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.

5. Beyond Within

Last week we left Abraham wondering what could be coordinating the sun-moon system.

One possibility was that the control was within the system. That would mean, in effect, that the sun and the moon were coordinating themselves. But that did not seem feasible because seeing their individual orbits and properties, it was clear that the sun was not controlling the moon and the moon was not controlling the sun. Therefore the control must be some factor which is not the sun and not the moon. Perhaps it was the earth, but that could not be because the earth was itself integrated systematically with the sun and the moon, for after all, that’s why Abraham worshipped them originally. The stars and planets too had their regular, integrated motions and specific roles in the grand scheme of things, so they were not the organizing force.

Clearly, whatever that force or being was, had to have two properties. It had to be external to the parts of the system, and it had to be more powerful than them, to keep all the parts in systemic order. Given that the system under consideration was now not just the sun and the moon but indeed the heavens and the earth as a whole, being external to it all implied being transcendent, and being more powerful than it all meant being omnipotent.

So now Abraham was looking beyond the system for a transcendent, omnipotent force responsible for creating and managing the entire physical universe. Okay, you may think, problem solved, odyssey over, monotheism established. . . or is it? Abraham might not have jumped to the One G-d idea quite yet. But “Why not?” you may ask. “How many transcendent, omnipotent beings are there?”

4. Unity

The sun and the moon have a special relationship. While different as night and day (in light, in heat, in motion, in phases, and in seasons), they nevertheless share two remarkable qualities. First, they are exactly the same angular (or apparent) size, even though the sun is huge and far and the moon is small and close. Second, their paths intersect every once in a while resulting in spectacular eclipses. Whoever has witnessed a total solar eclipse knows the awe and wonder this majestic event evokes. It was obvious to Abraham that the coordination of the sun and the moon was not mere chance event.

Abraham understood that most basic principle of human logic that everything that happens, happens for a reason. The very fact that solar and lunar sizes and motions are coordinated is itself a something, albeit an abstract something, which requires an explanation. The sun and moon should be viewed as an orderly system with a suitable cause.

Now the question was, what could the cause of this systemic property be? Could the two-part, sun-moon system originate in a duality or other plurality, say pantheon, of forces? Remember that Abraham had no clue about monotheism at the time. He addressed his question first using the pagan cognitive tools that were his heritage. Well, he must have thought, if it were the case that some divine plurality created the system, what was coordinating the parts of that higher plurality? And if nothing was coordinating the higher plurality, then how did their coordination come to be? Abraham wasn’t ready to drop cause and effect. Ascribing the natural system to a supernatural system only pushes off the coordination issue. Abraham concluded that there had to be ultimately one factor unifying the sun-moon system. But what was it?