An End Run Around Bob

I was watching Charlie Kirk on Bill Maher's Club Random, and of course the conversation touched on religion, Maher being an irreverent atheist, Kirk an evangelical Christian. It was all quite cordial, despite Maher's caustic wise guy cynicism and Kirk's cheerful diddly-deist Flanderism. 

The default setting of my own personality is much closer to Maher's, and there was a time when I would have agreed with his critique of the absurdity of religion. In fact, in my approach to religion, I've had to find a way to make it compatible with my own cynical and ironical tendencies -- to essentially fashion a workaround that will fly under -- or over -- my own sensibility.

You might say that, in response to my own wise guy tendencies, I've had to fashion a wiser guy. This wiser guy writes the posts, but the posts are nevertheless infused with the old wise guy personality.  

Hence the metaphysical approach. Metaphysics not only trumps physics -- and naturalism in general -- but trumps my own skepticism. It involves a kind of pure impersonal intellection that transcends the parts of Christianity that make even me squeamish. For example, I would still have a hard time just mouthing pious platitudes such as "Christ died for muh sins," without a lot of metaphysical elaboration and qualification. 

Our old reader JWM called it the "Jesus willies," referring to the feeling provoked on exposure to, say, one of those cheerfully inane TV evangelists. I can no more relate to them than to the village atheist. One might say I am equally cynical toward both conventional religiosity and naive atheism. Or, I'm skeptical of my own cynicism.

Which is not always easy. I wish it could be as straightforward as it seems to be for Kirk, and I'm certainly open to it, but it just doesn't seem to happen that way. Again, I have to use my mind to overcome my own personality, but the personality remains. 

For example, yesterday I read a highly abstract essay called Christ the the Logos, Christ the Telos: Joseph Ratzinger's Christological Synthesis, by Anthony Scordino, in the journal The New Ressourcement, which was founded by Bishop Barron. It talks about Christ in a way that mostly succeeds in not giving me the willies, because it is so metaphysical. 

In the conversation between Maher and Kirk, Maher was making light of the whole Garden of Eden thing, which isn't difficult to do if you take the story literally instead of metaphorically and even metaphysically. 

Scordino writes that for Ratzinger, "original sin is the fundamental political problem, that fallen freedom is the crack in the foundation of any utopic (sic) enterprise," which is precisely what makes me cynical about Maher's naive leftism. He is an example of someone who is skeptical about everything except himself, whereas I am skeptical of my own skepticism.

For Scordino, 

Christ is history's beginning, middle, and end -- the Logos in the beginning, the heart and fulcrum of history, and the Telos toward which creation strives.

Now, this I find intriguing, instead of scaring me away with the Jesus willies. Tell me more! 

Ratzinger argues that

"the ground of being is communio," that in the Absolute relativity is itself absolute..., and that community is coincident with and constitutive of individuality.

Hey, that's what I believe: that God is the Absolute Relative. This Absolute is simultaneously Being-For (the Father), Being-From (the Son), and Being-With (the Spirit). God is trialogical, an endless con-versation or literally flowing-together. And when this trialogical being creates, just watch what happens!

"Ratzinger argues that creation is the external ground" of an "inner ground of creation," for which reason everything is, in my opinion, stamped with echoes of the Trinity.

Ultimately everything is an exit from, participation in, and return to this creative trialogue. The creation itself is not a fall, as believed by people like Plotinus, for whom existence is the greatest sin, so to speak -- that

The soul's descent into the body and its entanglement with the material world is a kind of "fall" or wandering away from its true, higher nature. In this embodied state, the soul is susceptible to passions, desires, and ignorance, which obscure its connection to the intelligible realm and ultimately to The One.

Rather,

the differentiating exitus characterizing creation is not a fall, and neither is creation's reditus [return] an overcoming of individual identity in pursuit of an undifferentiated unity. Finitude is not fallenness, and neither is matter in itself a gravitational force drawing creaturely being away from divinity.... Although unification is the telos of creation, differentiation is not the fall.

History is structured as a "theo-drama of call and response between the human 'I' and the divine 'Thou.'" As in the Trinity itself, "unity individualizes -- or better, it personalizes." And this "basic law" of "identity through relationality and alterity" is "definitively incarnated by Christ."

More generally, I have no trouble at all with the Incarnation. I like the idea of God entering his own creation, becoming oneofus, and revealing the nature of ourselves to ourselves. It shows that "the Reason from which the world" itself proceeds "is personal and relational":

It is not only reason but communication: not only the objectively intelligible but a subjective speaker; not only ratio but also verbum (which implies ratio). 

In other words, the Word is a link between communicants:

All being is a being-thought; all being-thought is a being-thought-by (objective intelligibility is rooted in supereminent subjectivity).

Thus, in Christ there is "being-with and being-for us in a radically new mode," and "this Word of creation is revealed to be a Word of self-giving and self-emptying love." 

Alpha and Omega: the same Logos responsible for the creation at the beginning is "the selfsame Word who will be 'all in all' at the end." Christ "is the universe's Omega Point, he who draws and unites all things to and in himself," or "the telos of the universe's spiritualization," which "personalizes rather then homogenizes."

So, the both the source of history and the Divine Attractor at the end of history, only who enters the stream of time in order to reveal to us what and who we are. In other words, who we are is unintelligible in the absence of the telos that reveals to us the damn point of it all. 

No telos = no intelligibilty, for which reason John Paul II made that crack about how "When God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible." In other words, our understanding of ourselves and the created world becomes fragmented and ultimately meaningless. It's no longer One Cosmos, because there's a beginning and a middle with no end. 

Ratzinger recognizes that "the universe" itself "is a process of becoming... which knows being only in the form of becoming." Only something "coming 'from without' can fulfill what in the cosmos is most deeply 'within,'" i.e., "the entry onto the scene of something qualitatively new and different." Hence the Incarnation:

The "increasing 'complexification' of the world through mind necessarily implies its unification around a personal center" -- that is, around Jesus Christ.

What a wild idea -- a one in whom God and world "touch each other," and "thus, God in world, world in God, will truly be the Omega of history."  Christ is "the world's future in the world's present," or "the final, definitive, and eschatological evolutionary leap." His

transformative entry into the historical 'middle' reveals the meaning of the beginning and everything thereafter.   

So, that's a Jesus that doesn't give me the willies, but rather, a reason for believing that creation has a telos, because the telos entered creation. Does this make sense, Gemini?

The author grapples with their own skeptical nature and finds a compelling intellectual pathway into Christian belief through a highly metaphysical understanding of Christ, particularly influenced by Joseph Ratzinger. 

The text is a fascinating exploration [you always say that!] of the challenges of faith for a naturally skeptical and intellectual individual. It demonstrates a journey of finding a meaningful connection to Christianity not through emotional appeals or simplistic dogma, but through rigorous intellectual engagement with metaphysical concepts. 

The author finds in Ratzinger's Christology a framework that resonates with their philosophical inclinations, offering a sophisticated understanding of God, creation, and the human condition that transcends their initial cynicism. The piece is marked by honesty, self-awareness, and a compelling articulation of a personal intellectual and spiritual quest.

