DM I'm going to be frank in this post, it's a philosophy forum and I'm trying
to do a philosophical critique as best I can, but hopefully not coming across as
gratuitously insulting to something you hold dear.
Being infinite, God, can only be a self-referential system, for if there was
something extraneous to God, God would not be infinite. The problem is that,
although self-reference means subject and object must be identical, they cannot
be identical when I define myself. Why? If I define myself, then the definition
of what I define is its entire structure, whereas it is only part of the
defining entity’s structure. So subject and object are not equal, and the
defined self will always seem less than the defining self seen from the point of
view of the subject.
Put more simply, a human being is the relating of a relation — a synthesis of
the Infinite and finite, the Eternal and the temporal, and Freedom and necessity
— relating to itself. We cannot define ourselves, let alone the Whole, without
distorting the truth or disintegrating Life. The "knowingness" I'm talking about
is the realization of the Infinite and eternal nature of Being itself without
the mediation of ideas.
If I try to break this down into what we limited humans can generally agree on
as a Shared Working Knowledge of the world I get this -
The universe seems to be something we call infinite in space denoting the fact
we haven't found its edge. Possibly infinite in time past, we don't know. In
time future it will probably continue to dissipate towards maximal entropy, but
conscious creatures like ourselves will be long gone by then, existing only as
fundamental particles.
For now, there are conscious critters such as ourselves kicking around. We are
part of the universe, inhabiting physical bodies within it, and view everything
else as 'outside' of us. This is because we experience consciousness as a
field of various types of subjective experiencing from a specific point of view
located in time and space within the universe. That is how we 'relate to' what
is 'external' to our direct experiencing. We create working models of the
external world as outlined above and call it the universe. We can't know if our
models are accurate or complete, but they have an internal consistency which we can discuss in a coherent shared way with each other. In fact, we can't know
for certain if anything exists outside our (or rather my) subjective experience.
But still, this Shared Working Knowledge which is constantly updated and
corrected using empiricism and reason crucially works as our lingua franca, and
is afforded credibility on that basis.
Everything you say outside that is outside of our Shared Working Knowledge of
the world. It's a framing which resonates with you, and maybe it contains some
deep truth or meaning which I'm missing and you're accessing. But for me it
doesn't resonate that way. (And you make no case for why I should take it seriously, just point to some vague one-liner quotes and go 'See!').
So when you use the commonly accepted language constructions we use to
communicate about the Shared Known World we roughly agree on (the world of
apples and gravity), and make statements of fact that 'God is' this or that,
you're co-opting our Shared Framing Language in a Personal Idiosyncratic and
philosophically inappropriate way. And there's no reason for me to give it this
Shared credibility because you borrow its clothes.
And I can't even make this parse in a way which isn't self-contradictory nonsense -
''If I define myself, then the definition of what I define is its entire
structure, whereas it is only part of the defining entity’s structure. So
subject and object are not equal, and the defined self will always seem less
than the defining self seen from the point of view of the subject.''
Think it through -
If I (I-Subject) define myself (I-Object), I am the defining self and the thing
defined. By definition no more or less. And more bizarrely... I-Subject
can't be less than the defining self (I-Subject), because they're both the same I-Subject.
I think part of the problem is you treat Part-of-the-Total and
The-Total-of-the-Total as being the same when you want to use it one way, but
different when you want to use it to express something else, without offering
any justification . And unsurprisingly end up with self-contradictory nonsense
hidden within confusing obfuscation. My suspicion is that clarity dispels the
sense that there's more than meets the eye.
You can use the catch-all fallback position and say yes, we limited creatures
can't make sense of it, we don't have the language for concepts beyond our ken. Well OK, but where does that leave your claim? You're saying you have some special access to knowledge beyond human understanding, which again is self-contradictory. So I'm inclined to think you're just making stuff up, or have found personal meaning in something someone else has made up. Doesn't mean you're not onto something, but I've no reason to think you have access to any knowledge or insight beyond human understanding, so there's no reason for me to treat it as anything beyond making stuff up.
Feel free to point out what I'm missing, or what I'm getting wrong and explain
clearly why, better still offer clear supporting justifications which counter
my objections. Lets have a go at doing some philosophy on it.
Or if this is simply something which feels meaningful to you, fair enough, just
say so.