I jumped for joy because Jesus made me free. We humans use the language of metaphor like this not only to tell inspiring stories like this but also to attempt the reverse: we strive to enslave God. We use words, dogma, doctrine, interpretation of scripture or religious commentary, and even prayer to try to gain control of That Which Cannot Be Controlled. The following section of this chapter will show how language can describe God approximately, but can never enclose His Essence. Only meditation, silent, unarticulated peaceful attention, can even approach God and this we can do only roughly. But even so, we hope our crudely articulated representations of God get better and better with time, over millennia. We trust that God's Revelation to us makes this happen.
Except in our insistent, articulating lexical minds which are slaves to inevitable bad logic, God is unlimited. God is, was and ever will be unbound, whether we like it or not. God does need to be liberated, however. He needs to be emotionally freed from the shackles we place on Him in our own minds and speech. He needs to be freed from the boundaries we place on Him in our irresponsible use of various kinds of languages. He needs to be freed from the wordy prison in which we put Him in order to make Him do as we please. We say He must be our servant or we will never let Him out of our logical dungeon. Sometimes, Christians even try to directly command God by saying “I bind Thee” in public prayer. If this all wasn’t so funny and foolish, it would be blasphemy.
God can be freed by acknowledging that nothing we can say about Him is perfectly certain or one hundred percent complete. The lexical and other linguistic boundaries we try to put on God do not exist. Due to their intrinsic indescribability their very non-existence poses questions and consequent answers that are contradicted only in the Residuum.
There is a sort of Heisenberg uncertainty about articulated statements pertaining to God (and about everything else, actually). Language and even the ideas they represent and the very mind itself generally act in a quantum physical way. If you want to know where a small particle is, you cannot know much about its motion. If you know its inertia, its tendency to move, you can never deduce where exactly it is. There is an uncertainty principle for language. The sum of all our uncertainties is enclosed by the Residuum.
Words and ideas, even images, can not only superpose, interfere and reinforce, they follow a law of irreducible uncertainty that is defined only by how much effort we are willing to put into refining them. There is a point where more effort and more description and more information become counterproductive to improved understanding. One more word, one more noticeable brush stroke, one more sigh raises more questions than it settles. God is freed when we open the door to His cage into the Residuum of the inexpressible and unexpressed plausible unknown.
The best way to open the door is to shut up. Dogma, ritual, doctrine and all artistic representations of truth are all fundamentally limited and uncertain. The time comes when it is appropriate only to be quiet. Conflict and violence over words reduces this time, expands the Residuum of Plausible Deniability. Silence in the presence of God is required or He will not be present. Still and peaceful apprehension must be employed to find Truth. Thus, we can free God and find God Unbound in the Residuum.
By now you may have noticed that the Residuum must constitute a sort of Christian Tao, a compendium of profound unanswered and unanswerable questions having a spiritual or existential component. The Residuum reverberates to quantum statements of Joseph Campbell’s take on Teilhard de Chardin.
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QUANTUM CAMPBELLIAN TEILHARD
ReplyDeleteThe Ultimate Goal of All Human Truth and Knowledge is to know God as well as to free Him.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of the illustrious emeritus Episcopal Bishop (Generalissimo) John S Spong and his mighty rebel army of Believers in Exile. The Primeval Empire strikes back and the Force is with all of us.
Quantum science proves utterly that it is valid to superpose or mix mathematical equations that describe matter in opposing states or in quite different states. Our best, most thoroughly verified physical law thereby gives an explicit mandate for us to add together or mix logical expressions of ideas, even ones that appear contradictory. This we do in order to synthesize better indicators that more perfectly describe reality. Quantum science shows that this philosophical "syncretism" is an inherently valid exercise.
Furthermore, Joseph Campbell reveals that High Myth incarnates the most profound human truth. Dictionary definition, "denotation", is incidental, the connotation of Myth is what is important. Between the lines, the metaphor is the message.
So, quantum Campbell implies that it is not merely desirable but necessary to combine metaphors. We must superpose them appropriately the way quantum science sums algebraic expressions, thus mixing solutions to the Schroedinger differential equation.
My analysis of the metaphorical basis of all types of human language or communication shows that this is the only way to satisfy the need for accurate (but still approximate) descriptions of deepest human truths.
Also, I and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin aver that Revelation is ongoing so that, among other sources, science is adding to the store of human knowledge of both the secular and the divine. Scientists and all other seekers after truth share the noble goal of lifting human understanding to higher and higher levels. The motto of science is "Excelsior!"
Thus, as time progresses, not merely the human organism but also the human wealth of intellect, the expressed and expressible mind, evolves by a process of natural selection toward more perfect understanding of all things, particularly of God.
Quantum Campbellian Teilhard declares that "God" is a word we use that cannot be else but metaphor and to achieve an understanding of God that is closer to ultimate Truth we must evolve our idea by insouciantly compounding metaphors. We must allow definitions of divinity that cover the known spectrum from theistic Father God to deistic Allah to quintessential Ground of All Being.
The science of document interpretation, especially of scripture, is called hermeneutics. Application of quantum principle to scripture at once simplifies this science and complicates it. It offers more degrees of freedom to the directions of possible interpretation but demands that equal attention be paid to several, possibly contrary, simultaneous initial premises. There are often few ways that this can be done consistently with Spirit, that is, with the Spirit of Scripture.
But what is unknown is just as important. To take this into account in a formal sense, I postulate the Residuum of Plausibility. This Residuum is the repository of all doubt about what is claimed or denied. Most pertinently, it is the sum of all nascent countercontrary statements about the existence of God that have not yet found expression.
This Tao or Infinite Ocean of Residual Truth is the vacuum into which is expanding the Big Bang of human knowledge and understanding of all things, including of our metaphor for God. It is the ecological niche that supplies the reason for existence and the motive power for the evolution, indeed the perfection, of human knowledge.
The Residuum binds together apparently disparate equations in the logic of language. For the scientist, one may say the Residuum undergoes a phase change when it "evolves" human knowledge. It allows older essential metaphor to coexist with eloquent new poetry in their joint portrayal of truth that would be inexpressible by any other means.
God exists because quantum science allows all our expressible ideas of Him to be true simultaneously, even statements of His nonexistence. All things are true in Him. Language is infinitely malleable yet bounded. Once ideas of God are expressed in truth, they can be truthfully denied. But the quantum equation of divine state collapses to any definition we require whenever we conduct an real or thought experiment.
Without matter to get in the way, this experiment always takes the form of some type of decision. One way or another, we decide about God. For instance, we can decide that He exists. Then, for us and for all others, as far as we are concerned, He does.
Those who decide in the opposite way focus only on the inevitable imperfection of the multiple metaphorical expressions we use to define Him "between the lines". For them and for all others, in their view, He really does not exist. This is a good definition of Hell.
The damned condemn themselves.
Hell is a place, this place. As the designated righteous custodians of our own destiny, we are responsible Christian existentialists. We are commissioned by God to know or to deny Him. If we decide to know Him, we transform this place into Paradise. Our Paradise is not lost because we do not wander aimlessly in the jungle of language or crawl in the desert dust of our dismal dreams. With thanks and praise we shatter the shackles of word, sentence and paragraph which articulate the bonds that our minds try to tighten around God.
As Christian Believers at Court who know that we are one with our King, wary of the metaphor inherent in all language and at the same time celebrating it, we love and honor our Great God Unbound.
I have other blogs including NEOCHRISTIANITY, NEOCOSMOS (or NEOCOSMOLOGY) and LONETREE PICTURES
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