Refinement Not Realignment

There are repeated references in Genesis to God calling elements of Creation "good" during the Six Days.  One wonders what "good" might mean, or the meaning of God making the pronouncement.  Surely God could not fail to make something perfect, if that was his desire.  Nor, conversely, could anything that was not God be perfect, in the ultimate sense.  By the standard of divinity, then, God could just as well call something that was not God "bad" as well as "good".  Surely this is beyond us.

What then can be the meaning of the pronouncement?  I suggest that, for an adherent of Jesus' teachings in the Gospels, the matter need not be too difficult.  In John (the Gospel with the most explicit relationship to Genesis), Peter is left with an admonition to do his duty.  Peter is left with the prospect of continual service to others, until he falls out of his ability to work his own will, and falls into the clutches of others.  He will be thus offered up, as it were, to the afterlife as a product of a forge or refinery in life.

This seems always to be the case in God's Creation.  The only apparent (and narratively logical) reason for God to call elements of Creation "good" is because they are to be viewed as emerging satisfactorily from the cauldron of their birth.  This also is the case in the Gospels, as properly viewed.  We are to be the products of refinement, not of sacramental realignment--whether that realignment be in the form of repeated sacraments or of one-time rebirth.

In an important sense, the question becomes one of choosing between refinement (as in John) or realignment (as in the Gospel addendum of Luke/Acts, with its narratively indefensible tarrying in Jerusalem.)

Creation is a Cauldron

The standard imagery usually attached to the first moments of biblical Creation seems to be mistaken.  I've usually encountered depictions of darkness or semi-darkness in which it is understood there are jagged rocks and heaving waves whipped by awesome winds.

This imagery, of course, relies on a vantage point somewhat above the waves.  This is a gross presumption, which puts our imagined observation in the place of the divine--the presence above the waves is no created atmosphere.  The space that a creature might visit above the waves is only constructed later, as the vault separates the waters of heaven from the waters of the earth--on the second day.

On the first day only the light is created, and all that light perfuses the rock and water arena that we are to take as a formless void.  The proper imagery is not a wild, dark seascape, but rather an all-encompassing realm of underwater volcanism.

The earth in the beginning of creation is a hellish lake of fire--an unimaginable cauldron.

Not So Much a Post

Not so much a post.

The Collectivity is the Image

All the way back in the Bible is the notion (or at least the germ of the notion) of the true divine as "multi-personed".  I know my merest description of this idea might be unartful, but as any student of the content and history of Christianity can relate, the whole idea of the Persons of God has been the source both of ingenious, esoteric debate, and of appalling conflict.

An element of irony, then, must attend my attempt--as un-ironic as any I might make--to describe in this post what I think needs to be taken as a basic premise of the relationship of humanity to God.  I think it is both a true premise and a premise of simplicity, but also a premise that might engender ingenious, esoteric debate.

Here it is: The human race that is "in the image of God" is properly so described as a collectivity--a relational, multi-personed collectivity--and not as individuals.  As terms properly used, "God" is the multi-personed source of the image, and "Man" is the multi-personed bearer of that image.  The persons of God relate to each other and are understood by us as effective agents in their inestimable joint capacities; the persons of humanity relate to each other and are understood by ourselves as effective agents in our limited joint capacities.

The Bible describes God as making humankind "male and female" before it describes the creation of Adam.  "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27, KJV).  Then the more particularized story of Adam and Eve has Adam created first.  As I have related in earlier posts, Adam is subsequently characterized by God as needing companionship (other, that is, than the companionship of God.)  It is--when compared to the prospect of eternal communion with God--rather a sad story.

And so the second part of the 1:27 verse is effectuated ("male and female created he them").  As with other parts of the Creation Story/Stories, fussing about over particular chronology is bound to be a frustrating endeavor.  It seems to come to this: Mankind is less than it ought to be, and mankind only reflects the image of God in aggregate.

God is an "existence" who "relates" (insofar as those terms can ever be thought to apply properly to the divine), and ultimately God is seen as existing or relating in the framework of the divine--in the interaction of multiple persons ("Let us make. . . .").  Indeed, the very idea of existence is relational; nothing can be said to exist other than in a context, and the evidence of existence by definition alters that context.

