Goodbye to the contradiction

I know that I have been rather quiet lately. Family duties and the death of my mobile phone have made blogging a little more difficult, but this is probably for the best.

I have several projects in mind that I have brought to the Throne of Grace in my prayers so that they may be begun, continued and ended in God. I am at present tweaking the draft of a book that I have written for my Diocese. This will need a nihil obstat but, given its length and the commitments of my superiors, this will have to take some time. That is fine.

Much upon my mind is the spiritual battle that Christianity has with the prevailing culture. There is something demonic within Postmodernism that is breaking down even the ability for human beings to communicate with each other. Marx's Critical Theory is responsible for everyone to be categorised as oppressed or oppressor, victim or victor, proletariat or bourgeoisie - rather curious for a society that wants to be non-binary.

Of course, Kierkegaard would always want us to consider the both/and rather than either/or. So would Hegel for that matter. On their terms, they suggest that we should always be looking for the synthesis of two extremes rather than keeping the extremes apart.

This seems reasonable: God Himself breaks down the naive thesis-antithesis duality by being Three yet One, by indivisibly Human and Divine, by being both immanent and transcendent, by being both temporal and eternal. Yet there is one thesis-antithesis that He cannot break down - Good and Evil which we might also express as Sin and Righteousness. Yes, this is something even God cannot do - not because He is impotent, but rather because Good and Righteousness are defined in terms of His being and His divine nature, whereas Evil and Sin are defined by standing outside His divine nature.

You could ask whether God is impotent against the laws of logic. Is God Himself bound by the law of non-contradiction, that something cannot be both A  and not-A simultaneously. The writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite might expect us to leave aside all talk of Reason when it comes to discussing God. Yet, we know that within God is the very root of Reason itself - the divine Logos! God is - this is what He tells us Himself in calling Himself Yahweh or Jehovah. God is and thus He cannot not be. There is an exclusion of being both. Our modern physics may tell us that it is possible for the cat to be both alive and dead but in order to be either alive or dead, the cat still has to be.

The language of Quantum Theory is troubling to our world of common sense, but it is worth reminding ourselves that it is framed only in the language of mathematics. We know what it is to make an observation but while we might describe that observation using a self-adjoint operator on a Hilbert Space, that's not what we actually do do. We observe. Our observation does change the reality around us precisely because we are here to observe and that we do make that observation.

Of course, mathematics is infallible in what it tells us but, often, it doesn't really tell us anything that we didn't already know. Numbers exist as non-physical objects, but they do nothing. Mathematics is irrelevant without the conscious mind to manipulate it. Consciousness provides mathematics with a home in which to thrive and thus, just as God cannot be comprehended by His creation, neither can Mathematics truly comprehend the conscious mind. A science that claims it can explain consciousness is quite simply wrong.

Absolute truth exists, otherwise "there is no absolute truth" becomes absolute. Yet we can only make that observation because of the  Logos Himself. Reason is an expression of God's mind. He gives us this gift so that we might have some language in which we can communicate and debate and study and discover and glorify Him.

Although I believe that we should be careful in talking about dichotomies, I firmly believe that true dichotomies exist because God exists. Many dichotomies will be false such as the dichotomy that God is all-good, all-powerful and all-knowing and yet Evil exists. It takes reasoning and prayer to understand the truth behind such a dichotomy.

There is another dichotomy that is indeed truly binary, male and female. Postmodernism will deny this. Quite why it will deny this is up for debate, by my suspicion is that Postmodernism is an expression of inherent narcissism within our modern humanity. However, God made male and He made female. That is enough.