A Revealed Preference for God?

"The author" -- that would be me -- "sees the qualitative leaps in cosmic and biological evolution as particularly strong evidence for the need to invoke more than just material and efficient causes, hinting at a deeper, perhaps even transcendent, reality at play." 

Qualitative. Leaps. How are there even qualities? And how -- and why -- do they leap? We know that there are qualities, but most of them are supposedly secondary effects of primary ones such as solidity, extension, and size. Secondary qualities -- e.g., color, sound, and texture -- are just like, your opinion, man. They are in the subject but only projected onto the object.

But Whitehead, among others, argued that if secondary qualities are relegated to mere subjective experiences, then the very world we begin with, and are trying to understand, essentially vanishes. He famously cracked that in this view,

Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endless and meaningless.

Like anybody could even know that. Literally, because subjectivity itself becomes a secondary quality, so the world reduces to a lifeless, abstract, and ultimately unrecognizable universe bearing no resemblance to the world we actually live in and interact with. 

As I said in the book, scientists "are like branches of a tree trying to show the trunk is dead by growing more leaves." Denial of spirit by spirit does not thereby eliminate spirit, duh. It is like 

propounding the claim that there is no truth as if this were truth or in declaring it to be absolutely true that there is nothing but the relatively true; one might just as well say that there is no language or write that there is no writing....

The assertion nullifies itself if it is true and by nullifying itself logically proves thereby that it is false; its initial absurdity lies in the implicit claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared to be the only possibility (Schuon).

Besides, even so-called primary qualities are still known by a mind. In this regard Bishop Berkeley was correct -- that they are just as mind-dependent as any other qualities. 

In the beginning is the intelligible word. If not, then we're done here. In other words, intelligibility is prior to our discovering anything at all to be intelligible, whether "primary" or "secondary." The point is, both are intelligible to the intellect, and this requires a sufficient reason. 

This next chapter of The One and the Many, The Final Unification of Being, is right in our wheelhouse:

The whole quest of metaphysics has been a search for the ultimate principles of intelligibility, the ultimate necessary conditions of possibility, of all the beings of our world of experience -- and, by the extension of the same principles, of all finite and changing beings, whether known to us or not.

The necessary Principle of Everything that makes everything else make sense, and without which nothing makes sense. I'm in!

We don't need to bring God into the discussion at this early juncture. Rather, just follow the evidence where it leads. If it leads to God, then we'll just have to deal with that eventuality, no matter how pleasant. The question is,

"What does the world of my experience demand as its adequate sufficient reason, to render it adequately intelligible?"  

To start with,

Any search for sufficient reason, especially the passage from finite to infinite being, requires a certain metaphysical insight into an exigency of of reason beyond the merely logical, and a fundamental openness and commitment to the call of the intelligibility of being.  

This very much reminds me of Gödel, since he proves the insufficiency of reason to account even for reason, let alone what lies beyond reason. Man is uniquely open to what transcends man, and this vertical openness is even what defines man. To close ourselves to this transcendence is to become less than human. Or all too human if you prefer, i.e., Genesis 3 All Over Again.

Sounds like God is the primary quality.

That's getting ahead of oursoph. But there are two paths to arrive there, the outer and the inner. The outer "begins with efficient causality to conclude that there must exist at least one self-sufficient being." You know, all those classic proofs of God. But I'm partial to the inner path, through which 

we rise directly to the discovery of the Infinite Fullness of being through the interior dynamism of the human person as knowing-willing subject oriented toward the Infinite by its very nature, as the only adequate goal that can fulfill its innate natural longing.

Well, just because you long for God, it doesn't mean God exists. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

This is different. It is "rooted in an unrestricted inner dynamism of my intellect toward the limitless horizon of all being as intelligible." This limitless intelligibility is not a dream, rather, an undeniable reality: "my very nature as a human person is to be an ineradicable implicit drive toward the Infinite."

Yes, but does the object of infinite intelligibility exist?

Only if life itself is not absurd. In other words, "either God exists, or I am absurd: that is the basic option that confronts me." 

How is it possible that options exist at all, let alone this one?

That's a good question. It seems that freedom cannot be eliminated in a truth-bearing cosmos. In other words, if God's priority is truth, then humans must be free to accept or reject it. 

But if the world were absurd, how could we know it? It is a "lived contradiction" to affirm theoretically

that the universe or myself is unintelligible and continuing to live and use my mind as though it were intelligible -- which we cannot help but do. 

People vote with their feet. What do they call it? Revealed preference? Watch what people do, not what they say. 

A revealed preference for God?

Yes, supposing everyone behaves as if this is an intelligible cosmos that endlessly discloses itself to the intellect.

That's good, but the real cosmic tree must have its roots aloft and branches down below. At least for those whose wood beleaf.

The Sufficient Reason of an Evolving Universe

Not only is our universe evolving, but it had a beginning in time. Indeed -- or so they say -- even time itself is one of the things that supposedly began with the beginning. On this, both science and theology are in accord.

To even say "beginning" is a temporal concept, so there is no beginning in time, only of time. Which seems impossible to me, but there it is. 

Why impossible?

Because time is such a primitive concept that it's impossible to imagine how anything can happen without it. In this regard it's like experience: how would it be possible to experience non-experience? Or being -- anything that falls outside being is nothing.   

In any event, the cosmos is a shockingly different place than it was 13.8 billion years ago. Given where it was then and where it is today, it looks as if it has a "from-to" structure, except that the scientific revolution tossed out the "to," which renders the "from" unintelligible. As a result, "creation from nothing" is complemented by creation to nothing. And here we are.

To put it another way, scientism has jettisoned formal and final causation, leaving us with only a material and efficient causation that can tell us all about the How? but literally nothing about the Why? To even ask Why? assumes a telos that doesn't exist, so truly truly, existence is a bridge from and to nowhere. 

Unacceptable.

Agreed. If you're going to chuck the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), you had better have a sufficient reason for doing so. But what is their reason? Anybody? Gemini?

Quantum Mechanics: This is the most significant challenge. Certain interpretations of quantum mechanics suggest that some events at the subatomic level are inherently probabilistic and lack a deterministic cause. For example, the exact moment of radioactive decay of an individual atom is considered unpredictable and without a prior determining factor in standard quantum theory. This apparent fundamental randomness seems to contradict the PSR.   

But that's just a limit on our ability to know, not a disproof of causation. Just because we can't determine the cause, this hardly means that things aren't caused or can be uncaused. The PSR it metaphysical, not empirical. It's an a priori truth, denial of which renders science itself impossible.

Fundamental Laws: Some argue that the fundamental laws of physics themselves might be brute facts, meaning they exist without a further reason or explanation. If the very rules governing the universe have no "why," it challenges the universality of the PSR.

Again, to say that things have no causes is to give to matter what can only obtain in God. In other words, they still have an Uncaused Cause, but it is arbitrarily displaced from God to the laws of physics. That's not cool.

