I think your approach relies too heavily on the use of the word "infinite" by someone who, I assume, had little or no knowledge of mathematics? I suggest that the word was used in an everyday sense, whereby "infinite distance" is merely an exaggeration meaning "especially distant". And so on.Hereandnow wrote: ↑September 8th, 2022, 5:37 pm God is as useful a concept as can be made sense of, and I don't mean simply pragmatic sense, the kind that Dewey and others might defend: a concept with utility for those living in wretched conditions. I mean sense as a descriptive term of what it is that lies before us in philosophical inquiry about foundational metaphysics. But is metaphysics merely theoretical?
Stevie quoted St. John saying "God's being cannot be grasped by the intellect, appetite, imagination, or any other sense; nor can it be known in this life." Is this true? god cannot be known in this life? And then this, "The most that can be felt and tasted of God in this life is infinitely distant from God and the pure possession of him." Infinitely distant? This raises the question of infinity, does it not? How can this notion be sensibly presented and not be nonsense? If it is not nonsense, and I think it is not, then there must be a presence of this possessed within experience, for if there is nothing whatever of infinity in experience, then the term has no meaning beyond an empty abstraction. The rub in looking for and understanding of God lies in the analytic of the things we can identify that constitute what validates the concept.
What, then, is this "infinite distance" St John talks about, and what is it in-the-world (experience, of you like) that makes talk about this kind of distance meaningful? Take infinite space. This is "given" to us, this intuition that reaches outward, and falls flat. By given intuition, I simply mean it is not a piece of fiction, nor is it reducible to mathematical concept. there is a palpable encounter with infinity in that when we exercise our intuition to grasp it, we encounter the impossible IN the world. Spatially, the world is impossible, and the same goes for time. When space and time (as intuitions) are deemed impossible, this invalidates at the level of basic level all talk of space and time. Certainly we can continue to talk about late buses and trees and clouds being up there and over there, and so on; but this is not philosophical talk about foundational metaphysics, and it is here that space and time fall apart. Like any concept, once a context is established, and time words are used in this context, sense is made. But philosophy has no interest at this level in its search for basic validation.
But have we not a least approached the problematic of God here? For infinty is not some alien wholly other, but is a palpable presence; it is IN the experience that encounters the world, and the "otherness" is conceived out of the fabric of experience itself. Infinity was NEVER apart from US. It has always already been a structural feature of experience.
this line of thinking can move on from here into a more revealing analysis. But this depends on if you have an interest to pursue it.
Yes, there is much to be thought and said about God, but we will not find Her by quibbling about infinity.