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.

Human Sacrifice Will Find a Way

Why are proofs of God insufficient for the man who wills not to believe in God? The question answers itself, and goes to what we were saying yesterday about the role of will and sentiment in causing a man to deviate from truth. 

Maybe a man doesn't like the implications of God's existence. If so, it's easy enough to use a little confirmation bias to make him go away.

What about my confirmation bias? Well, for starters, this is neither the God nor the religion I would invent. To the extent that I'm confirming something, it's a bit foreign to my sensibilities, especially the whole sacrifice thing.

Andrew Klavan writes that

Anti-Christians often object to the idea that Christ’s crucifixion was a sacrificial expiation of the sins of mankind. They ask: what kind of barbaric God demands a sacrifice for sin? 

Well, when you put it that way. Then again, 

I ask this: Where did all the sacrifices go? Not just the children and virgins and kings, but the doves, the pigs and the goats and so on. Why don’t we kill them anymore to propitiate the gods? 

Wherever Christianity took hold, sacrifices vanished. Why did we stop them? If it was the sacrifice of Christ that put an end to them, then maybe the barbaric need for his death wasn’t God’s but ours? Which is just another way of saying that his crucifixion was a sacrificial expiation of the sins of mankind.

That's a very Girardian explanation, i.e., the scapegoat to end all scapegoating. If Girard is correct, then the fading of Christianity should result in increased scapegoating, although with a twist, since the culture is still implicitly Christian -- or, as Klavan puts it, "hatred of bigotry or your defense of women’s rights, or your belief in the centrality of love. Who taught you these things?"

As Klavan's son Spencer writes in response,

Overturning an established order means rejecting even its basic categories. And as you write, “the problem the radical faces is that the system he is rebelling against is the very system that shaped the terms of his rebellion.”

So now, instead of the weak and marginalized being scapegoated by the powerful, it is the powerful who pretend to be weak and marginalized in order to maintain or increase their grip on power. Why else would Kamala so desperately want to be seen as African American, when four years ago she was Indian American?  

When it comes to identity politics, the money is in the basement.

As Heather MacDonald observes, back in the days of actual racism, "the way to discredit someone was to assert that he was black":

The idea that a political contender would fight back against the claim that he was anything other than black would have been regarded as surreal. Why would anyone insist on being the one thing that puts him at the bottom of the social and political totem pole?

Why? Because of the Christian concern for victims. Thus, nowadays "the benefits of blackness are so patent that it is white (and even Indian-American) individuals who on occasion try to pass as black." Conversely,

there is no evidence of black applicants labelling themselves as white; blacks today know which way the wind is blowing. If, as we have gleaned from the hysteria over Trump’s recent Harris remarks, it is now racist to question someone’s black identity, it is also preposterous to claim that that black identity subjects someone to systemic racism.

Of course, preposterousness has never posed the slightest barrier to the left. Indeed, the arms race of virtue signaling shows no signs of slowing, only moving on to encompass new victims, from the QWERTY crowd, to illegals, to people with wombs who may have to travel out of state to terminate their child. It is also why these weirdos are scapegoating the normal by pretending we're the weirdos.  

Why Do Things Ever Turn Out Right?

This morning I read an undistinguished essay on why people believe true things. I only skimmed it, but in it the author makes the point that asking why people believe false things is the wrong question -- similar to asking why poverty exists when it is the default position of mankind. 

The more interesting question is how and why wealth exists -- likewise, how and why people ever come to believe true things. Why isn't everyone poor and stupid, and come to think of it, why does anything ever turn out right?

As per yesterday's post, human nature hasn't changed in the past 50 to 65,000 years. Presumably idiocy has always existed, the difference being that today's idiots are equipped with weapons like literacy, credentials, and ideology, and are therefore that much more dangerous. 

Is it enough to just stipulate that man is fallen and be done with it? Or is it possible to understand the reasons why things ever turn out right? In the words of our resident hipster poet Mose Allison, 

You know I used to be troubled, but I finally saw the light

Now I don't worry 'bout a thing, 'cause I know nothin's gonna be alright

Which tracks with our equally good humored Aphorist, who says that

With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored.

As for why things inevitably go sideways, he has many things to say:  

Political blunders are repeated, because they are the expression of human nature. Successes are not repeated because they are the gift of history.

History? It only

shows that man's good ideas are accidental and his mistakes methodical.

Which is why

None of the high eras of history have been planned. The reformer can only be credited with the errors.

Ultimately,  

Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope for a miracle.

What can we conclude from the above quotations? That nothin's gonna turn out alright short of a vertical ingression, to which we look forward with great pessimism and good humor.  

