Originally posted by FabianFnas
This is not te clean and simple answer of everything I anticipated.
Where do these water tanks get its water from? The first one, or isn't there a first one? Then were do the water comes from from the beginning?
And where does it go? To the last tank? And if there are no last one where does it go? To the first tank again?
Oh, very zen...
The Whole has no proper analogy—being (as scottishinnz called it, speaking strictly as a scientist) the “totality that has no edge”. All analogies are limited, as they must be drawn from “edged” elements within and of the whole.
Failure to recognize the whole leads to disjointed dualistic metaphysics (e.g., dualistic theism). And to such crazy-talk as “What was there
before (!) time”? Might as well ask: “When was there before
when?”
The “analogy problem” does not just stem from the generally dualistic nature of our language, or even from the normal edge-defining process of our conceptual thought. It also stems from the fact that there is a kind of recursiveness, in which we attempt to talk about “it” separate from ourselves—when even the conceptual processing of our minds is a facet of what is going on with the Whole; in which, from which and of which we also are. And a “loopy” recursion in the self-reflective nature of our consciousness.
For example, I have often used the analogy of waves on the ocean (the Whole) to illustrate figure/ground, identity/nonseparability, etc. But then someone will say, “Yes, but what about the shape of the land masses and the wind and the sun and gravity and what-all—all of that causes the waves.” And they are, of course, correct. That does not make the analogy a bad one; it simply points up the limits of any such analogy.
The same kinds of limits apply to all such analogies, including water-flow and vessels.
Different philosophical expressions have different names for the Whole: Brahman, Tao, Ein Sof. The latter term—
ein sof—means “without end”. But it is “without end” because it is the totality that has no edge. I think that, perhaps, sometimes words like “timeless” and “infinite” and “eternal”, etc., were originally intended to convey the definitional edgelessness of the Whole, the totality, the all-without-another. (I, like Agerg, am skeptical about what meaning such terms can have in a dualistic system such as supernatural theism.)
[Somebody generally brings in the “big bang” at this point; I will just, like sonhouse, refer them for now to the “big bounce”. Nevertheless, it has been explained many times on here that the big bang does not somehow make “before time” talk sensible.]
Another error is, after saying something like “aside from the whole, there is nothing”, then treating that “nothing” as if it were (in G.E. Moore’s words) “a queer kind of ‘something’.” “What is the universe expanding
into (!)?” “Into (!) nothing.” "And
where (!) is that nothingness?" "Nowhere..."
In terms of black beetle’s analogy, it is like asking, “To
where (!) does the whole emanate?” But all goes on within itself, because it is literally all there is.
[Another error, to my mind, is treating it analogously to an erector-set-like mechanism, a pantheism that resembles some adding-up of distinct parts. But such a pantheism is vulnerable to the teleological (clock-maker) argument; treating the universe as an artifact begs the question of an artificer. But the universe resembles organism more than it does artifact.]
In the end, any analogy used to illustrate the goings-on of the Whole is limited. The analogy is simply an illustration, a pointer to the fact that complex patterns of forces, dimensionality, and the like need to be understood within the context of the Totality (philosophical non-dualism)—or else deal with all the problems of philosophical dualism (gods, unmoved movers, the “supernatural category”, etc.).
EDIT:
When people say that God is “outside” time and space, they mean (I think) that God is outside any natural dimensionality.* That is, if scientists are able to identify a few more dimensions, God will likely be claim to “exist” (!) “outside” (!) those as well. But, without defining-dimensions—that is, dimensionality that gives definition to any this-or-that as opposed to any other this-or-that—I find all talk about God being "
a being" meaningless. It is like trying to identify a figure without any ground against which to identify it. That notion of God seems to me like a groundless figure...
* The notion of a “spiritual dimension”—as some kind of “real”
dimension—seems to me to be troublesomely undefined. I don’t know what it means (unless “dimension” here is just used loosely to mean some kind of way of thinking, or some such).
A 'timeless' god!
09 Dec '08 12:26
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