God has made worlds of worlds, and infinite infinities. He Himself is the Absolute, Personal Infinity, Aleph Nought.
By: Jay
One of the most difficult things for people to readjust to is the counter-intuitive (or seemingly counter-intuitive) worldview in modified Platonism that I often refer to. This reorientation shifts one’s entire perspective on the outer, external world, rendering it again a sacred space, infused with the Divine, as opposed to a brute, “material” realm dominated by chaos, entropy and death. It is understandable why people prefer this grand narrative (and a depressing narrative it is), despite the protestations of those who opt for this paradigm that we in the other camp are “weak” for choosing older “fictions” like souls, angels and God. To be sure, the materialists and servants of delusion of brute “matter” have their own deity – the impersonal “forces of nature,” but we’ll set that aside for the moment.
It is crucial that the psyche undergo this repentance, metanoia in Greek, and reorienting, as the attitude mentioned is that of fallen man, viewing his world as one devoid of the supernatural under the guise of “science.” While the scientific method is certainly a useful tool (I read scientific material frequently), the lack of philosophical education on the part of that community is appalling. It is precisely the hubristic impetus of fallen man that impels the hardcore dogmatists of the brute, impersonal forces of nature cult to stamp out all such ideas – even the slightest inkling by any of their ilk, tending toward the idea the psyche or mind may not be reduced to chemical reactions, must be swiftly punished.
This is why the discoveries and theses proposed in quantum physics are so disturbing to advocates of scientism, despite their good faith in future science to resolve all questions with strict rationalism. Never mind the fact that “reason” itself is nonsensical in the deterministic paradigm of Darwinian naturalism, the crusaders of modern empiricism are committed adherents of the Holy Inquisition of Scientism, and no manner of logical argumentation can persuade them otherwise. Those aware of an alternate version of human history, the Biblical narrative, in which man is a fallen creature in rebellion against his Creator, have a perfectly rational (indeed, the only rational) explanation of these events – and can even explain why man himself prefers his own self-imposed servitude, to quote Kant, rather than submission to the doctrine of Creation.
Creation is crucial because of the implications for the entirety of how man views and operates in the world. Our worldview will determine the way we act, showing the old adage of lex orandi, lex credendi to be correct. If the universe is a created reality, then the implications for how things like electrons, matter and other natural processes work will have vastly different meanings. For example, if there is no Creation, and the universe is either eternal or illusory, the way we operate will be dictated accordingly. We can look to history to show us cultures where such a fundamental presupposition dominated, such as Hindu India or ancient China. In these cultures, the dominance of the Absolute as an impersonal reality, with a multitude of lesser deities to be supplicated created a vast array of self-destructive practices amongst those populations. Starvation in India, while cattle roamed free as divine, and a “divine” emperor in China, where individual subjects had no personal identity. These are merely examples of basic philosophical presuppositions that undergirded a culture and resulted in a praxis consistent therewith.
The Eagle Nebula.
Precisely because these cultures were suffused with the notion that time and the universe was eternal, it became a trap from which the wheel of time and “materiality” had to be escaped, through meditation, radical asceticism, or some other form of mystical gnosis. If, on the other hand, “material” reality was a created reality, and not a self-subsisting eternal principle of its own, and the fundamental framework of the “stuff” of reality was designed and began at a point in time, the implications would be vastly different. The creation account of Genesis, for example, presents a very different narrative of history and beginnings than these other accounts. Although it has been fashionable for the last few hundred years to dismiss the Genesis narrative as a fictional mythology of numerous blended Ancient Near Eastern cosmologies, the fact is, the Creation account of Genesis presents a vastly different theology than any other religious account, aside from even the Egyptian account, which comes close.
This difference cannot be overstated: The biblical account posits that time and “matter” are not evils, traps or the source of any fundamentally oppositional principle, but are rather goods – inherently good, due to being created in time by a good God. God, being good, does not “create” evil, as if it had any substantial or ontological being. All being, in the metaphysical sense, in this sense, is created being, and created with the potential to receive the higher divine energies or powers of God. In other words, creation was such that it was placed in a state in which it might be raised to even higher goods, but this does not mean creation was therefore “bad,” because its initial state was a lesser good. There is no opposition or dialectic between the good being many, as later western philosophy, and in particular Platonism would posit. This opposition of the good necessarily being absolutely One (the simple monad), was a Platonic idea that would have its precedent in ancient far eastern thought.
Read the rest of this article at - http://jaysanalysis.com/2015/03/05/the-philosophy-of-creation-darwinian-evolution-and-the-absolute/