Back to the question of what interferes with things turning out okay, man isn't just intelligence; rather, he is also will and sentiment, which is where the real trouble starts. Intelligence can only go so wrong without other non-cognitive factors coming into play.

For example, it seems that man has an in-built need for "distinction," or for being seen as special. Everyone wants to be "alpha" in some way, even if it is in a sneaky, passive-aggressive, or trivial way. 

For example, regarding the latter, in my own head I am Alpha (long form) Blogger, all others being number two, or lower. If I didn't have this delusion to cling to, how could I do this year after year?

Now, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the desire for distinction. Indeed, it can be quite adaptive in a social context, so long as the distinction being sought is honorable and virtuous. 

For example, the founders were positively neurotic about being seen as disinterested and above reproach, and prickly if not paranoid about their reputations. It's surprising that more of them didn't die in duels.

The point is, mere intelligence isn't nearly enough to ensure one's distinction. After all, half of the population possesses above average intelligence, and who wants to be lumped in with them? 

Above average intelligence is not sufficient to secure any kind of distinction. In order for it to do the job, one would have to be at least two standard deviations above average, placing one in the top two percent. 

To be on the safe side, you might want to be three standard deviations above, which puts you in the top .1%. But then, these latter folks often come with a lot of baggage, for example, an obsession with pigeons.

Nowadays, in search of distinction, millions of people are educated beyond their intelligence, which leads to a host of societal problems, i.e., of stupid people making important decisions over our lives. It is enough to say Brandon. Saying Kamala is redumbdant. Adding Tim is superfoolous.

It should go without saying that education has no effect on IQ, which will remain as low or as high as it is, the rest being puffery, ornamentation, misdirection, and fraud, as in the Wizard of Oz: 

"Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls the earth or slinks through the slimy seas has a brain.... 

"Back where I come from we have universities, seats of great learning -- where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts -- and with no more brains than you have... But! They have one thing you haven't got! A diploma!

"Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitatus Committeeatum e plurbis unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Th.D."

"Th.D.?"

"Yeah -- that... that's Dr. of Thinkology!"

Jill Biden, for example, is a typical Doctor of Thinkology, pathetically hungry for the distinction of being called "Doctor," as if this can mask the absence of a brain.

Speaking of movies and brainless but credentialed mediocrities, in his newsletter, Rob Henderson recalls the opening scene of the film The Social Network, when

the Mark Zuckerberg character asks, referring to the Harvard student body, “How do you distinguish yourself in a population of people who all got 1600 on their SATs?”

"Victimhood narratives," says Henderson, "seem to be the answer elite colleges have provided." In fact, unless you are a victim, intelligence is neither here nor there. One must be able to say: I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people have victimized me! 

Henderson recounts the story of a particular student who lied about her background, describing herself 

as a first-generation, low-income, former foster youth in her application to the Ivy League university and, later, the Rhodes Scholarship. After two investigations..., the university is reportedly withholding Fierceton’s degree and she has subsequently withdrawn from the scholarship.

In short, not only do elite universities "incentivize victimhood," but college advisors recommend applicants to "sell your pain." Thus, there is a race to the bottom, with students climbing under each other  to prove they are worthy of the distinction of being authentically pathetic.

A contemporary remake of The Wizard of Oz would have to feature a character who longs to be a genuine victim:

"Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity.... 

"Back where I come from we have universities, seats of great indoctrination -- where humans of every conceivable race and inconceivable gender go to become great victims. And when they come out, they feel deeply aggrieved -- and with no more oppression than you've experienced... But! They have one thing you haven't got! A diploma!

"Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Vh.D."

"Vh.D.?"

"Yeah -- that... that's Dr. of VictimHood!"

All of this is a transparent inversion of Christian civilization, at the foundation of which is the most consequential victim in history. The entire culture of victimhood is only intelligible in the context of the deep structure of Christianity. It is not so much that we are "post-Christian," rather, in the midst of a Christianity turned upside-down.

To be continued...

Ensouled Down the River of Time

If Noam Chomsky is a genius linguist, it wouldn't be the first time a gifted intellectual also suffered from delusions -- for example, Isaac Newton and his alchemy fixation, or Gödel and his paranoia, or Tesla and his pigeon obsession.

But let's keep this party polite, and never let truth out of our sight. Truth is true even if it's said by an America-hating terror-supporting utensil.

Spitzer certainly keeps things polite, relying on Chomsky's linguistic theories without so much as a peep about his extracrackpotular political wacktivities. 

Do the soulless prove the existence of the soul?

I don't know if I'd put it that way, but privations in general are parasitic on some positive good.

Where there's smoke there's fire, and where there are shadows there is light. In this sense, where there are progressives there is truth lurking nearby. 

