Dear me, that title does sound rather grandiose, but it more or less capture the essence of this post's content (though hopefully without being too high-minded!).
As I was re-reading over what I had written yesterday, I reached the passage where I noted that Science lacks language or categories to deal with a nonphysical being. It occurred to me that the scientific method would insist that first, we'd need to establish that something completely nonphysical exists before anything else anyway. When thought about in this particular light, one can see my one would dismiss the immaterial as completely immaterial- never mind the question of how the physical world reacts to nonphysical interference, how does the nonphysical even overcome that barrier in the first place?
That question of course goes all the way back to Platonism; the separation of the physical world and the ideal forms, and in Christianity, one finds thinkers wrestling with the problem of how simple, unitary perfect invisible substance, interacts with complex visible multiplicity. On the whole they confronted the intellectual tendency asserting that it couldn't. Often the Logos was posited as something that somehow existed as a halfway house between Divinity and the Physical World, before it became untenable to hold to the idea that something less than God could truly save humanity (the Arian controversy). This is a bit of a diversion though, that paragraph on science discovering the Trinity, sparked two pieces of thought, which I suspect are tending in opposite directions.
If it's far from easy or straightforward to prove that one set of metaphysical statements has any more claim to being right, or 'true' than another set without appealing to authority, tradition, experience, whatever. It struck me that obviously this is not the entirety of what Christianity is. Christianity is not simply about God and heaven and hell and so on. It's rooted in history, that a real man called Jesus who taught and preached and was crucified somewhere in first century Palestine.We can never have Christianity without Pontius Pilate, or Simon Peter, the Sea of Galilee or the Romans. I think Jesus' mere existence is not really something that can be reasonably disputed, thus Jesus is a physical, human being with concrete historical details. this means that there will always be (or should always be) a link to the physical world in its religious thinking- it can make it seem less fantastic and exciting as a religion (compare to the Greek or Norse myths for instance), but it does at least give you something to hang your hat on, a starting point in time and space, something one can easily comprehend.
Of course Jesus makes a lot of statements about things we interpret as being 'beyond' the physical realm, and apparently does things beyond human physical capacity in the accounts we have of him, but you can always ask yourself if you trust this man enough to accept the more difficult aspects to swallow I suppose. We are not being confronted by an invisible 'voice of God' but a fellow human, which is harder, I think, for us to just dismiss. We can always ask 'do the actions we can accept actually happened exemplify to what he says?' If he seems like a reliable character, can we dare to trust him on all his words? And even a totally naturalistic Christianity (I would dispute), with Jesus as a moral teacher and his death significant as an exemplary act of love in the face of the ways of the world is possible and has some value. Of course there are questions about the reliability of the narrators and so on, but if there is some mixing of pure myth in there, there still remains plenty that an ordinary human could do, and would do, and so it hardly seems unreasonable that this man did in fact do it. Undeniably though, there is still some 'faith' involved, that gap to the nonphysical.
Now the other thought that occurred to me is rather wilder, harder to accept for a traditionalist, but in some ways, quite fun (at least I think so...). It basically breaks with almost all religious sensibility by positing that God is in fact a physical being. It wouldn't be a great surprise to me if it turns out that 'God' is not outside, but inside the universe but so much 'more' than we are that we mistook it for infinite and beyond our world. It's a bit like the idea that our universe is in fact, simply an atom of a much larger universe- possible to imagine (sort of) but how we'd go about discovering that...
But I do want to eat my cake and have it in this instance, if God is physical (and involved in humanity- or else it doesn't really matter what he is), how is it he's still so incomprehensible to our means of understanding? I therefore consider the possibility that God is in fact extra-dimensional. A polydimensional being of immense power (though not necessarily infinite) that we can't see because we're trapped within 3 dimensions. To help make sense of this notion I've enlisted the help of Carl Sagan. I hope you find it an interesting idea, I especially enjoyed the 'voice from within' bit.
Of course, if this is the case than we can understand why our merely 3D science can't find him so easily, but we are left with the question just as knotty as 'how does the nonphysical interact with the physical' when we are confronted by the character of Jesus: 'how does a possibly finite multidimensional being end up inhabiting just three dimensions?' How typical- in one paradigm he is a possible saving grace of Christianity, and then in the other he's a total spanner in the works. One possibility I suppose is that it was just a shadow, A three-dimensional shadow- yet it is contentious, how can a shadow be said to have a concrete, human existence? Can a 3D shadow suffer on a 3D cross? Maybe the Docetists were onto something? (they denied the physical reality of Jesus' existence, though for rather different reasons).