So it is with humanity.  The notion of the individually existing human being as "in the image of God" is--no matter how profuse the humility of the speaker--a gross impiety (if not offered as a provisional notion.)  The individually existing human being does not--within the grasp of human intellect--truly exist at all.  Such a being is an abstraction.  Paradoxically, the whole of humanity as being viewed properly as "in the image of God"--no matter how much we might want to call that collectivity an "abstraction"--is the only manifestation of humanity that we can honestly claim to observe and--to the extent of our abilities--to know.

What is Experienceable

At the end of the last post, I indicated that "I will try to show whether Jesus maintains that what he calls 'truth' can be known or not, and if so, how?  Of course, I am going to frame the matter in terms of the organic quality of 'roused, readied, reaped.'  I would like to see if 'organic' life can embrace 'live' questions."

There is first to be addressed the question of what, in a religious sense, can be made of the word "know."  Is "to know" more definitive than "to believe"?  I suggest that any difference between the two terms is crushed (or perhaps I should say "compacted") by my having thrown in the phrase "in a religious sense."  Religion is essentially experiential--or at least that seems to be the approach Jesus takes.

If religion is essentially experiential, then it can embrace both knowledge and belief.  I can know that the world is round, and I can believe in the veracity of the various methods of education to which I have been exposed, ratifying in numerous terms the "fact" that the world is round.  I live with the experience that the world is round, both in the repeated experiences of hearing that view shared, and in the conditioned responses I have to the surrounding land, sky, and weather that fall together into my engrained conception of the world as round.

None of this is shaken by my having learned that the earth is miles from being a perfect sphere, or by ingenious arguments of flat-earthers (though many such arguments might leave me speechless in an inability to respond.)  I "know" that the world is round, and I "believe" that the world is round, but all of that can be subsumed under the heading of my experiences.  The world that is round and spinning for eons in space (don't ask me how) is the world that I experience, and that conceptualized world is that in which my religion--such as it is--will have to occur.

That same kind of certainty of experience is what Jesus brings to his ministry.  We can argue forever about ostensible proofs of God's existence, but there does not seem to be any significant body of theological argument about the validity of Jesus' arguments for God's existence--Jesus just assumes God's existence.

Jesus assumes many things about his audience.  This may well prove very important when considering statements of his that are usually thought to be definitively theological--perhaps Jesus is just working with the available raw materials of the existing religious milieu.  This is especially important when Jesus flatly contradicts the existing religious milieu, including elements to which the churches even today remain wedded.  That is when the arguments of the theologians can be the most artful, and the most entertaining.

What is Unknowable

A few days ago I made one of my characteristic (tiresome) contributions to another blog:

Hilbert’s Hotel shows why some infinities are bigger than others in Mano Singham.

(https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2021/07/01/hilberts-hotel-shows-why-some-infinities-are-bigger-than-others/)

Chiefly I am concerned about two things: whether the thought experiment can be addressed meaningfully at all, and what we might indeed mean when we refer to the status (empty or filled) of the "hotel rooms" in question.

Briefly, the thought experiment involves a hotel with infinite rooms each occupied by a guest.  How to fit more guests into the hotel?  (I suspect the math logic of the experiment is more important than any concern we might have about an--admittedly rather tenuous--guest ejected at the other end, "infinity" being what it is, you know.  Also, the guests in general seem to be under pressure of time, presumably being expected to move instantaneously, possibly over infinite distances.)  As I wrote:

There is something about this “thought experiment” that I don’t understand. I’m not even sure about the simplest solution of the simplest case: the case in which one guest-candidate shows up, and the existing guests are all asked to move up one room number, emptying Room One (if I might call it that) for the new guest.

This is the only way in which I have been able to understand the “Room One” solution to the Infinite Hotel experiment. The hotel is described as having an infinite number of rooms, each with a guest in it. When all the guests are asked to move to a room of one higher number, it seems to me that nothing has necessarily changed in substance; it is still a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, each with a guest in it--and with an empty twenty-by-thirty-foot box at the near end.

And then:

Would the “one extra guest to be accommodated” scenario be satisfied by a person stating that the hotel company could simply construct a minimally-sufficient twenty-by-thirty-foot utility-connected box at the hotel’s near end?