Is it enough to prove the soul's immaterial capacities to prove the existence of the soul? Whatever we call it -- for example, (¶) -- it does routinely do things that that matter could never do, for example, the self-reflection whereby it is both observer and observed. 

Again, we can teach sign language to primates, but there is no evidence that they can think conceptually or communicate abstract ideas, whereas this is what humans effortlessly do. Similarly, they might connect two words that are immediately adjacent to one another, but cannot relate more distant connections, as we are doing in this and every other post.  

The question is whether the gap between animal and human is truly unbridgeable, i.e., an ontological distinction, or one that can be explained by natural selection?

Eh, we've long since dismissed the latter possibility. As we've been arguing for a couple of decades, there is ontological discontinuity from the bottom up, but continuity from the top down. Chomsky & Co. "hypothesize that the gap between humans and nonhumans is fundamentally biological," but then they would, wouldn't they?

As the science currently stands, "this is a major problem, which is currently inexplicable through physical-biological processes." I say it cannot in principle be solved via science, because the soul is irreducible to anything less.

But if the soul didn't evolve via natural selection, how and when did it get here? In the book, I suggested that it was a sudden occurrence that happened -- if I recall correctly -- as recently as 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, whereas Spitzer puts it at 50,000 to 65,000 years ago. No doubt the date of the third Big Bang (into Mind) will be increasingly fine-tuned as more evidence comes to light.

Let me fast forward in the book, as Spitzer presents his evidence for the third bang in an appendix. Again, given the soul's existence, "when did we get it?," i.e., "when did the nonevolutionary, transphysical event of the soul's creation occur for the first time?"

Examining only the biological evidence, we can trace things back to a Miss Mitochondrial Eve and a Mr. Y Chromosome Adam. Although these two lived at roughly the same time and came from a similar neighborhood, there's no way of establishing if they knew each other (in the biblical sense, wink wink). In fact,

Though they may have had acquaintance with each other, it is by no means certain -- and seems quite unlikely (given the large region and time spans involved).

Now, looking at the trans-biological evidence, it hardly matters whether these two got together, since they lived some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, whereas evidence of the transphysical soul doesn't burst upon the stage until much later, again, 50 to 65 thousand years ago. 

Anthropologists call this "the great leap forward," even though natural selection is a gradual process that doesn't allow for such leaps, much less vertical ones. 

As I said in the book, Homo sapiens does nothing novel for a couple hundred thousand years, and then bang, more advanced technology, mathematical discovery, representational art, music, sewing, seafaring, awareness of the future, more sophisticated burial practices, and those lovely mancave paintings. Wha' happened?

In short, "Our first ensouled ancestor appeared on the earth." I suppose it's a bit like trying to remember back to when you and I became ensouled. It's something of a blur. I just woke up one day and there it was. 

Spitzer, bless his heart, also brings Gödel into the argument, since he proved that "human thinking is not based on a set of prescribed axioms, rules, or programs" and is indeed "beyond any program." 

Presumably this includes any genetic program -- I'll have to check with Robert Rosen -- but in any case "human intelligence is indefinitely beyond any axiomatic or program-induced intellect." It is

not only always beyond axioms, rules, and programs (to which artificial intelligence is limited) but also capable of genuinely originative creativity (that is, capable of thinking without deriving from or making recourse to any prior axioms, rules, or programs).

Much like the Creator who ensouled us and in whose image we are.

Say, those aren't pigeons, are they?

Circles Within Circles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knock knock.

Who's there?

An unrestricted desire to know who's there.

I AM.

I don't get it. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Put the "Bang" in the Shanga Langa Big Bang?

We've stipulated that the Trinity is an eccentric jazz trio -- as opposed to a self-enclosed "in-centric" one. 

Eccentric literally means "outside the circle," and it seems that it is thanks to the very ex-centricity of the immanent Trinity -- its tendency to overflow its own boundaries -- that creation exists. 

Not to say it's an automatic, emanationist deal, rather, that it is simply in the nature of the Good to radiate and communicate itself, if not to us, then someone. The music of creation. Who doesn't hear it? 

Now, to quote the old song,

Who put the "bomp" in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?
Who put the "ram" in the rama lama ding dong?
Who put the "bop" in the bop shoo bop shoo bop?
Who put the "dip" in the dip da dip da dip?

Come to think of it, who put the bang in the shanga langa big bang? In order to find out if the answer has changed since writing my book, I'm reading one called Science at the Doorstep to God: Science and Reason in Support of God, the Soul, and Life after Death, by Robert Spitzer. 

