6. Transcendence

Last week we followed Abraham’s logic into the realm of supernal forces and found that rather than explaining nature, their existence only serves to magnify the need for an explanation.

One of the properties that Abraham ascribed to the One Above is at once the best feature as well as the worst. It is the best because it has the greatest explanatory power. And it is also the worst, because it poses major marketing challenges.

That property is transcendence. What does this mean? It means above and beyond, but beyond its spatial connotation it means abstraction. Ultimately, abstraction means no space, no time, no body, and no parts.

But how do you sell an idea like that to people? Nothing to see, smell, taste, touch or hear. An imperceptible ultimate force. But even that would not have been so bad as long as people could imagine someplace in heaven where this entity could reside, and some kind of form, albeit abstract, that this entity could have. But Abraham did away with all that, and not on a whim, either. In a word, the ultimate being had to be abstracted from any notion of space and form, physical or spiritual.

To exemplify, let’s consider the popular notion that the Creator resides in heaven. Sounds fair. People live on earth and the Big Guy lives in heaven. Isn’t that what most people think? But what and where is heaven, and what does it mean that He lives there? If they told you “Take a Voyager Taxi to Alpha Centauri, turn left and it’s right beside Andromeda, you can’t miss it, just ask for the Boss and tell him I sent you” I don’t think you would buy it.

With a little more abstraction, we could call heaven a higher world and say the Creator lives there because He is spiritual and not physical. Well, that would be a little better because at least it shifts the discussion above the physical plane. But still, it relegates the Creator to a place, a spiritual place but a place nonetheless, so Abraham had to accept that the Creator transcends spiritual “space” just as He transcends physical space.

Now how about time? Time is a creation as well; it’s part of the spacetime continuum, and Abraham figured this out too. If everything has one source and time is part of everything then that one source created time too. Abraham had never heard of Genesis because Moses hadn’t written about it yet, and he had not yet met any other monotheists, but still, he deduced that there had to be a beginning and that the true Source had to “precede” that beginning. The Creator had to be beyond time just as He/She/It had to be beyond space.

What does it mean to be beyond time and space? It sounds absurd. “Outside” is a spatial concept. To be outside of space makes no sense. Similarly, “before” is a temporal concept. To be before time makes no sense either. But the fact that human reason cannot quite digest the conclusion does not mean that the reasoning is faulty.

On the contrary, it reflects the greatness of the idea that cannot be grasped by the logic that conceived it.