I know “making another hotel room” is a rather silly solution, but then so is the notion that one could make an infinite number of people change hotel rooms to accommodate a single person. Moreover, the question at hand is not a matter of real-world practicability, but rather a matter of how the Infinite Hotel experiment could be addressed without arbitrarily changing its conditions. When the standard solution to the “One Extra Guest” scenario is used, Room One--as I stated above--has been changed into as empty a twenty-by-thirty-foot box as my hypothetical constructed one. Each of them functions as a hotel room only insofar as we decide to call them hotel rooms, and place the extra guest in them. Since Room One now has no occupant, yet a description of the condition of the hotel--absent the emptied room--is the same as before, are we not driven to conclude that following the rules of the experiment leads not to its analysis, but to its alteration? How can an ostensible solution to a thought experiment stand, when it is logically indistinguishable from an arbitrary alteration of the experiment’s conditions?

As I wrote at the start, chiefly I am concerned about two things: whether the thought experiment can be addressed meaningfully at all, and what we might indeed mean when we refer to the status (empty or filled) of the "hotel rooms" in question.  I believe that both of those questions are impacted by the sentence I left un-italicized in the paragraph just above, "Each of them [the constructed versus emptied spaces] functions as a hotel room only insofar as we decide to call them hotel rooms, and place the extra guest in them."

The constructed hotel room is silly, of course, but then so is the emptied one ("empty" being the inescapable implication of the "hotel" metaphor--one guest is taken out so that another might be put in.)  In the instant of emptiness--assuming we admit such a span of time--the conditions of the thought experiment have been changed.  We are no longer just dealing with an infinite hotel filled with infinite guests--and, to be sure, we still have such a hotel before us--we are also dealing with a fillable space we call a "hotel room" into which, we might imagine, we can now place our guest-candidate.  We have changed, by nothing other than our fiat, the conditions of the experiment.

Of course, we might maintain that the guests have simply been "switched," as though each could be pressed into the room as the other is pressed out (type and arrangement of doors might be an interesting problem) and as though the entire infinite series could be shifted simultaneously, but then the whole purpose of the thought experiment has been voided.  Then we would just be saying that we could add to the infinity of guests without exceeding the infinity of rooms, placing ourselves back in the state of wondering about infinities.

But why not wonder about infinities?  As  I wrote later:

Why not make the thought experiment about filling up an infinite number of infinite hotels? After all, we have decided that there is an infinity of guests, have we not? We have decided that the emptying and filling of hotel rooms can be done instantaneously and for arbitrary reasons. Just because we have to move someone out of one room in order to fill up another doesn’t mean that the first room can’t be immediately occupied by still another guest, a person’s whose absence elsewhere can be filled by yet another. Indeed, why not postulate an infinite number of infinite hotels packed to their limits by a single guest?

The problem, however, is that often we can do nothing about infinities other than wonder about them.  As soon as the element of "infinity" has been injected into a consideration (and good luck trying to keep other elements of infinity out) the notion of coming to definite conclusions about the matter is voided.  As I was getting at above, the problem is usually one of the conditions of the matter we are considering.

As I will get to in a later post, and as has been dealt with by better minds than mine, the entire notion of "proofs" of God's existence hinge on making the infinite satisfy conditions by which existence might be ascertained--a doomed enterprise.

It is unsurprising that delving into this thought experiment brings another to mind, that of Schrodinger's Cat.  (I'm sorry; I don't as yet know how to make umlauts.)  The cat has been described as both alive and dead.  I will put forth another notion, one having to do with the hotel rooms described above.  "Described" is the most salient word I can apply to those rooms, and I suppose that is why my original blog comment was peppered with references I made to the "described" status or character of the rooms and whether or not they were filled.  As I tried to say, the Infinite Hotel thought experiment is violated if any of the rooms are empty, and it is unaddressed if the rooms are all filled; violated on the one hand because the conditions of the experiment have been changed arbitrarily, and unaddressed on the other hand in that perpetual filling (even if by a contiguous string of guests forced in at infinite velocity) is only to say without warrant that the infinity of guests can be greater than the infinity of rooms (or is it the other way around?  Whichever.)