We can never prove with absolute certitude that God is responsible for the Big Bang. However, we can say that, whatever alias he goes by, our leading suspect is an immaterial personal being with an intellect infinitely superior to ours, so we've put a tail on him and are attempting to tap his line.

As Spitzer says in the Introduction, the unimaginably unlikely fine-tuning of the Big Bang makes "the idea of a transphysical, transuniversal intelligence a most compelling explanation" for these improbable coincidences. 

And when we say "improbable," we mean something like a raccoon typing randomly and coming up with the text of Macbeth on the first try.

So, you're telling me there's a chance atheism makes sense?  

I no longer spend much time thinking about how to harmonize religion and science. Rather, I just try to comprehend the metaphysics of it all, and let the harmony take care of itself. 

What I mean is that some things are true regardless of what science or religion say. 

If this sounds impertinent, even God cannot, for example, violate the principle of non-contradiction, i.e., simultaneously exist and not exist. Indeed, to say I AM WHO I AM is to validate the principle of identity. 

I won't review the whole book, rather, focus on some of the material I overlooked in my own. 

Spitzer puts forth a sophisticated argument for why science not only cannot disprove the existence of God, but actually makes a transcendent intelligence the most probable explanation. But even an unsophisticated argument easily proves this to be the case. No need to rub it in. 

Likewise, there is much argument that the cosmos must have a beginning, and that this beginning is the Big Bang. However, even absent the Big Bang, we can again prove via metaphysics that the cosmos must have an uncaused vertical source. In short, the cosmos cannot explain itself.

One of the most simple but compelling arguments for a beginning is from the law of entropy, meaning that the existence of disorder necessarily increases in the cosmos with the passage of time. Once maximum entropy is reached, no activity can occur, and the cosmos will be functionally dead. In short, "the entropy of the universe must increase until equilibrium is reached."

Unless this turns out to be an open cosmos, more on which as we proceed. But it certainly appears to be open to a transcendent source, clearly so at the beginning, so why not at the end, and at every point in between?

Anyway, let's complete our gedankenexperiment with entropy. If maximum entropy is the inevitable end of the cosmos, then 

it's clear that if the universe had existed for an infinite time, then that equilibrium would have been reached, and if it had been reached, the universe would no longer be able to undergo spontaneous change and would therefore be dead. 

Right. Therefore, the cosmos not only had a beginning, but there is necessarily more order at the beginning, indeed, an inconceivably vaster amount. And this is precisely what we see with all of the fine-tuning packed into the Big Bang.

The low entropy of the universe is so improbable that its occurrence at the Big Bang is virtually impossible.  

I won't bore you with mathematical figures and comparisons. Well, just this one: out of all the possible universes, given the free range of various parameters governing it, the "right answer" for a cosmos capable of sustaining life comes down to one in 10 to the 10th to the 123rd, a number so large that "if it were written out" in 10-point font, "our solar system could not contain it."

There are numerous other comparisons, but they essentially equate to impossible, "which screams out for an explanation, a cause." And Spitzer easily bats down such desperate pseudo-explanations as the multiverse, string theories, or cyclic cosmologies. 

In chapter 3 Spitzer moves on to a more purely metaphysical argument. Lotta ins & outs, but it basically comes down to the reality of an uncaused and unrestricted intellect behind it all, which is the source and ground of the "profoundly intelligible existents filled with information that can give correct answers to the full range of questions." 

In other words, a Talking Universe ordered to our unrestricted desire to know about it, for "observable realities are shot through not only with contingency but also with intelligibility." 

This prior unrestricted intellect is the basis for our "correct answers to all possible questions" herebelow.

Which is as far as I've gotten in the book.

Personal Jazz and Jazzical Persons

Having thought about it for a good five minutes, we could never deduce from any first principle why Trump and not Comperatore. Rather, the best we can do is listen to an overall vision in which such disparities are rendered intelligible -- or at least not radically unintelligible and off-key. 

Let's tune up with a little Schuon, taken from various sources: 

The distant and indirect cause of what we rightly call evil -- namely privation of the good -- is the mystery of All-Possibility.... the latter, being infinite, necessarily embraces the possibility of its own negation, thus the “possibility of the impossible” or the “being of nothingness.”

Manifestation is not the Principle, the effect is not the cause; that which is “other than God” could not possess the perfections of God, hence in the final analysis and within the general imperfection of the created, there results that privative and subversive phenomenon which we call evil. 

Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility -- and necessity -- of evil.

The nature of evil, and not its inevitability, constitutes its condemnation; its inevitability must be accepted, for tragedy enters perforce into the divine play, if only because the world is not God; one must not accept error, but one must be resigned to its existence. 