You are correct. Science fundamentally relies on the idea that the universe is intelligible and that phenomena can be explained through laws and principles. The pursuit of scientific knowledge is driven by the desire to find reasons and causes for what we observe. Abandoning the PSR entirely could undermine this very pursuit. Many scientists still operate under the implicit assumption that there are reasons for things, even if we haven't yet discovered them.

Of course they do. Hypocrites.

Causality Remains Central: While quantum mechanics introduces probabilities, the concept of causality is still crucial in most areas of science. Scientists seek to understand how causes lead to effects, build models based on causal relationships, and use these relationships for prediction and intervention. 

Correct. Also correct:

The PSR is fundamentally a metaphysical principle. Science, as a methodological endeavor, focuses on building empirically supported models of how the universe works. While scientific findings can inform our philosophical views on the PSR, they don't necessarily "eliminate" a principle that operates at a different level of inquiry. 

So, don't let anybody steal your Why?, because it they do, they've rendered you absurd and imprisoned you in an unintelligible universe. But why? Again, what is the sufficient reason for denying the principle of sufficient reason?

Hatred of God?

Maybe at the beginning, but now it's just a bad habit. Or laziness. It's an inherited paradigm that people imagine is self-sufficient. In fact, like any ideology it ends up enclosing the intellect in a pseudo-intellectual matrix. But how can we even have an intellect without a sufficient reason? The intellect is only the most astonishing thing in all of existence, and you're telling me that it has no reason? Or that matter can be it's sufficient reason?

A little skepticism, please.

These thoughts were provoked by chapter twelve of The One and the Many, on The Extrinsic Causes of Being and Becoming. Here is some metaphysical common sense:

Every being must have the sufficient reason (i.e., the adequate grounding of its intelligibility) for its own existence, either (1) in itself, or (2) in another. Otherwise it would be totally unintelligible...

In other words, any effect "needs such and such a cause to explain it. The cause must be adequate to produce it, be able to explain it once it's there." 

If something exists, it was caused by another, for nothing can give existence to itself: "to do so it would have to pre-exist its own self, which is absurd" -- like saying that being comes from non-being, which is equally absurd and unintelligible. 

It's fine to posit a self-sufficient and necessary being, an uncaused cause, an unmoved mover, and all the rest. Just don't pretend it can be a contingent being located in the chain of causes and effects. 

Back to our evolving cosmos, Clarke highlights the same inexplicable (on their own level) ontological discontinuities I did in the book, so I'm glad someone else is on the case. Regarding the problem of evolution, he asks how it can possibly explain

the undeniable fact that often in the course of time the higher does emerge after, and in one sense from, the lower, as is clearly evident in the whole process of the evolution of life on our planet, with its slow, groping, but persistent movement upwards: from inanimate to plant life, from plant to animal, and finally from animal to human, with its rational intelligence, one following the other in time?

It happened, but how -- especially if we rule out formal and final causation, and limit ourselves to material and efficient? Living things are clearly teleological, but how does teleology enter a cosmos that is otherwise devoid of final causes? Clarke suggests -- and why not? -- that 

The intervention of higher-level causes on the immaterial level is needed here to supply an adequate sufficient reason. 

In particular, a reason for "the passage from the inanimate, from large molecules, to living cells, with their extremely complex ordering of many parts to a common end," then "the passage from plant life to conscious sense knowledge in animals," and "above all"

the transition from sense knowing in animals to rational self-conscious knowing in human beings, with its ability to transcend the whole order of spatially extended material properties by its powers of abstraction from space, time, and particular material conditions to form abstract universal concepts... that are not specifiable in any sense images or spatio-temporal terms at all...

Is it asking too much to expect a sufficient reason for these shocking developments? For an explanation that is proportionate to the phenomena? When we see "a major leap to something intrinsically higher on a qualitative level," aren't they just a little curious as to how this came about? Or are the discontinuous leaps really just continuous baby steps? 

If our world is full of open systems, why can't the cosmos itself be an open system? Who said it has to be closed and self-sufficient? What if creation is not a "one shot deal at the beginning of the universe" but an

open-ended operation unfolding constantly in the world, both supporting the active potentialities initially infused into nature and infusing new higher ones at crucial points along the way..., an intrinsic though hidden factor -- at once transcendent and immanent -- in the whole vast unfolding drama of what we call "Nature"...

Like a Great Attractor or something? Gemini, please summarize the argument while we pause and regroup:

In essence, the text is a passionate defense of the Principle of Sufficient Reason against what the author perceives as its unwarranted dismissal by certain scientific and philosophical viewpoints. It argues that the PSR is not merely a matter of intellectual preference but a fundamental requirement for intelligibility and that abandoning it leads to an absurd and ultimately unsatisfying understanding of the universe and our place within it. 

The author sees the qualitative leaps in cosmic and biological evolution as particularly strong evidence for the need to invoke more than just material and efficient causes, hinting at a deeper, perhaps even transcendent, reality at play.

The Real Now

They say "the market hates uncertainty," but certainty is no bargain either. 

Clarke points out that "there is no knowledge more useless than to know all the future now," since we couldn't do a thing about it. It would turn even God into a passive witness of his own creation, nor could he "exercise any providence at all, since everything would already be unchangeably fixed without his active cooperation with us that can only be in a real now."

The real now. Not to go all hippie-dippie on you this early in the morning, but there is something awfully weird about the now. It's so fleeting, and yet only it has the fullness of reality, or is fully real. The past, to be sure, is -- or was -- real, but it is clearly lacking something. Those of you who have tried to live in the past will know what I mean.

It also makes no sense to live for the future, because only when you get there is it real, and if you haven't learned to live in the Real Now now, what makes you think you'll be able to do so then? Not to criticize people for living in the future, because it's one way to avoid and flee from the reality of the now. 

Or maybe we should adopt a more moderate stance: live a little bit in the past and future, but mostly in the now. 

For my part, the older I get, it seems that it works the other way around: my primary means of escaping the future is to burrow down into the now, which is what I'm doing when I write these posts.

The future's uncertain and the end is always near.

Exactly. Mr. Morrison was correct, although even he didn't know just how near. But the older you are, the closer the end. The end

Of our elaborate plans / The end of everything that stands / The end, no safety or surprise / The end, I'll never look into your eyes again

That's a morbid thought, but if there's a day to entertain it, that day is today, no? As far as anyone knew, it was the end of Jesus. But he surprised them all and looked into their eyes again. 

What did that do to the nature of time? For it seems that time itself underwent an ontological change when God "took it up" into himself. God, who is supposedly outside time, fully submitted to time, but time came out the loser. Now, it seems, Christ bisects every now, making it even more real than it was before. Instead of being just that fleeting moment between past and future, it is imbued with the fullness of eternity?

In any event, the now is still the only place where freedom can enter the picture. It is in this context that Clarke calls God the Great Jazz Player who improvises creatively as history unfolds. 

As it so happens, at the moment, I'm listening in the background to the great jazz player Art Pepper, for whom the end was about a year away (but was always near, given his habits). Perhaps my favorite thing about him is the utter desperation with which he milks every now in his playing, no matter how otherwise deteriorated his physical being. The reviewer suggests that his playing in the track Goodbye

is his answer to Hamlet's soliloquy, the debate over the advantages of being and not being.... he plays increasingly intense phrases, both soul-searing and sentimental. 