But what if the room in question is both filled and empty?  What if the guest, so to speak, is Schrodinger's cat?  Or perhaps it would be better to say, What if we keep--to the extent we might--the question alive in our minds?

I would like to keep the idea of "live" questions in mind as this blog tries to deal with the topic of truth.  In so doing I will likely be addressing thoughts like these expressed in a recent article, by David Rothkopf:

We Still Won’t Admit Why So Many People Believe the Big Lie

(https://www.thedailybeast.com/six-months-after-the-capitol-riots-we-still-wont-admit-why-so-many-people-believe-the-big-lie)

Many of these lies were created out of necessity. Life is finite. (OK, I’m sorry. It is. Take a deep breath if you need to and then continue reading.) If we don’t come up with a good story about what happens after it ends or why we are here we will all go mad. So we make up preposterous stories about magic people in the sky and then immediately say that we cannot question those stories, that "faith" in them is more important than knowledge of what is real. Why? Because they will not stand up to scrutiny.

When challenged, the defenders of these original big lies say the truth is unknowable. Good try. Hard to argue with that. We don’t know there is not an omniscient rule-maker beyond the clouds or a heaven filled with virgins to give pleasure to the faithful so how can you question it? But of course, selling what is unknowable as a truth is one of the most important categories of lies we encounter in life.

In the next post, I will try to show whether Jesus maintains that what he calls "truth" can be known or not, and if so, how?  Of course, I am going to frame the matter in terms of the organic quality of "roused, readied, reaped."  I would like to see if "organic" life can embrace "live" questions.

The Easiest Example

The 11th chapter of Matthew is an unyielding progression of Jesus' expectations of us.  It is a vigorous progression from the faith that we expect down to the faith that Jesus expects.

This progression is framed initially as Jesus' response to the query from John's disciples: "Go and shew John again those things. . . ."  Jesus' response ends with an admonition: "And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me" (Matthew 11:2-6, KJV).

This admonition is a fitting preface for the discourse that is to follow, because it sums up the substance of that discourse.  Jesus is going to tell his followers that his greatest of expectation of them is in the negative: they must get rid of the unnecessary in order to get at what matters.  We are not to be offended in that Jesus wants to be exactly what he intends to be to us, and we are largely to understand those intentions in the framework of out own shattered expectations.

True religion is not going to be what we expect it to be: "What went ye out into the wilderness to see?" (11:7).  Jesus tells us that John was a prophet, a messenger, a faint foreshadowing of the true believer, a remnant of religion typified by ambition and striving, and a fulfillment of the promise of Elijah's return--a return that Jesus describes in deflating terms, scarcely reflecting the anticipations of the book of Malachi.  As Jesus says,

"Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things.  But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed" (17:11-12).

Jesus disassembles John the Baptist, and then proceeds to disassemble religion.  All of the things that hold religion together in our preconceptions are to be torn away:

"But whereunto shall I liken this generation? It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows, And saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.  For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil.  The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber. . . ." (11:16-19).  Religion has always be burdened with--always untenable--notions that one's righteousness is seen in distinction to the un-righteousness of one's "fellows."

And religion has always been burdened with notions that (especially coupled with a false and convenient humility) getting right with God involves something more than a determination to get right with God.  Jesus tears into the idea that repentance has some sort of secondary or dependent relationship to true religion:

"Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes" (11:21).

Jesus continues prying away all the elements by which religion might be identified:

"I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes" (11:25).  The wordless lunging toward the meek and wholesome, so much a part of original and infantile iterations of "roused, readied, reaped," is what religion is all about.  We don't know why some people are inclined to do God's will, or inclined to encourage others to do God's will, or indeed why some people are induced to turn from unrighteous paths to the pursuing of God's will.  Never has religion, in any form, been able to answer those questions, and as far as the philosophy of religion is concerned, it is useless to try to figure the matter out:  Or as Jesus says,

". . .no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him" (11:27).  How, then, can anyone be saved?!  In our sin and despair, are we not left alone and in terror, deprived possibly of some salvation formula by which (according to the denominations) some satisfaction might be made for our lost souls?!

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light" (11:28-30).

Oh.