Evil cannot be absolute, it always depends upon some good which it misuses or perverts; the quality of Absoluteness can belong to good alone. To say “good” is therefore to say “absolute,” and conversely: for good results from Being itself, which it reflects and whose potentialities it unfolds 

So, basically, evil is here because here is not heaven, i.e., God, the Principle, the Absolute, the Good. Which at least provides a framework in which to understand the existence of evil as such, if not such and such an evil. 

Now, it seems to me that Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven implies that God's will is not done on earth, hence, that there is some sort of limit to his absolute omnipotence, as per yesterday's post, not to mention a number of previous posts over the years. We've been hmm-ing this tune for a long time.

In fact, rather than starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel of karma, what follows is re-edited material from an auto-google:

Clarke suggests that God really and truly gives us "a share in his own power" -- the mysterious power of free will -- such that we "determine the use to which this power is put, even to use it against the express conditional will of God (= sin)."

This "free self-limitation of God's exercise of His own unlimited power" solves at least two big problems, 1) the otherwise inexplicable but self-evident existence of free will, and 2) of God's responsibility for literally everything, including evil. We want to get him off the hook for the latter.

Now, there are Christians who will say that anything that happens is a result of God's Plan, but -- no offense -- some plan. Why blame him for our own stupid dreams and schemes, for our own dissonant and tone-deaf choices?  

The point is that God can still have a plan, but that he has given man the power to mess up the plan, this latter being a final cause, not an efficient one. 

The following extended passage is another example of my thoughts in Clarke's words: all that the Christian must believe with regard to causality  

is that God determines the general set of goals He wishes to achieve, the goals at which He aims the universe, and knows that in general He will be able to achieve by his suasive power, but does not determine ahead of time in detail whether or how each particular creature will achieve its share or not in this overall goal.

Again, his Plan is in the order of finality or entelechy. We might even say that the Cosmos is not a pre-written classical composition, rather, jazz, baby:

Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous "improvisation" of the divine mind and will -- from His always contemporaneous eternal now -- precisely to fit the actual ongoing activities, especially the free ones, of the creaturely players in the world drama.

Couldn't have said it better. As we've suggested in the past, the immanent Trinity is indeed much like a jazz trio, and why not? If the Father knows exactly what the Son and Spirit will play, what's the point of the playing? I myself am not a fan of formally arranged jazz, only the spontaneous kind. Likewise, God

sees what is going on, and acts accordingly. In a word, predestination does not and should not imply total predetermination. It leaves a large dose of indetermination, to be made determinate -- not ahead of time, independently, but only contemporaneous with the actual ongoing development of the world.

Otherwise it's not jazz, it's a cosmic muzak that could be produced by a machine. But God is no more a machine than is man, and for the same reason, i.e., the principle of personhood. 

Seems to me that a trinitarian metaphysic has certain extremely important, even revolutionary, entailments, otherwise -- truly truly -- why bother? If it's just a radical monism in disguise, then revelation has revealed nothing fundamentally new to our understanding of the nature of divinity.

As discussed in yesterday's post, Clarke also critiques the radical immutability of God, without going too far in the opposite direction into a pantheistic process philosophy a la Whitehead, the latter essentially equating God with pure change. So, how to reconcile change and changelessness?

[O]ur metaphysics of God must certainly allow us to say that in some real and genuine way God is affected positively by what we do.

Clarke suggests that

God's "receiving" from us, being delighted at our response to His love, is really His original delight in sharing with us in His eternal Now His own original power of loving and infinite goodness which has come back to him in return.

Is it going too far to say that "God is not only the universe's great Giver, but also thereby its great Appreciator, its great Receiver"? 

This is essentially Hartshorne's position -- that God is both ultimate cause and ultimate effect. Curiously, he doesn't ground this in the Trinity, but the first thing that occurs to me is that the Son is a kind of eternal and ultimate effect of, and relation to, the Father. 

Is this wrong? Is this sort of thing frowned upon here? Because I have another book by Clarke called The One and the Many, and it says that God is indeed "the Great Jazz Player, improvising creatively as history unfolds." Thus

The complete script of our lives is not written anywhere ahead of time, before it happens, but only as it actually happens, by God and ourselves working it out together in our actual ongoing now's.

In another essay, he writes the following, which is pretty much my favorite meta-idea:

God as the ultimate One now appears as both the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, at once the Source and the Goal of the restless dynamism of all of nature, of all finite beings.

The structure of this "total journey" is "in the form of a circle," the Great Circle of Being, whereby

In the emergence of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circular movement, in which all things return, as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin in the first place (Thomas, in Clarke).  

Having said this, the completion of the Great circle still "needs a mediator that can take it up into itself and somehow carry it back Home with itself," one who will even go to hell and back in order to complete the circle, and who could this be?

