I’m still not following your response. I quoted pseudo-Dionysius wondering if that was something you would identify with in your thinking. It’s not my view.
When I said that not even God can create an infinite quantity of things, your response is that I won’t internalize (accept or believe?) the fact of eternity.
I think eternity of nature would mean that the objective change never finds it’s beginning in the one who is uncaused.
Or maybe objectivity is still an illusion of the self?
At some point in the infinite regress the observer has to ponder whether it’s really progressing, which is a real possibility.
In the uncertainty of a world turned upside down, the one thing I found is the way God comes to meet you. It wasn’t philosophy which I thought would allow me to know God apart from Jesus. It wasn’t coincidences that only reinforced the thought that other people were not real. It was when I wept deeply and only wished to touch the feet of Jesus and then I would know I was not alone.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
103
My apologies for being unfollowable. You overestimate me. I’m a very simple minded ignorant man. dim but dogged. I thought pseudo-Dionysius was speaking - beautifully - for you. He does for me in part. I am not at all in agreement with the scripture writers except qualitatively, in so far as they are yearning up. I don’t necessarily disagree with them either, I seek to understand them in their context, their enculturation, shorn of the delusions of inerrancy and infallibility. So Jonah becomes nothing but astounding sublime humanism. Isaiah a radical pre-Christian socialist. The giant on whose shoulders Jesus stood in many ways. And on and on, despite evil innocently attributed to God on in to the NT (the most awesome being God come a callin’ to Abraham under the Terebinth Trees of Mamre - we have one in our botanical garden): they could only transcend their culture so much. Including and especially Jesus.
My limited beholder’s share reading pseudo-Dionysius in ignorance out of context agrees with ‘the real truth of these matters is in fact far beyond us’ being at least an analogy for the eternal first cause of existence. He appears to allude to apophatic ontic theology, yes I resonate with that. I forlornly aspire to be in union with God in His absent presence.
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a God who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d come and stay…
So
I think eternity of nature would mean that the objective change never finds it’s beginning in the one who is uncaused.
Agreed.
Or maybe objectivity is still an illusion of the self?
In the physical all points of view are relatively objective. The most objective having the shortest range. An analogy that is inverted in the psychological perhaps.
At some point in the infinite regress the observer has to ponder whether it’s really progressing, which is a real possibility.
A merely quantitative infinite regress is simple: do one thing, iterate. That becomes one thing. There can be no progress. The one thing is universes. Introducing the transcendent below and above that changes nothing. Admittedly it is vertiginous to look back forever from here, the end of time.
I’m looking forward in my maggot Pascalian way-ger to being dynamically deconstructed and reconstructed in the resurrection, before I take off and fly away forever ageless in the moment.
The thing with Dionysius, and some of us do it unintentionally, but others as the Scriptures warn, do so with determined purpose.
“I cannot attain it,” the Psalmist says plainly, while Dionysius says in response, “that if you would just stand outside of your finite nature you will discover it.”
The Scripture is unified in it’s teaching that salvation is a gift of God. He lowers himself to us, we don’t raise ourselves up.
You may do one thing like snap your fingers and the number of times you do that may proceed to infinity, even if you were to live forever, you could never snap your fingers an infinite number of times.
If you and I can act, then the action whether you or I cause it, is an event that objectively progresses and can even be random in it’s occurrence if we so intend, but it is not an eternal immanenation of the one if another is present.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
105
Scripture can warn and say what it likes, and false Dionysius knows no more than the cat.
I know how counting works. Hilbert’s Hotel chain and all that. It’s utterly irrelevant to the brute fact of past eternity.
I thought you meant progress in a qualitative way, but immanation, at the largest pulses of the flow - universes - and all within them, changes nothing qualitatively except for infinitesimal individuals like us.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
115
It can’t not. It’s the brute fact. But then again yeah, infinite have occurred, no number is involved. So you’re right! No number is involved. Infinite is.
Being able to conceive it’s unobservability, is right there along side being able to understand there are only three possible statements for explaining the universe.
It really is an initiation into metaphysics proper, and it’s also what allows you to see there cannot be an infinite number of things like planets in space or events in time.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
122
There’s no connection whatsoever. It’s just a matter of incredulity which I share. The brute fact of infinity in eternity remains.
Reality doesn’t work.
How does a mathematical physicist work out the forces on a table with four legs? Work out the forces on a table with no legs, then with infinite legs, interpolate.
Choose:
Nothing/Someone did nothing for forever and then it/they did the universe.