Unity and Diversity, and the Person Behind Them, or How Our Finiteness Begs Trust in God

I gave the following presentation for a Spring 2014 Ratio Christi meeting. There are a few imperfections in the argument. I note them here. (1) I seem to have conflated the idea of relation and unity. (2) The argument for the unity of the person behind our phenomena feels stretched. I feel confident in it's ability to be made perfect however. (3) The pacing is a little wonky. And some of the material seems superfluous.

Even with the imperfections, I still think it gets at an intuitive point. When I want to remember God, the idea I try to communicate here is my first recourse. Whatever it lacks in rigor, I hope you may show in the comments, either through challenge or through development of the idea.

The idea is not original. I thank James Anderson of the website "Analogical Thoughts" and F. H. Bradley of the 1800s for many of the ideas herein expressed.

Unity and Diversity, and the Person Behind Them, or How Our Finiteness Begs Trust in God 

"[We are] incapable of certain knowledge or absolute ignorance. We float on a vast ocean, ever uncertain and adrift, blown this way or that. Whenever we think we have some point to which we can cling and fasten ourselves, it shakes free and leaves us behind. And if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slides away, and escapes forever. Nothing stays still for us. This is our natural condition, and yet the one furthest from our inclination. We burn with desire to find firm ground and an infinite secure base on which to build a tower reeling up to the infinite. But our whole foundation cracks, and our earth opens up into abysses."

- Blaise Pascal 

Pensées, trans. Roger Ariew

It is a truism to say “we are finite creatures”. We find ourselves in a vast space of unknown, but it is a burning desire within us to make sense of our experience.

All experience. Including: Science, Mathematics, Politics, Romance, Theology. We are curious about how Quantum Mechanics relate to Relativity. We want to understand the ABC conjecture. We are at pains over the problem of our national debt. We feel frustration about intimacy with another person. And we want to know why we feel pain.

But often we don’t know an answer. And it pains us into searching for answers.

If we want to solve any of these problems, we must make sense of a wide array of data. As for physics, we have experiments and theory. As for mathematics, we have formalism and intuition. As for government, we have understandings about the nature of man and of our power over one another. As for romance, we have each other’s words and actions and our biologically rooted desires. As for pain, we have experience, tradition, history, and a list of promises and expectations which were fulfilled and broken.

In short we don’t know as we want. We see in a mirror dimly. But we sometimes press on. We press on to find meaning. Facing this disparate experience, we hold hopes of making sense of it. But why do we believe that the universe is meaningful? I mean meaningful in the broadest possible sense. Why do we feel the universe is coherent? In any sense? Some sum it up as being the chance configuration of atoms: what is real is the parts. Emotions and desires are really only chemicals. And chemicals are really only atoms. Others hold that unity is fundamental; the point is to be complete oneness with “it all;" all else is illusion and only the broadest encapsulation of the data will give us understanding.

Why do we hope our passions for understanding will be filled? In some sense, it is because we already believe in God.

Let me explain. Our whole existence is bound up with two things: (1) correctly unifying our diverse experience and (2) with proper division of united experience. I’ll give two examples to illustrate.

1. When Copernicus studied the stars, he was trying to find a theory which most beautifully corresponded to the movement of the stars and planets. Heliocentrism unified diverse experience.
2. When Aristotle analyses the word “good”, he brings out the many associations we have with the word: pleasure, happiness, usefulness, etc. There he is making proper division of united experience.

And with a little imagination, you can see that our whole quest for meaning is bound up with balancing unity and diversity.

I say “balance”. For we cannot even conceive of a universe which is all particular things, disjointed, or all one thing where all particulars are realized by one concept. We must stay in-between: all things are united and yet all things are diverse.

Fig. 1 Unity and Diversity

You might say: “your arguments might have some persuasive power, but when you say ‘that just cannot happen’, you are just appealing to our sense of meaning. Perhaps our sense of meaning is false.” To this objection I can only say, I believe that we can make sense of reality. All people must so believe. But I don’t have a ready argument against it now, and it may be that no strict argument for it exists. In this might be the true sense of faith: trusting in beauty and goodness even though you don’t have a God-like certainty of things.

