From Cosmic Coherence to Christianity

The other day I wrote that if readers were interested, I would explain how theism and then by extension Christianity – taking the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement as the basic doctrines thereof – are entailed in the miracle of cosmic coherence. Longtime commenter and orthospherean Bill Luse expressed his interest, to my chagrin. So, now I’m obliged. Here goes, then.

Readers interested in what follows would do well to read that post of a few days ago, and its few comments, so as to grasp what I’m talking about when I notice the miracle of cosmic coherence.

The first thing I should say is that my understanding of miracles has evolved since the last time I wrote about them here. Back then I was urging that nature is miraculous in herself, and also that if miracles were not natural to her, they could not be possible in her, and could never therefore have come to pass. I still think those propositions are both true. But now I think also that miracles are phenomena that nature has it not in her own power alone to generate – even though they may be natural to her, and thus can occur within her scope. I think that miracles are phenomena in which the nature of nature is supplemented by exogenous and gracious influx to her of information – about her true nature, and thus about her true purpose and happiest ends, thus her likeliest best paths forward and best next acts – that she could never have learned or figured out on her own: information, that is to say, about the best way (or perhaps ways) that she could next be so as to constitute herself in the next moment, and for all her moments, a coherent causal system.

Miracles then are natural to this world, so that they can in her be manifest; but the world is not of her own powers capable of manifesting them.

And included in the class of miracles is the continued coherence of the cosmos. The cosmos on her own is incapable of procuring it.

The source of the information exogenous to the cosmos and necessary to her coherence is obviously God. We might as well call that information, and its source, by its ancient name: the Lógos. By a tiny step from cosmic coherence, we’ve arrived at theism.

Note that the argument from cosmic coherence is one of a general class of cosmological arguments for God’s existence.

OK: how do we get from theism to the Trinity? To recapitulate an argument I have presented here already, and in a nutshell: God can’t be God unless he is omniscient (recall that, were he not, he could not provide from himself to the cosmos the information she needs to perdure coherently from each moment to the next); and he can’t be omniscient unless he knows himself, and what is more knows that he knows himself. The Trinity is how this is accomplished. In the knowledge of the Lógos about his Father, God knows himself; in the knowledge of the Holy Spirit about the Father, the Son, and their love, God knows that he knows himself. All 3 Persons then (logically then, not temporally then) know that God is a Trinity.

On then to the Fall. In providing to the cosmos her capability of constituting herself as such – this being how God creates worlds, by his Word, his Lógos, the utterance of the information implicit in his necessary omniscience – God necessarily confers upon his creatures their freedom. For, there is no way to act except as freely (what is utterly determined is not actual, but an aspect of some actual, that is free). Implicit in freedom are options to do other than what is perfectly optimal. And there are lots more ways to be imperfect than to be perfect. The likelihood of a Fall is then implicit in creaturity per se. And, there being so many more ways to be imperfect than there are to be perfect, it seems likely that most worlds Fall at some point in their careers.

We must at this point detour into a demonstration of God’s perfect goodness. The Creator cannot give to his creatures what he has not in himself: nemo dat quod non habet. So all the goods of creatura derive in the first place from God. Why must God be perfectly good? Because, in principle, he can – and, maybe, does (these might amount to the same thing) – create countless worlds that avoid a Fall. Such perfect worlds are possible in principle, however rare they may be. Creaturely perfection in respect to any good whatever can be derived only from a Creator who is himself perfectly good.

OK then; being perfectly good, God is naturally going to want to rescue all the creatures he can from the terrible horrors of their Fallenness, of their defective being. But, because he has not defected – so that the defection of creatures is not of his own doing, but theirs, and so that he is still perfect, and has no defects of his own to repair – he cannot be the one to rescue creatures from their own errors. Those creatures must rather correct themselves; for, after all, their defects are their Falls away from him. He has not departed from them, but vice versa. So, creatures must return to him, if they are to be rescued.

But, because they have Fallen, and are defective, creatures have not the power of themselves to climb back up out of the pit of their defection into his high sunny uplands – or even to tolerate its lovely brightness, which is to them as a coruscant fire. To rescue a cosmos full of defective creatures, some creature thereof is going to have to be perfect, and what is more potent as creature to pass the abyss of the infinite gap that creatures have by their defects opened between them and God. To surpass that infinite abyss, the perfect creature is going to need to be infinitely powerful. He is going to need to be God.

So we arrive at the Incarnation.

The rescue – the Atonement – is effected by a sacrifice, in which the perfect creature who is God gives his infinite self to fill the infinite abyss of the Fall from the creaturely side. So doing, he suffers by his omniscience all the creaturely agonies that derive from the Fall, and heals the ontological defects of his creatures, wipes out the agonies that hang thereupon, and compensates for them perfectly. So doing, he opens for his Fallen creatures a way back to perfect companionship with their Creator. He saves them who would have his salvation – who are not so far gone already that they cannot recognize it as such, and so want it above all other things..

I think that covers the main points.