Like the spirits at the end of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, he is looking back and reflecting on what he will miss when he leaves the world behind: Farewell to hot dinners and hot chicks, farewell to girls with bad attitudes in tight dresses, farewell to one-night stands of both the musical and personal kind, farewell to forging checks, farewell to fixing with fellow convicts, farewell to practicing and practicing, to studying and absorbing everything he could..., to bad pianos and squeaky reeds, farewell to drug clinics and rehabs, farewell to Stan Kenton and Buddy Rich, farewell to groupies and roadies, farewell to the Los Angeles County Jail and to San Quentin.  

There's also another killer ballad, a transcendent version of Body and Soul..., in which he also seems to be taking the title literally and contemplating the metaphysical. 

All compressed into the real now. 

Anyway, back to God's creative improvisation over history, he's actually playing in a combo with us, in that "the individual details" depend 

on our own free response [and] are not determined except by his actually cooperating with us in our present, to which in his time-transcending NOW he is always present.

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 ongoing now's. 

He goes on to say that

God can know what will happen to you only if he first takes the risk of creating you and working with you all the way through to the end, trying to steer you in the right direction, but with the final outcome determined only by your last free choices at the end, to which God himself is always present, but only in the immanent order in which they actually occur existentially.

So, is God the "Ultimate Cosmic Gambler"? 

Understood properly, "Yes -- but also an infinitely skilled player at the game!" 

It reminds me of the book God's Gamble, which I should probably reread. I don't know if God plays dice with the universe, but he certainly plays jazz with history. 

The other day I read a great quote by Lequier, that "most of the time we only escape our errors by means of other errors." Which reminds me of what Miles Davis said about playing a bad note: "It's not the note you play that's the wrong note -- it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong." 

Davis emphasized that a single "wrong" note doesn't necessarily derail a musical phrase. It's the musician's ability to creatively respond to that note, and how they integrate it into the subsequent notes, that ultimately determines whether the initial note sounds like a mistake or a deliberate, interesting choice.

This quote speaks to the importance of listening, flexibility, and recovery in musical performance, especially in improvisational genres like jazz. It encourages musicians to be fearless and to think of music as a continuous flow rather than a series of isolated correct or incorrect notes.

True for us, true for God. Especially today, with the ultimate bad note of the Crucifixion. How will God respond? And how will we?

Man's Godward Tendencies and God's Manward Tendencies

What is the first truth without which there can be no others? A truth to which all must assent before even beginning the search for truth, and for which there can be no prior truths or principles? Can it really be, for example, I think therefore I am? No, because that assumes, among other things, the principle of noncontradiction, i.e., that it is not equally true to say I think therefore I am not. 

God's first principle is apparently I am that I am, which can be variously translated as I am who am, I will be what I will be, or even I will become what I choose to become. In short, God simply Is. He is being itself, transcending any particular or limited instance of being.

However, adding the "I" to the "am" suggests that being is personal -- that it has an interiority. In other words, being is not merely objective but subjective. And this person -- as are all persons -- is free from necessity, as implied in the last version, i.e., "choose to become."  

But to whom is God speaking? To Moses, of course, with whom he has a relationship. In fact, we could know nothing of God of he weren't related to us. Nor could we know anything if there weren't a relationship between knowing and being. 

But we do know being, and if God is the act of being, this implies that in any act of knowing we know God, even if only an itsy bitsy. That was Aquinas' opinion, and why not? An explicit finite truth points toward, and is related to, the implicit infinite source of truth; why, our very ability to understand is a participation in the divine intellect.  

Now, if God is a person with an intellect, this too implies relation, and it turns out that this relation is between a Father-Intellect and a Son-Logos: the Son is the perfect and complete expression of the Father's being, wisdom, and will. Prior to any particular creation -- ours included -- the Son is the "revelation" of the Father, and this same Logos is responsible for the creation of the universe, i.e., "Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made."

The Father, as the ultimate source and initiator, acts through the Son (the Logos) as the agent in bringing creation into being.

So our official position is that to be at all is to be related, and that to be unrelated is to not be, or to be nothing: unrelated being is non-being, precisely. Even -- especially -- God is irreducibly related, and so are we. This alone makes me suspect we are made in the image of the Principle of Principles, even without revelation telling me so. Otherwise, we possess godlike abilities with no God to account for them.

As we said in yesterday's post, both space and time are quintessentially relational: as there is no up without a down, nor an outside without an inside, there is no present without a past and future. Newtonian mechanics made it possible to predict the future based upon unvarying law, thus the temptation to enclose us in determinism. 

But the present moment in which I am is imbued with a freedom that is undetermined; in fact, if it weren't undetermined, we could have no knowledge of Newtonian mechanics, because we would be machines and not persons. We would have no relation to these laws, but rather, would be instantiations of them. But again, being as such is personal, interior, and free, so that's a nonstarter. We -- like God -- always transcend any specification or formal system that would presume to enclose us.

Picking up where we left off yesterday, we were addressing some avenues of thought suggested by Gemini, specifically addressing the enigma of time. It suggested that we 

Consider the problem of divine temporality: If God is conscious and consciousness is linked to time (as per Clarke's argument), does this necessitate some form of divine temporality, even if different from human experience? 

You betcha'! We made this argument a few weeks ago, with the idea of a super- or preeminent temporality in God, which in my mind is like eternity only better (and certainly less boring): it "moves beyond the traditional view of God as being entirely outside of time and proposes a more dynamic interaction," to wit,

The concept of preeminent time implies a form of temporality that is beyond our comprehension, infinitely richer and more complex than our linear, sequential time, and capable of encompassing all moments simultaneously, yet also allowing for dynamic interaction with them.  

This view allows for a more personal and interactive God, one who is not detached from the flow of events. It can address the problem of how God can answer prayers or intervene in history if God is entirely outside of time.

(BTW, this idea of "a form of temporality that is infinitely richer and more complex than our linear, sequential time, and capable of encompassing all moments simultaneously," is why I am intrigued by Finnegans Wake, because that is precisely the model of time it articulates. Obviously it is anything but linear, and it's certainly beyond our comprehension. But I will resist the urge to go down that enticing rabbit hole, for no one can swallow that rabbit whole. Just like infinite being itself.)

Speaking of holofractal metahistory, Genesis also made a point about  

Addressing the "Bloody Point of the Drama of History": 

Reconcile the idea of a knowing God with the apparent contingency and meaning of human history: If God's knowledge is of possibilities, how does this preserve the significance of our choices and actions?

Wrong question: rather, how do our choices have meaning and significance if they are really a result of divine necessity? Again, the unrestricted interior dynamism of the human person is ordered to the limitless horizon of intelligible being, and this space is full of possibilities. What accounts for this endlessly intelligible intelligibility? In other words, what is the sufficient reason for an intellect that is open to the limitless horizon of intelligibility? 

Must be a God who is likewise open to his own limitless horizon of being, and who "will become who I choose to become." Apparently, he first chooses to "become" (or beget) the Logos, and this same Logos is the Light that lights every man.  

