I hope you don't mind me jumping in on your conversation, but I wanted to comment on the above.
I concur with your assertion that God isn't vengeful, but probably for much different reasons. One of those reasons is that I disagree that God is not subject to order, and I also disagree that God is beyond space-time. My personal feeling is that God is subject to order because God IS order, and God is not beyond space-time, but rather underlies it. I sometimes think that both religious philosophers seeking to determine the nature of God and scientists seeking a "Theory of Everything" are stumbling towards the same goals. I believe that the reason things work the way they do is because we have a fundamental order to the universe, perhaps someday identifiable as God.
I think I came to this conclusion after a summer intensive course in Dante. I was reading Sagan's "Contact" concurrently with studying the Divine Comedy. We were discussing the means by which souls arrive in hell, according to Dante, and had come to the conclusion that the Inferno suggests not vengeance, but a certain degree of determinism. That is, similar perhaps to binary code, if you are at 0 when you die, you go to heaven, or if you are at 1, you go to hell. Your own actions determine your setting. Of course, it's more complicated than that, but that's the gist.
Between that and Sagan's idea that messages have been embedded in numbers like Pi got me thinking that maybe the numbers aren't the signifier, but the actual signified. The reason that things like evolution of species (to segue briefly back to the topic of this thread) work so beautifully is due to the fundamental order of things that holds the universe together. An order that I do not believe was created by God, but that actually is God.
Anyway, that's my two cents.
Thank you very much for your post #1276...you have quite concisely, approached God in a manner that was lovely...it will take me some time to let it sink in, but I do believe what you have stated, is something I could well embrace...
It may be just your two cents worth, as you say, but heck, I think those thoughts are worth a million bucks...
Beautiful post, Chiapet!!! Kudos! I agree with your perceptive insight in every respect, except for only one. Actually, with a little further "delving down" into the fundamental structure of reality, maybe we wouldn't even disagree about that. Maybe: We Christians do so love to dispute with one another! :^).
The point of disagreement: "I disagree that God is not subject to order, and I also disagree that God is beyond space-time. My personal feeling is that God is subject to order because God IS order, and God is not beyond space-time, but rather underlies it."
I would restate this, from my point of view, as follows:
God is not subject to order in the same sense (analogically speaking of course) that Picasso is not "subject to" the order of his painting, Guernica. Sure, there's a lot of Guernica in Picasso, so there's lot of Picasso in Guernica. Yet all the same the painter and the painting are not the same thing, that is not on an equal footing, the proof being that the painting could not have painted itself. But the painter would still be there, with or without the painting.
I think you're on to something, with your intuition that both religious philosophers and scientists seeking the ToE "are stumbling toward the same goals." Put the accent on "stumbling"; but human beings of whatever sort drawn to truth will try and try and stumble sometimes. And they keep on seeking and stumbling, despite the fact they know in their heart and soul that truth is ever a quest, and never a final possession of man, on this side of the grave.
Indeed, one's own actions determine the "binary setting" that ultimately constitutes the divine judgment that will be rendered on each of our immortal souls one day. But God the Father created free men. Unfortunately, free men often forsake their own freedom in order to become the slaves of their own ambition, cupidity, and lust.
The foregoing is to say I acknowledge that God created the universe and constantly, providentially maintains it. So in a sense, though He is "outside" or "beyond" spacetime reality, paradoxically He is also simultaneously in it.
Isaac Newton had a magnificent proposal for understanding this paradox: He called it the sensorium Dei, a sort of universal field that (to put it crudely) effects an "interface" between the divine and natural realms, especially the human. For Newton, God is "the Lord of Life, Who is eternally with His creatures."
Handling all these disparate strains of divine action, in heaven and on earth as the Holy Scriptures say, I just look at it this way:
(1) God the Father is Creator of the Universe. He is the "Picasso in relation to His painting."
(2) The Order of the universe was laid in, in the Beginning: It is the eternal Logos of God the Father Himself, the Son of God, the Christ. In classical Greek, logos means mind, reason, paradigm or "blueprint." Of the Son, the Logos, it is said He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Word spoken by the Father in the beginning in order to make a world (i.e., to paint a Guernica, to follow our analogy), and the End, or purpose or goal, for which the universe was made by the Father. The Son was in the Beginning with the Father. Later, He incarnated as the man Jesus, born of Bethlehem in Judea, Who sacrificed Himself to an inglorious death on the Cross in order to restore humankind to their Father, which had fallen way from God's Truth, by atoning for human weakness, sin.
(3) The Holy Spirit -- the third Person of the Christian Trinity Who expresses, together with the Father and Son, the fullness of the One God -- is a sort of "sensorium Dei" in Newton's sense (metaphorically speaking of course), by which the Order of God the Father is transmitted to the human soul, via the loving sacrifice of Jesus Christ, Logos. The Holy Spirit is the Comforter of mankind, the Paraclete Who entered the world with the Resurrection of Christ the Son. The Light and Love of the Son is made evident to those whose souls are open to God by means of the Holy Spirit. It is through the Holy Spirit that God "underlies" both the order of the human soul and spatiotemporal order in which we humans live -- it is what "puts God into the world." The Father has always been "Beyond" it; the Son was here on earth for only a brief time, and then departed. But by the power of the Holy Spirit of God, the Son is still with us, by virtue of the power of His Grace which is abundantly communicated to the souls of the living, in space and time, by virtue of the action of the Holy Spirit -- at least to those souls that are open to God's love and light and truth.
I loved what you said about numbers like pi, that maybe they "aren't the signifier, but the actual signified." Fascinating, Chiapet! I gather we'd have to say that we still do not know what is being signified by such numbers. But it seems to me, a good search would be a good idea....
Where would we begin?
Thank you for your marvelous essay, Chiapet. I'll be thinking it through some more.