We're nearing the end of the tune, but I think we can agree that "person" and "immutable" are antithetical. Let's whistle past the grooveyard with a few final licks by Clarke:

To say that God is "all powerful" does not mean that He alone holds and exercises all power, but only that He is the ultimate source of all power.... 

The fact that all creatures are totally dependent on God both in their being and in their actions does not therefore mean that God determines their actions from without....  

[T]hat God is the creator of all things does not mean that He directly creates all the acts of creatures. God creates agents, beings with active natures -- or, if you wish, beings acting, not acts.

Providence for Me, Tough Luck for Thee?

Recall the words of Ratzinger regarding the divine relationality or relativity: in the theology of the Trinity

lies concealed a revolution in man's view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.... 

[P]erson must be understood as relation.... the three persons that exist in God are in their nature relations. They are, therefore, not substances that stand next to each other, but they are real existing relations, and nothing besides....  

Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation.

I want to bring this to bear on the recent assassination attempt, specifically, with some people (including Trump himself) suggesting that he was only spared as a result of providence. 

Which, for any compassionate or fair-minded person, leads directly to the question of why, if God can directly intervene to prevent an evil and spare someone's life, why didn't he do so for Corey Comperatore? 

This hardly seems fair, nor is it intelligible, i.e., grounded in a stable principle that we could apply to all cases. Rather, it makes God appear arbitrary: providence for me, tough luck for thee.  

In search of an answer, I revisited a number of books by Charles Hartshorne, because his is one of the only theologies I can think of that provides a plausible and consistent answer. 

Of course, the plausibility and consistency are purchased at the price of God's total omnipotence, but for me it is worth it to have a more intelligible, empathic, and relatable God. Come to think of it, there are many self-evident truths that cannot be proved, and absurdities that can be.

In the book The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, one contributor says that 

Hartshorne knew that arguments for God's existence could be convincing only if the idea of God for which they argued was itself intelligible.   

Put conversely, it seems to me that it is indeed possible to prove -- beyond the shadow of a doubt and with geometric logic -- the existence of a God that is in turn totally unintelligible. 

Matter of fact, I just finished such a book yesterday. In it the author deduces eight ironclad attributes of God, including simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinitude, omnipresence, eternity, unity, and immutability. 

As longtime readers know, it is this last one in particular that troubles Bob, for immutable means immutable, meaning that what happens must happen and was bound to happen from all eternity. Which 

implies that human experience is fundamentally illusory. It implies also that what is for us future is for God, and therefore in reality, already just what it is, fully determinate. That means our sense of creativity, of rendering determinate what was, prior to that act, not determinate, is an illusion (Cobb, ibid.).

So, I'm always looking for a metaphysical loophole in the traditional view. However, I disagree with much of Hartshorne's overall philosophy and theology, to put it mildly, so the ultimate answer must either be found elsewhere or discovered by yours truly.

The closest thinker I've found to my view is the neo-Thomist Norris Clarke. Here he describes the problem -- that "it is impossible" for our actions 

to be both free and yet a logical consequence of a divine action which "infallibly" produces its effect. Power to cause someone to perform by his own choice an act precisely defined by the cause is meaningless.

Indeed, what is the point if  

God has caused all events, even free choices, to occur just as they have occurred? We would then face the implication that the most wicked acts are caused by God....

But

The notion of a cosmic power that determines all decisions fails to make sense. For its decisions could refer to nothing except themselves. They could result in no world; for a world must consist of local agents making their own decisions....

If God be in all aspects absolute, then literally it is "all the same" to him, a matter of utter indifference, whether we do this or do that, whether we live or die, whether we joy or suffer....

A wholly absolute God is totally beyond tragedy, and his power operates uninfluenced by human freedom, hence presumably as infallibly determinative of all events, and therefore, it seems, there need be no tragedy.  

Okay, Bob, we get it. Now, where's the loophole?  

Let me see if I can track down a suitable passage. Bestwecando at the moment:

the immutability which must be affirmed of God is the unchanging, indefectible steadfastness of an infinite plenitude of goodness and loving benevolence, but a benevolence which also expresses itself in a process, a progressive unfolding of mutual interpersonal relationships, spread out in real temporal succession at our receiving end... in terms of which he is truly related to us....

Hmm. Sounds like a person to me, recalling Ratzinger's words at the top.

Now, you probably know someone who is absolutely rigid, closed, predictable, and robotic. Which is not the ideal insofar as persons are concerned.  

Our bottom line for this morning is that perhaps a bit less in the immutability department redounds to a more personal and relatable God, which is fine by me. 