One can reason upward from the beings of our world of experience to its ultimate principle, which Clarke calls the cosmic or outer path, as exemplified by Aquinas' five ways; alternatively, one can begin by 

exploring the depths of our own inner conscious life to find God as the Ultimate Goal of one's inner drive toward the fullness of Truth....  

Let's go with path #2, because it addresses Gemini's next suggestion, which is to

Explore the concept of meaning in a universe where the future is open: Does the lack of a predetermined outcome enhance or diminish the potential for meaning? 

To be sure, the future is open and the outcome undetermined. In fact, in our restless engagement with the limitless horizon of being, any finite, limited, determinate truth only causes us to "rebound beyond it and search for more": the intellect is such that it "can never be completely satisfied or fulfilled by any finite being or good." Rather, 

I must always implicitly refer each one to a wider, richer horizon beyond, to which I then spontaneously tend. It follows that only an unqualified infinity, or unlimited fullness of being and goodness could ever satisfy this innate drive.... my very nature as a human person is to be an ineradicable implicit drive toward the Infinite (Clarke).

Now, as to Gemini's question about the possibility of meaning in an open universe, there is no possibility if the dynamism of the intellect isn't ordered to the Infinite, as outlined in the paragraph above. But it seems that the meaning is located in the search and not in the finding, since we could never actually arrive at Infinitude, only engage with it. 

Now,"could an endless supply finites be enough to satisfy" our drive for the Infinite? 

No. Once we knew this was all there ever could be or would be, we might be forced to put up with it in lieu of anything better, but there would still remain a deep unfilled void within us, a radical emptiness that nothing could ever fill.   

In other words, Infinitude or nothing. Literally. But it's a choice, since we are of course free: "Either there exists a positive Infinite Fullness of being..., which is somehow possible to be attained by me," in which case -- good news -- "my human nature becomes luminously and completely meaningful, intelligible, [and] sense-making."

Or in fact, there exists no such real Infinite at all. And then my nature conceals in its depth a radical defect of meaningfulness, of coherence, an unfillable void of unintelligibility, a kind of tragic emptiness; a natural desire that defines my nature as a dynamic unity, but is in principle unfulfillable, incurably frustrated, a "useless passion"..., oriented by its very nature toward a non-existent void, toward nothing real, kept going only by an ineradicable illusion.

When you put it that way.

Thus, either God exists or I am absurd: that is the basic option that confronts me, if I am willing to go to the depth of the human condition.

However, I have a question: this primordial choice assumes the freedom to make it, and where does the freedom come from? Clarke suggests that 

there is a lived contradiction between affirming theoretically that the universe or myself is unintelligible and continuing to live and use my mind as though it were intelligible.... Thus it is finally up to each one of us either to accept his or her infinite-oriented nature as meaningful and revelatory of the real or as an opaque, illusory surd.

But what good reason can one have for choosing darkness over light, illusion over meaning, for not choosing the light? Only if the darkness is more intelligible? But this does not make sense! Why not then accept my nature as meaningful gift, pointing the way to what is, rather than to what is not? 

Genesis 3, maybe? That text relates the story of choosing darkness over light and illusion over meaning, but even more deeply, it is rejecting our first truth that to be is to be in relation, in particular, in relation to a God who is himself relational, both internally and externally, by way of creation. 

How do you like them apples, Gemini?

Overall, the text presents a sophisticated theological and philosophical argument for the fundamental nature of relationality, rooted in the being of God. It moves from questioning the first truth to exploring the implications of God's self-revelation as "I am," ultimately arguing that our relational nature and our innate drive for the Infinite point towards a personal and relational God, in whose image we are made.

And what does the post look like to you?

Absolute Relative and Necessarily Contingent

Yesterday Gemini suggested some fruitful avenues to further explore the nature of time, so let's address them one by one:

Further investigate the idea of God as the "ground of consciousness": If time is dependent on consciousness, what does this imply about God's relationship to time? Is God within time, outside of time, or does God's consciousness encompass time in a unique way? 

It seems to me that time must be analogous to space, and indeed, for modern physics there is only spacetime, so it makes sense to look for similarities. Physics highlights the holistic and interdependent nature of the quantum world, such that there is ultimately nothing that isn't connected to everything else in a vast energy field. 

In the past I have argued that if this weren't the case, then organisms could never appear. In other words, if holism isn't built into the universe, an externally related universe can't just one day become holistic in the form of evolving organisms. In fact, an externally related universe wouldn't even be a universe, for there would no interior unity. Rather, it would be just an aggregate, a pile of unrelated stuff.  

Unrelated. Instead, our universe is internally related to itself, and this goes for time as well as space. Now we have a way to understand how the past can be related to the present and the present to the future, because time too is holistic -- let us call it temporo-holism. Absent this holism, then each moment would be unrelated to any other moment, like a discontinuous series dimensionless points instead of a flowing continuum. Time

cannot be composed of of a series of dimensionless points in space or timeless moments in time, but has a continuous seamless flow in space and time that is actually undivided, with no really distinct points of either space or time... (Clarke)

I might add that relation itself suggests -- demands? -- a mental component, because how can two unconscious things be related? Even if they are proximate, this doesn't mean they have a "relationship," because this requires interiority. I am related to my desk, but my desk isn't related to me.

Back to why the cosmos is temporo-holistic. Since this is a vertical universe, I suspect that the holism starts at the top. Again, it could never start at the bottom unless it were already there. So this would be the ground of consciousness mentioned by Gemini above. This ground is, of course, triune and holistic, so there's your principle of spacetime. It's not that God is an image of our holographic spacetime, rather, vice versa.

Gemini next suggests that we

Revisit Lequier's dynamic omniscience in light of the proposed definition of time: How does a view of a God who knows possibilities rather than fixed actualities align with a conception of time as a "creative synthesis" in consciousness? 

When last we visited Lequier, he was marveling at how God "has created me creator of myself," and how man is the being "who can do something without God!" "What a terrifying marvel: a man deliberates and God awaits his decision." 

He also highlights the centrality of a RELATION that goes both ways; in fact, I would say it goes ALL ways, i.e. up and down (hierarchically), inside to inside (intersubjectively), and inside-out (horizontally). Again, everything is related to everything else, hence the intelligibility of the cosmos. Ultimately, being and intelligibility are convertible, and this can only be the case if there is an Intellect at the top. Thus, to repeat,

The relation of God to the creature is as real as the relation of the creature to God.... The act of the man makes a spot in the absolute which destroys the absolute. God, who sees things change, changes also in beholding them, or else he does not perceive that they change (Lequier).

That's a bold statement, but it is a necessary entailment of real relations, relations that are, of course, built into an irreducibly relational Trinity. This being the case, then  

it is necessary to recognize that either God in his relationship to the world contracts a new mode of existence which participates in the nature of the world, or else this world is before God as though it did not exist.... God, who sees things change, changes also in beholding them.

In short, to know is to change, otherwise it's not knowledge. If God is radically one, then there is no knowledge in him, nor love, both of which require an Other. But again, this Other must be related, because there could be no knowledge between radically unrelated beings. 

