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.
Thank you for reading and responding Ms. Boop. I do appreciate it.
Two things that I would like to clear up though. As usual, I left out too many details of my 'theory' :)
First, I do not know that I would define myself as Christian. My 'revelation' so to speak, came at a point where I had considered myself an atheist for well over a decade. I think that the idea I have of God is, at least in part, my way of reconciling my sense of things greater than myself with my disagreements (to put it mildly) with Biblical Christianity.
Second, to extend your analogy of the painting, if we visualize the painting as a thing that is never fixed, and if we visualize the painter as being not separate from the painting, but woven into it, this is more what I see as God.
For instance, when I describe God as being order itself, what I mean more specifically is that I see God as law, meaning ALL law. That is, God is in a very literal sense "the tie that binds" everything together. What I suppose is that every time we discover something new about the way the universe works, we are discovering little pieces of God. When we discover new things about the organizing principles of matter, we are discovering little pieces of God. I suppose that I think of God as the ultimate organizing principle. Not separate from the ultimate organizing principle, but the thing itself, which is why I don't think that God can violate or supercede his own laws. It would be tantamount to God denying himself.
I don't know if that's any clearer than what I wrote earlier, but I'm a little tired after a long day.
Marvelous discourse between you and Chiapet..
Mathematics indeed could be the footprints of God..
or the scent... or the playthings.. made me think too/also..
I like that..
As a molders can cast bronze or plastic being humans..
Boggles the mind on how God might cast universal energy/matter at will.. Interesting that Quantum Mechanics can't even really figure out what energy even is, completely..
God creating Galaxies, planets, lifeforms, even spirits.. maybe even time is thingly, is conceivable.. The study of crystalline structures imply art at a mechanical base.. Crystals have an identity, who gave them that identity?.. Logarithms, Pi, so many other mathematical axioms seem to mirror crystals as mechanical base art forms with an identity.. To think they are random mutations masking as art is a stretch..