But we need to get down to specifics: why Trump and not Comperatore? How can we render this intelligible while denying neither man's nor God's proper and proportionate influence over events?

To be continued should sufficient interest be aroused.

Man, Superman, and Inframan

Another post I hesitate to recommend...

Last night I was watching a video on Nietzsche by a philosophy professor. Then this morning, while rummaging around in the arkive, I found this old post written after rereading Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I hadn't looked at in some 40 years.

My avowed purpose was to revisit ground zero of modern bonehead atheism, although Nietzsche himself was no bonehead, rather, a clever and witty anti-theist who was also honest enough to draw out the implications of his philosophy all the way to the madhouse, so give him credit for ruthless consistency. 

At the age of 30, Zarathustra leaves home and goes off to the mountains in order to think. Eventually he wearies of being alone with his wisdom, so he deicides to go down into the world and share the news, which is neither good nor bad (since there can be no transcendent standard), but rather (like nature), simply is. 

The first person Zarathustra encounters on the way down is an old saint. I suppose this sets the pattern of people who aren't particularly congenial to his message of liberation from God (or from any other form of transcendence). Afterwards Zarathustra is astonished, saying to himself,

"Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"

Then he wanders into town, where he again gets the cold shoulder, even though, hey, "I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed." And just "What have ye done to surpass man?" 

For Superman is to man as man is to ape; and the latter is

a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.

But almost nobody qualifies for the title of Superman, since mankind at large is literally a kind of contemptible disease:

The earth, said he, hath a skin; and this skin hath diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called "man."

Nor did Zarathustra have any use for liberalism or progressivism -- unless it is the individual progress from man to Superman. The Superman categorically rejects Christian holdovers such as equality and justice, regarding them as disguises for weakness, envy, and vengeance: 

ye preachers of equality! Tarantulas are ye unto me, and secretly revengeful ones!

But I will soon bring your hiding-places to the light.... Therefore do I tear at your web, that your rage may lure you out of your den of lies, and that your revenge may leap forth from behind your word "justice"....

[Y]our most secret tyrant-longings disguise themselves thus in virtue-words! Fretted conceit and suppressed envy... in you break they forth as flame and frenzy of vengeance.

He also nails the media, and good on him:

Just see these superfluous ones! Sick they are always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper.

Not to mention the state, which is  

the coldest of all cold monsters.... Destroyers are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state.... whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen....

True enough. So, who exactly benefits from this cold leviathan monster? The usual excess and useless people: 

Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised!

Certainly true of the modern state, which, in addition to pandering to the superfluous, is itself the employer of last resort for millions of otherwise useless people. 

Nevertheless, I don't see how Nietzsche's vision works in practice -- a handful of Supermen riding roughshod over the restavus useless drones. But I am by no means a Nietzsche expert. I was just an adolescent dabbler and Superman wannabe. Maybe I should watch the rest of the video. 

Why is Nietzsche so popular despite the fact that few of his readers would make the cut and qualify as a ruthless Supermen? Kreeft describes five different kinds of reader, from those who dismiss him as crazy, to teenage rebels, to deconstructionists who enlist him into their clever-silly language games. 

Kreeft takes him as a kind of prophet "with a valuable warning to our entire culture," what with its evident "will to power" in the wake of the vacuum left by the (practically speaking) death of God. 

Speaking of which (and back to the present), I'm reading a book by Henri Renard called The Philosophy of God. It's another one of those "introductory" texts from 75 years ago, when folks were smarter. I won't say there were more supermen back then, but certainly there were more men aware of what transcends man.

Nietzsche is usually lumped in with the existentialists, but it says here that "The philosophy of St. Thomas is the only philosophy that is truly existential," so somebody's wrong. And someone is not as super as he thinks he is. After all, the prefix "super-" literally means

over and above: higher in quality, quantity, or degree; exceeding a norm; surpassing all or most others of its kind or class; having an additional dimension; constituting a more inclusive category.

Like a saint or something? 

As for Nietzsche, I don't see how someone can be called "super" while simultaneously being plunged back into immanent nature. Rather, the latter seems more deserving of the prefix "infra-." 

Is Thomas above Nietzsche, or is it the other way around? Recall that, on his way down from the mountain, Nietzsche bumps into an old saint. Too bad it wasn't Thomas, for perhaps he could have straightened him out about the death of God business. Because for Thomistic existentialism,

nothing is intelligible, nothing is, except as immediately from Him who is the "To Be." 

Without this "Subsisting 'To Be,'" there is "no satisfactory solution" to a host of various problems, man himself being among the biggest ones. I think Thomas would agree that there is something not-so-super about man, even though this is a deviation from the original plan.