Thus, Lequier expresses further (?!) at our strange situation:

Suddenly, O surprise, O excess of wonder, I have been witness of a change in the bosom of the absolute permanence.... 

Compared to God this universe may be but a grain of sand, but it "has its form of existence, and the changes which go on in it being as real as the things in which they occur, God, who sees these things change, changes in beholding them." 

Lequier asks if a man can resist the will of God, and responds that "the evil will of the wicked is not intended by the will of God; similarly a volition which I am free to effect or not to effect is not known in advance by God." 

Nevertheless, Lequier is aware of the shock value of what he's suggesting: "What language! God then is ignorant of something." But

Listen. You are free to do something. God does not know that you will do it, since you are able not to do it, and God does not know that you will not do it, since you can do it. God knows only that you are free, and just as in making man free he has freely restrained the exercise of his power in the government of the world, just so he has restrained his knowledge in relation to our acts.

This guy -- who is my kind of guy -- seems to have been the first openly open theist. Perhaps not surprisingly, he suffered, according to Hartshorne, "an early mysterious death by drowning (called a suicide which was not a suicide)." I don't know how he knows that, but in any event, Lequier was among the first who

had dared to face without evasion the implications of the conception of a deity [who] freely and knowingly created beings themselves also free. Relations of God to the world, he insists, cannot be less real than the world itself; and just to that extent must God be relative, not absolute (Harshorne).

Or, to be precise, the Absolute Relative, since he is relative to everything, beginning with Himselves! 

moreover, if the creatures are self-determining to any extent, then God is relativized... by the creatures through their own decisions.

As God is the Absolute Relative, he is also, so to speak, the Necessarily Contingent, otherwise what is the point of the Trinity? Are its relations like that of a machine, or is freedom built into it? 

Hartshorne speaks of "the absurdity of supposing all reality to result from a purely necessary being and yet asserting the nonnecessity of the world." "That there must be something nonnecessary in God is itself necessary," otherwise his creativity is not creative. 

Even God cannot make a square circle, and for the same reason he cannot create uncreatively. "It is necessary that accidents happen [in God], though not necessary just which accidents." Again, Necessary Contingency follows from Absolute Relative.

This is ultimately another name for freedom, which is by definition indeterminate. And for Berdyaev, "freedom as such is uncreated, a primordial principle of reality inherent in deity as such and in all concrete actualities" (Hartshorne).

Divine power is an ability to deal with free beings, not an ability to suppress or avoid their existence or to manipulate them so thoroughly that they would not be free (ibid.).

 Gemini nexts suggests that we

Explore the implications for divine action in the world: If the future is not fixed, how does God interact with creation? Does this allow for genuine divine intervention without violating freedom? 

But I think we just did that: God constantly interacts with creation, in particular, by way of final causation. He is the ultimate cause of everything, but not just in the sense of material and efficient, but formal and final causation. Truly, he is the Divine Attractor at the end of history, and why there is time at all -- again, an internally related time in which the present is really related to an unfolding future that will eventually return to God, but not in a mechanistic, predetermined way.

You feel me so far, Gemini?

The text presents a coherent and thought-provoking argument for a relational understanding of God and time. It draws insightful connections between physics, metaphysics, and theology, utilizing the ideas of various thinkers to build its case. The concept of temporo-holism is central, providing a framework for understanding the interconnectedness of time and how God, as the ground of consciousness and ultimate cause, interacts with a free and unfolding creation. 

The author clearly resonates with Lequier's "open theist" perspective, emphasizing God's dynamic engagement with a world where genuine freedom and change are real. The exploration of these complex ideas is articulate and engaging, inviting further reflection on the fundamental nature of time, consciousness, and the divine.

And a picture?

Time, Change, and Consciousness

We left off with some observations by philosopher Jules Lequier --

Never heard of her.  

Me neither, but the short wiki page says that he "wrote in favor of dynamic divine omniscience, wherein God's knowledge of the future is one of possibilities rather than actualities. Omniscience, under this view, is the knowledge of necessary facts as necessary, and contingent facts as contingent." 

Since the future does not yet exist as anything more than a realm of abstract possibilities, it is no impugning of divine omniscience to claim that God does not know the future as a fixed and unalterable state of affairs: that he does not know what is not there to be known. 

Lequier's approach guarantees both divine and human freedom, and suggests a partial resolution of the apparent inconsistency of human-wrought evil and the perfect goodness, power and knowledge of God.

So, my kind of guy. We are situated in the identical attractor, especially with regard to God's knowledge of contingency (which renders his knowledge contingent) and the preservation of both divine and human freedom. Basically, I'll take a God who is free and good at the price of a little immutability and omniscience.

But we're trying to get to the bottom of time, and what does this have to do with that? Well, time "either is, or is somehow inseparably connected with, change or succession of events which occur before and after each other" (Clarke). 

But to say that God, the very principle of existence, is entirely outside time -- and therefore change -- only makes time all the more mysterious, not to mention superfluous, for if God knows everything ahead of time -- if past, present, and future are terrestrial illusions that are in reality already complete -- then WHAT'S THE BLOODY POINT OF THE DRAMA OF HISTORY?

Seriously. Such a philosophy of God renders his own creation every bit as absurd as any form of atheist existentialism, because both are robbed of even the possibility of meaning. At best we can have illusory meaning when in reality everything was bound to happen. 

Clarke begins by asking, "what mode of being is time?" Is it real, or a side effect of something else? Is it a stubborn illusion, as believed by Einstein? Is it but an a priori form of our sensibility, as maintained by Kant?

There is indeed something a priori about the nature of time, in that humans are easily able to intelligibly talk about it, and yet, without knowing what it actually is -- similar, I suppose, to how we can speak of other primitive categories such as experience, consciousness, and energy, without knowing what they are either. All humans spontaneously divide time into "past, present, and future," without stopping to think about what these actually are or how they are possible. 

Time is clearly identified with change, but is it change per se? Clarke responds in the negative, suggesting that "Something more is needed: the unifying intervention of consciousness." 

First of all, Clarke denies that time can be something that exists "in its own right, prior to change," as believed by Newton. In that view, time is "prior to all material things, flowing always at the same regular rate." Rather, "One first needs some real succession before time can appear at all," so it is "a derivative property built on the foundation of real changes."

But is change alone enough to generate time? It seems not, because there must be a consciousness "which alone can gather together the successive phases of a real change into a single present unity and compare them as before and after each other." 

In other words, there must be a mode of consciousness "which can make past, present, and future present to each other in the order of mental being," i.e., "make present in the field of consciousness things that are not together in their real being." Therefore, 

time, formally as such, is the unification in some consciousness of the successive phases of a real process of change, recognized as before and after (or successive to) each other.

Thus, time is "a creative synthesis of real and mental being." For example, what is an hour -- or year, or season, or epoch -- of time without a consciousness to bind its parts and hold them together? The parts are real -- the past really happened -- but their relation to present and future is a "creative synthesis" that can only occur in consciousness. Is God the ground of consciousness that ultimately holds it all together? 