This reflection might make us uncomfortable. If I believe that which is chosen by me, it seems arbitrary. To that I must insist: look outside yourself. Don’t worry too much. Trust. Otherwise is to distrust all your thoughts, and it is to inter a world of darkness. For your eyes tell you nothing. Your ears, nothing. Your touch, nothing. Even your language is dark, because it refers to nothing.

In short, along with the Christian Church through the ages, I say the alternative to believing in God is Hell. But again, I get ahead of myself. For I have not yet related my argument to God.

Let us look at the harmony between unity and diversity. How is it sustained? There are three options:

1. It is sustained by (non-personal) inanimate matter.
2. It is sustained by multiple (that is differing) intensional wills.
3. It is sustained by one intensional will.

I hope it is clear that dead matter cannot organize itself. So (1) is out.

Multiple wills cannot be jointly ultimate. For then our supposition that everything in the universe is relatable is destroyed. For then, in some sense, a collection of atoms won’t have anything to do with another collection of atoms. But to validate this point more thoroughly, I suspect, would be a laborious, though a probably beneficial, process. I hope it is clear however. So (2) is out.

So there must be a singular Will. Is it within the universe or without it? If it were within, it would have to Will it’s own willing into existence. That doesn’t make much sense. For its will would be dependent on its will to will. So the Will is without the universe.

And this Will is God.

This Will is similar to ours in creative power, but it is obviously much more. And the nature of the person or persons behind the will can be touched on using a similar method as we have just employed. For if there were just one Person behind the Will, alone, he would have nothing to say, for he has nothing to relate to, but if there were distinct Persons behind this will, who were in some sense not relatable to one another, lacking some unity, then they couldn’t be said to have a single will. Thus God is some kind of multi-unity.

That is the argument.

Let us review the argument. We began by reflecting on our own experience, our trust that the universe is meaningful. Meaningfulness involves a dance of unity and diversity. Since meaningfulness is a quality that only a person can appreciate, what sustains this universe is a great personal Will that stands outside this universe.

This Will must be involved with this world, and it must care for it to some degree. For this Will sustains the world at every moment. 

But how can we say that God cares about us? That he (literally) gives a damn about humans; that is, hold them morally responsible? Couldn’t he just stop at making neat configurations of atoms? Whence the human aspect?

This is difficult to argue. But it goes along these lines: we look again within ourselves. We count our human relationships as meaningful. But oddly, the meaning does not lie in any identifiable particular of our existence. Suppose your grandmother baked you a carrot cake. The happiness you feel when we eat the carrot cake, is not strictly identifiable with any the pleasurable sensations you feel in gaping at the cakes orange and white frosting, or in the creamy texture of a mouthful of a slice, or even in the recollection of all the happy summer afternoons your grandmother baked these cakes in the past. But somehow all these data of experience, point outward towards new connections, and at the same time all these data point inward toward your experience.

My contention is that these data will keep on pointing outwards. It is our duty to find meaning: to follow the data and make sense of it all, but at the same time we have to realize that since these data are not pointing towards itself, all attempts to make an object the interpretive key of the universe is intellectual death. I’d call this the most general definition of idolatry. All things must be pointing outwards towards the Will of the Personal Sustainer of it all. For the Sustainer is making it for his purposes. And it should be our curiosity to know what the purposes of the Sustainer are. If we want a meaningful life, we are to listen. Listen to creation. Listen to ourselves. Listen for God.

And this is the injunction of the Bible, to listen to the triune Creator and to mold ourselves after his Will. For His Will is the only thing which will lead to a meaningful life. I shall end with the most famous quote of John Calvin’s:

“Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern. In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he “lives and moves”. For, quite clearly, the mighty gifts with which we are endowed are hardly from ourselves; indeed, our very being is nothing but subsistence in the one God. Then, by these benefits shed like dew from heaven upon us, we are led as by rivulets to the spring itself.”

- John Calvin

The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Trans. Ford Lewis Battles