clearly why he believes or why he doubts. 

Yada yada, for Voegelin, "the order of the world is not of 'this world' alone but also of the 'world beyond.'" Or in other words, immanence and transcendence respectively, such that any definition of this (immanent) world must include the world beyond that is its transcendent ground.

Is there a more cutandry way to express this, and to tie it in with the title of this post? Hmm. Proof of the world is proof of God? 

No it isn't.

Is!

We'll think on it some more and get back to you tomorrow. 

On Proofs of God

Proofs for the existence of God abound for those who do not need them. --Dávila

Last night I watched an interesting podcast of an atheist and agnostic ranking the classic proofs of God from A to F, with a higher category called S for superlative. 

They did a better job of articulating the arguments than do most Christians, and placed the argument from contingency at the top, with the fine-tuning argument earning an A.  

One of the podcasters (the agnostic) has a 12 hour video in which he discusses over 100 arguments for God. Viewed in aggregate one would think that all of the arguments taken together would be rather convincing, but I don't know if he addresses this angle. In any event, even an intellectually serious atheist knows that

If it is not of God that we are speaking, it is not sensible to speak of anything seriously.

Even the serious denial of God is more interesting than a lukewarm acceptance.

Nevertheless, in the end, 

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

Man is not absolutely insignificant, ergo God? Works for me. 

If God does not exist we should not conclude that everything is permissible, but that nothing matters.

For most if not all of the arguments there is just enough evidence to adopt one side or the other if one is so inclined. It seems that, try as we might, we can never eliminate the leap of faith. Somewhat ironically, this goes for both sides, as it requires an equally great leap of faith to adopt atheism. 

There are arguments of increasing validity, but, in short, no argument in any field spares us the final leap.

The Aphorist also says that  

If God were the conclusion of a rational argument I would feel no need to worship him.

After all, we can prove any number of things, but it doesn't mean we ought to worship them. Indeed,

If we could demonstrate the existence of God, everything would eventually be subjected to the sovereignty of man.

Reason only gets us so far in this Gödelian cosmos, for

God is not the object of my reason, nor of my sensibility, but of my being. 

For my money, the most compelling argument in favor of atheism is how to square the existence of evil with an omnipotent God, which is why I am sympathetic to dialing back the latter in order to clear God of any charges against him.

But again, either way, no mere argument spares us the final leap. However, this may not be a leap of faith, but rather, a "leap of vision," so to speak, for 

Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is a perception of a special order of realities.

Which is more how I look at it -- religion is, as it were, a way of talking about this special order of realities, and the map is not the territory. It is not something we look at, but rather, the lens we perceive through. 

Another important point is that, once one accepts God, it is as if further dimensions of this special order are illuminated as a consequence of grace or something (some kind of vertical x-factor). And

God allows man to raise barricades against the invasion of grace.

Moreover, supposing God is a person, 

The existence of God is indemonstrable, because with a person the only thing we can do is bump into him. 

In the end -- or beginning? --  

The sole proof of the existence of God is His existence.

Which sounds like a tautology but actually goes to the one of the arguments referenced at the top, for if God is even possible then he is necessary, this because he is far more plausible than anything else on offer:

Either God or chance: all other terms are disguises for one another. 

Me? I suppose my favorite argument is something like the following: 

If the totality of reality is completely intelligible, then God exists.

But the totality of reality is completely intelligible.

Therefore God exists. 

Schuon says something similar, that "human intelligence coincides in its essence with the Absolute," whatever one calls the latter. 

Not only is this a talking universe, but it never shuts up. Nor does it talk nonsense, which is what Einstein found so surprising, i.e., the endless comprehensibility to our comprehension.

In short, the total intelligibility of the world to our intelligence -- or the conformity of the immaterial intellect to reality -- demands a sufficient reason. And chance doesn't cut it.

Another favorite is from entropy, for if the universe has always existed, it would long since have reached maximum disorder. Where does all the information come from, and again, why is it so intelligible? 

But to repeat, no argument spares one the final leap. Well, except for direct intellection, which is not so much a leaping as a seeing. Or even "a spontaneous intuition" which

contains in an infused manner the certainty transmitted by the proofs of God or [of] the supernatural (Schuon).

I have a feeling we're just getting started.