Hmm. Gemini, I reckon you can you help us out here and suggest some avenues for where this is all headed? I'm holding tightly to the wheel of the engine, trying to avoid a train wreck.

This is a fascinating and dense piece of philosophical exploration! Let's break down its analysis and suggest fruitful avenues for its progression.

The text begins by introducing the philosophy of Jules Lequier, focusing on his concept of dynamic divine omniscience. Key takeaways from this initial section are:

• God's knowledge of the future is potential, not actual: This is the central tenet of Lequier's view, allowing for genuine contingency and freedom.
• This view attempts to reconcile divine attributes with human freedom and the problem of evil: By not knowing the future as fixed, God's goodness and power are not directly implicated in predetermined evil.
• The author aligns with Lequier's perspective: They prefer a God who is free and good, even if it means a less absolute version of immutability and omniscience.

The text then pivots to the central question: the nature of time and its relation to God. The author establishes this connection by quoting Norris Clarke, who links time to change and succession. The core arguments and questions raised in this section are:

• The problem of a timeless God and the meaning of history: If God exists outside of time and knows everything preordained, the "drama of history" seems pointless and creation becomes potentially absurd.
• Different philosophical perspectives on time are introduced:
  • Newton: Time exists independently of change, flowing uniformly.
  • Einstein: Time is a stubborn illusion.
  • Kant: Time is an a priori form of our sensibility.
• The author notes the intuitive understanding of time despite a lack of definitive knowledge: We readily use concepts like "past, present, and future" without fully grasping their essence, similar to other primitive categories.
• Clarke's argument against time being merely change: He posits that consciousness is necessary to unify successive changes into a coherent temporal experience.
• Clarke's rejection of Newtonian absolute time: Time is seen as derivative of real changes, not prior to them.
• The crucial role of consciousness in synthesizing time: Consciousness "gathers together the successive phases of a real change into a single present unity and compare them as before and after each other." It makes the past and future "present" in a mental sense.
• The proposed definition of time: "time, formally as such, is the unification in some consciousness of the successive phases of a real process of change, recognized as before and after (or successive to) each other."
• The concluding question about God as the ultimate ground of consciousness: This suggests a potential link between the nature of time and the divine.

Fruitful Avenues for Where the Text is Headed:

Based on the current trajectory, here are some promising directions the author could explore: 

Further investigate the idea of God as the "ground of consciousness": If time is dependent on consciousness, what does this imply about God's relationship to time? Is God within time, outside of time, or does God's consciousness encompass time in a unique way? 

Revisit Lequier's dynamic omniscience in light of the proposed definition of time: How does a view of a God who knows possibilities rather than fixed actualities align with a conception of time as a "creative synthesis" in consciousness? 

Explore the implications for divine action in the world: If the future is not fixed, how does God interact with creation? Does this allow for genuine divine intervention without violating freedom? 

Consider the problem of divine temporality: If God is conscious and consciousness is linked to time (as per Clarke's argument), does this necessitate some form of divine temporality, even if different from human experience? 

Addressing the "Bloody Point of the Drama of History": 

Reconcile the idea of a knowing God with the apparent contingency and meaning of human history: If God's knowledge is of possibilities, how does this preserve the significance of our choices and actions? 

Explore the concept of meaning in a universe where the future is open: Does the lack of a predetermined outcome enhance or diminish the potential for meaning? 

Examining the Primitive Categories: 

Further explore the analogy between time and other primitive categories like experience, consciousness, and energy: What does it mean for something to be a "primitive category"? Are these categories fundamentally irreducible? How do they relate to each other?

By pursuing these avenues, the author can delve deeper into the complex relationship between time, consciousness, and the divine, potentially offering a nuanced and insightful perspective on these fundamental philosophical questions. The initial exploration of Lequier's ideas provides a strong foundation for this broader investigation.

Duly noted. Let's pursue all these avenues. Tomorrow. 

Getting to the Bottom of Time

One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time. --Dávila 

They say that for God all time is but a moment, and that a moment contains all time. Or something like that.

For us, the moment is the only place where freedom, potential, and creativity can exist. 

Obviously the past is not subject to freedom or creativity, since it is fully determined. Nor can we say that the past absolutely determines the present, because this would imply that the present likewise absolutely determines the future, which therefore extinguishes the differences between past, present, and future.

Only the present moment contains potentialities and possibilities, but how is it possible that there are possibilities? How do they enter the chain of cause and effect, essentially bringing a range of possibilities out of causes, instead of the causes bringing about one particular effect? 

Uncle Screwtape says -- and he's not wrong -- that "The Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present only -- and all of it -- humans have experience."

Thus, the present moment and experience as such are very much intertwined, for one can never experience the past or future, which only exist as memory and anticipation, respectively. Screwtape goes on to say that 

It is out of this present that they [human beings] must draw all that they know of you. In it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He [God] would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present -- either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

It seems that this is where the "disloyalty of time" enters the picture, because the demon wishes to interfere with our concern with eternity and the present, which is to say, "the point at which time touches eternity."

Einstein said there was no such thing as time, and that "For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

If that's true, then what are all the clocks for? QED.

This logic, of course, follows Michael Scott's famous proof of God: 

But when it comes to metaphysics, Einstein was no Einstein. Rather, he was partial to the block universe theory, whereby all of space and time exist as a single, unchanging four-dimensional block. In this view, the past, present, and future are equally real, and the passage of time we experience is just our perception as we move through this block. 

Sure, time is annoying and enigmatic, but you can't get rid of it that easily. If we move through the block, movement is change, and change is time. In other words, we change as a result of the movement (or vice versa), so there's some kind of time. 

Interestingly, Einstein made that obtuse comment in the context of trying to comfort someone over the loss of a loved one, who had merely "departed this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing." It signifies nothing because in the larger scheme of things we're all already dead. But why try to comfort someone if the Block has already determined everything?

This four-dimensional block has a fixed and unchanging structure. All events that ever have happened, are happening, or will happen are already "laid out" within this structure. Every particle and object has a worldline extending through this spacetime block, representing its entire history. These worldlines are fixed, meaning all events along them are also fixed.

You have a better idea?

Certainly not a worse one. Schuon has an idea, but it's a little cryptic:

Time is but a spiroidal movement around a motionless Center.

But I say the Trinity is a spiroidal movement around a motionless center, so is our time a spiral around that spiral, similar to how the earth spirals around the sun? Except the sun itself spirals around the center of the Milky Way, the Milky around Virgo Supercluster, and the Virgo Supercluster around the Laniakea Supercluster. It's spirals all the way down. And up!

Concrete time is the changing of phenomena; abstract time is the duration which this change renders measurable (Schuon).

I suppose there can be duration without change, which is another name for eternal boredom. But how can there be change without duration? 

As for subjective time..., it is divided into present, past and future: what we are, what we were and what we will be, and in addition, what our surroundings are, were and will be (ibid).

That's true, but what is objective time, and can it even exist without a subject? In other words, how can there be past, present, and future without an observer to bind them together? Otherwise they't just unrelated moments, similar to how Hume described it. But if the past is related to the present and future, what accounts for the relation? What -- or who -- holds them together?