On the one hand, "Education results largely from constant contact with great minds" -- with superminds, I suppose we might say. But "The error of the Modernists" -- Nietzsche among them -- "is that they reject any objective demonstration of the existence of God." 

Nietzsche dismisses any such talk of God as so much sentimental twaddle resulting from a slave mentality, but you heard the man -- he just referred to a rigorously objective demonstration of God's existence that doesn't care about feelings -- Nietzsche's or anyone else's. 

I'm with Thomas, who "proclaims and establishes that the intellect of man in its most perfect [super!] action is able to reach objective reality and know the true." 

Superman or dead man? For Thomas, any form of subjectivism "is intellectual suicide," hardly the means of surpassing man and attaining the Superman.

It's getting late, so here is a super summary of how we are able to attain real transcendence in five easy steps:

1) Being is intelligible.

2) Knowledge is caused by the object.

3) The intellect is a spiritual faculty whose adequate object is being.

4) The principle of causality flows from a knowledge of being and made certain by metaphysical analysis.

5) From a knowledge of the effects we are able to rise to certain knowledge of the cause which is God.

Are we not supermen? Or just men ordered to that which we know darn well is superior to us? More to follow...

Which Came First, the One or the Many?

Despite editing and synthesizing a couple of old posts into this new one, it's just more of the same, so I would skip it if I were you. 

This question of the one and many is said to one of the oldest and most persistent problems of philosophy, which is to say, if the cosmos is one, how can it be so diverse? And given the obvious diversity, how can it be one? 

It seems that the underlying unity of the cosmos is a necessary condition for saying anything about anything in or of it, which goes to the relationship between intellect and being, in a word, affirming the isness of things. 

As mentioned in the previous post, to say something is true may be reduced to the statement that something either Is or Is Not.  

But again, how are such statements possible unless there is a real underlying unity between knower and known? We cannot know a thing about a thing that is fundamentally unconnected to us.

As Garrigou-Lagrange reminds us, "the first operation of the intellect" -- the operation we always do and cannot help doing -- is "simple intellectual apprehension." According to Thomas, 

The gaze of our intellect is fixed first upon the natures of sensible things.... To understand is a kind reading into the interior.... For sense knowledge is occupied with sensible, exterior qualities, whereas intellective knowledge penetrates all the way to the essence of the thing (emphasis mine).

Ultimately, "the object of the intellect is that which is," AKA being. Sounds like a modest claim, but to say that being both is, and is intelligible, is probably the most profound -- and surprising -- thing one could say about the world, for the implications are literally endless. 

Do things make sense? Or does sense make things? Sounds like a joke, but for Kantians what we call things are just consequences of our own psychic categories. But for common sense realism, it is the things themselves that truly make sense, i.e., disclose their real natures to the intellect.

After all, if they don't, then the world is but a projection of our own neuropsychology, which eventually leads to the barbarous idea that perception is reality. 

But if perception is reality, then there is no reality, precisely. To even say reality is to affirm the existence of something distinct from our own perceptions, and will still be there when we look away.

Having said that, to say reality is to say appearances; but this is a complementarity, not a duality, for appearances are of reality, not a negation or occlusion of it.

Now, along the vertical spectrum there are three principle degrees of abstraction to which we have access; from the bottom up, they are 1) the positive sciences, which still have one foot in matter, 2) mathematics, and 3) the metaphysical, this latter being completely immaterial and going to the sort of cosmos in which math and intelligible matter can even exist. 

The vertical spectrum can be further subdivided in any number of ways, for example, between physics and biology, psychology and neurology, theology and metaphysics. Nevertheless, despite these subdivisions, it's still One Cosmos, albeit both divisible and indivisible, continuous and discontinuous.

This question of continuity and discontinuity goes to another one of those primordial complementarities we've heard so little about. 

However, as with all such complementarities, one pole must be prior, and in this case it's the continuity, for the alternative is both inconceivable and impossible: no amount of parts adds up to the whole if the whole isn't already implicitly present in the parts. 

In the absence of this prior unity, the best we can accomplish is an aggregation, agglomeration, or agglutination; a blob, a glob, or a mob. 

Garrigou-Lagrange agrees that 

A being's quantitative unity in space is not the criterion for its substantial unity. This quantitative unity presumes only an accidental union (an aggregation of molecules).

In short, there is the accidental unity of the blob and the substantial unity of the whole, which is to say, the substantial oneness prior to the accidental manyness. 

And God is pure substance, or so we have heard from the wise. And the fact that this substantial unity is present in three persons seems important, for even in God it seems there is a kind of distantly analogous manyness that eternally resolves into a unity of perfect truth, love, and beauty, or something.