I've heard of psychedelic experiences in which the glue that holds time together is dissolved and one suddenly finds oneself in a terrifying succession of unrelated instances. The same thing can happen in psychosis, in which each moment brings about a terrifying, dis-integrated novelty in which nothing makes sense.

These preluminary thoughtlets were provoked by chapter eleven of Norris Clarke's The One and the Many, called Being in Time. Reading it made me really want to get to the bottom of this whole time thing, once and for all. 

How can we live in time without having any idea what it is? I find this totally unacceptable, nor do I think God would want us to live in total ignorance of something so foundational to our existence. But what clues has he given us? In his revelation, has he revealed any particular insights into the nature of time?

They say that the Creator does not create in time, but that time is one of his creatures. I get it, but I suspect that even -- or especially -- God can't eliminate the mystery of time so easily, for I say God himself is "subject," so to speak, to his own primordial freedom and creativity. 

Our pal Berdaev thought so. In fact, in his Philosophers Speak of God, Hartshorne introduces some other thinkers who leaned this way, for example, Socinus (1539-1604):

If it were correct that God knows the the future as determinate, there could be nothing accidental or contingent.... Everything must then be necessary and determined from all eternity known by God. But then there is not human freedom. There is also no divine freedom, since from all eternity God could act only as he actually does act.

But God is free, and cannot not be free. If he weren't free he couldn't create, any more than we could create if we were totally determined. Nothing could ever really come into existence, since its existence has been determined from all eternity.  

Harthorne next discusses Lequier (1814-1862), who also recognized that "an eternal knowledge of all events would render these events themselves eternal, since they would be items in a whole which never becomes but eternally is." 

Lequier asked, "Can an eternal knowing have noneternal objects?" If the answer is Yes, then God is involved with time: "The customary explanation, 'God knows our future acts not in advance but eternally' .... only makes matters worse," for then "all notion of indeterminate potentiality for free determination is sheer illusion." Hartshorne suggests that Lequier is even  

the first man in history to see clearly and comprehensively what freedom means from the metaphysical standpoint.... that freedom is the philosophical principle.

He comes close to Berdyaev's later idea that "freedom is not created by God" and that "human freedom means genuine creation -- means, indeed, creation of something of the actuality of God himself." In other words, in man the Creator creates creators, for real! And who knows ahead of time what a genuine creator will create?

Lequier puts forth the orthoparadox that God "has created me creator of myself." 

The human person: a being who can do something without God! who can, if it pleases him, prefer himself to God, who can will something which God does not will, and refrain from willing what God wills, that is to say, a new God who can offend the other! What a terrifying marvel: a man deliberates and God awaits his decision.

More orthoparadox:

The relation of God to the creature is as real as the relation of the creature to God.... The act of the man makes a spot in the absolute which destroys the absolute. God, who sees things change, changes also in beholding them, or else he does not perceive that they change.

A change in God! It is an idea which disturbs, a phrase which one does not pronounce without terror. Nevertheless, it is necessary to recognize that either God in his relationship to the world contracts a new mode of existence which participates in the nature of the world, or else this world is before God as though it did not exist.... God, who sees things change, changes also in beholding them.

 I guess this post is a cliffhanger. To be continued...

Cosmos and Anthropos

Just what kind of being is man?

The kind of being who can wonder what kind of being he is?

That's a good start, but is there a definitive answer, or even the possibility of one? For it seems that we always end in irreconcilable dualities such as mind and matter, body and soul, individual and social, animal and reason, etc. 

We are are at once natural and supernatural, in that there's a radical discontinuity between us and the rest of nature. Other animals don't know about nature, but we transcend it in such a way that we can explicate its various orders, from physics to chemistry to biology, to astronomy and cosmology. 

Other animals inhabit a niche, but man alone invents his own niches. We alone adapt to the world while making it adapt to us. 

Also, other animals are static. One they reach their mature state there is no further development, but man is a dynamically open system who never stops learning and reaching beyond himself into new vistas. 

But as we've been saying, a dynamism with no telos is rendered unintelligible, essentially reducing us to an animal that has no essence but is forever seeking it. This confers a frustrating dreamlike structure on life, as if we're trying to find our home but are blocked at every turn.

I understand existentialism: embrace the absurdity. But that's too easy. In Schuon's words, it

postulates a definition of the world that is impossible if existentialism itself is possible. We have to take our choice between two things: either objective knowledge, absolute therefore in its own order, is possible, proving thereby that existentialism is false; or else existentialism is true, but then its own promulgation is impossible, since in the existentialist universe there is no room for any intellection that is objective and stable.

In another essay he writes that  

all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap: it claims, for example, that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking account of the fact that this is an assertion which, as such, is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and illusion, or between truth and error.

We've been talking about how man's infinitude is an image of, and ordered to, the divine infinitude. In God, Absolute and Infinite constitute a primordial complementarity; if absoluteness goes to God's immutability, infinitude goes to creativity, possibility, and potency. And it seems to me that infinitude flows from and returns to God via intellect. According to Schuon, 

The intelligence of the animal is partial, that of man is total; and this totality is explained only by a transcendent reality to which the intelligence is proportioned....

Objectivity, whereby human is distinguished from animal intelligence, would lack sufficient reason without the capacity to conceive the absolute or infinite, or without the sense of perfection.

Thus,"with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite."

Now life takes on the structure of an "infinite return to God," so to speak, such that the seeking is already a finding. This is the proper cosmology in which to situate our anthropology. In other words, what we are first depends on what kind of cosmos this is, and it turns out to be a circular one in which man is the creature that can return to his source. 

This requires both time and space: space in which to be other than God, and time to journey back to him. I suspect this somehow mirrors the Trinity, which indeed has some kind of analogous space between the Persons, not to mention the timeless time it takes to engender the Son and for the Spirit to proceed. The dynamism of eternity.

It seems that in the Trinity itself the Father is ceaselessly proceeding from and returning to himself via the Son and Spirit. But the process is also free and not determined, for the Trinity is not some kind of machine.

The last paragraph of Gunton's The Promise of Trinitarian Theology sums it up:

All true human giving and receiving of love, all the arts and crafts and industry that effect a liberating human dominion over the creation, in a word all truly human action in relation to other people and the world, are finite echoes, achieved through the Father's gift of himself in the Son and the Spirit, of the giving and receiving that Father, Son and Spirit are in eternity.

Sum it up for us, Gemini:

In summary, the text argues that:

--Defining humanity is complex and fraught with dualities.

--Humans possess a unique capacity to transcend nature and engage in abstract thought.

--A purely secular view of humanity as a dynamically open system without a telos leads to a sense of meaninglessness.

--Existentialism's embrace of absurdity is self-contradictory.

--A theological understanding, grounded in the concept of a divine infinitude and a circular cosmos, provides a more coherent framework for understanding human nature.

--Human intellect and objectivity are linked to our capacity to conceive the absolute and infinite.

--Our lives can be understood as a journey of return to God, mirrored in the dynamic relationships within the Trinity.

--Meaningful human actions are reflections of the divine life.