Rage for Order

Rage for Order

"He has put eternity into the heart of man yet in such a way that he cannot see the end from the beginning. Solomon, The Bible, Ecclesiastes 5

Question

Why can we know things but not conclusively prove how or why we know them? Why is it that absolute proof of knowledge depends on perfect or infinite, knowledge, which we cannot have, and yet we cannot help but act as if we do know some things absolutely? Why does common sense philosophy end up being about as far from common sense as any other Philosophy?

Why do the principles and rules for organizing thought depend on internal rules of consistency and yet the system created by these internally consistent rules and definitions can still make accurate predictions of the outside world? Why does knowledge and experience seem to be divided up into opposing or dualistic pairs: 1) neither pole is able to fully explain the world; 2) each pole seems to be inescapably true; and 3) each pole seems to thoroughly contradict the other?

Why do you try to be reasonable about the things you do? Why is it that to live we must follow rules and laws? Why can we (indeed why do we) organize our lives and our societies - from small clubs to empires - and yet we never come up with a fully coherent legal code, a coherent self-evident social morality, much less can we flawlessly run even the simplest organization, much less the empire?

Why is it that reason inevitably sets us on a search for universal principles to order the rules and laws, which govern what we do? Why is it that having organized these laws around a set of universal principles the legal matrix will tend to grow until you can do nothing without reference to some law or other?

Why is it that when social order advances to this point more and more people revolt against the laws and those who apply them to the extent that they can, mock, insult, attack and even kill others over the very laws so necessary to life? How can something so simple as the Ten Commandments become as complicated as the Talmud, or even as complicated as Federal Law?

How can something as incomprehensible as the Q'uran be so simple as the 7 pillars of Islam, or match even the simple affirmation, "There is one god Allah and Mohamed is his prophet? Why is it that no matter how you see the world, you have a range of acceptable deviation from exact agreement with others? Why is it that those outside your range of acceptable deviation are hard to live with and if sufficiently deviant even killing them seems reasonable?

How do we pick an appropriate level of intolerant behavior toward it. For instance, how much deviance warrants character assassinate through gossip or verbal rebuke? And how much deviance warrants physical discipline, or ostracism? How deviant must someone be to imprison, or finally to kill him? If truth is knowable, then why can we not all agree? If it is knowable, then why do we tolerate any deviation at all?

But if we will tolerate deviation at all, why do we suddenly decide that a particular deviation has gone too far and is intolerable requiring our corrective action or at least a hostile withdrawal on or part? Why are we the most intolerant of those whose beliefs, ethical systems and daily behavior are closest to ours but not quite in complete conformity?

Why do we turn whatever dots we manage to connected into the order we are driven to impose on everyone around us... and yet we are not fully consistent even with our own dots? Can we be sure and yet question our certainty at the same time? Is it possible not to know God, yourself, and your world? Is truly rigorous intellectual atheism even possible? What does it mean for anything to exist? What does it mean to know it? How can you decide what to do about what you know - what to fix, and what to leave alone?

How can you know if it's broken in the first place? And if broken, what makes you think you can fix it... or that you must fix it? What makes you think you can resent people for either not fixing it, or not helping you fix it? Why do we all in our gut expect men and women, husbands and wives, boys and girls to dress and act in certain ways? What stone or tree did we read these rules from? Why do we feel uncomfortable where our expectations are not met, especially with husband, wife, child or parent?

Why is it that even the simplest most incontrovertible moral maxims cannot lead to a self-evident moral fabric in society?

Abstract

Because we create a world beyond the physical world we are inexorably trapped in two illusions. One is that there is no knowable world other than the illusion we create. The other is that the illusion of knowledge we create is irrelevant to the real world.

Because we live in a world that we did not create we are inexorably trapped in two illusions. One is that we know what is there. The other is the illusion that because we never can experience it fully it is always unknowable. To live is to seek, receive, and impose order. This order is the way life is. We either assume that this order is the way the world is, or we justify it by appeal to reason, tradition, experience, or revelation.

All of these appeals to be sustained depend on the assumption that there is a knowable relationship between what we know and the way the world is. Neither assumptions nor appeal to authority can prove this relationship between our thoughts and the world.

Perhaps it is the impossibility of challenging these assumptions which becomes the proof to even the most rigorous skeptic that unless he is catatonic, even he must act as if there is a relationship in order to sustain the illusion that he has disproved his own existence, or God's existence or the world's or the existence of rules of right and wrong.

The most effective refutation of skepticism is skepticism itself. To be a skeptic is to deny skepticism. The most effective proof of skepticism would be a catatonic state or as close to such a state as one could get which would be the self imposed unity with the ONE brought about by Eastern techniques of meditation.

Human reality is simply variations on the fact that we cannot know anything without also knowing God, the world, ourselves and morality. These four are the presupposition of knowing inescapably making possible all thought. Limitations of Order: Because we are finite, we are never able to create perfect order either in our minds or in the mind's ability to grasp what is really out there. All we know exists in a dynamic harmony created by contradictory, elusive, and unattainable ideals of perfection, which exist wherever there is an attempt at coherent thought - which is to say whenever we think.

Within limits, those who create more coherent and dynamic patterns of thought achieve their goals better than those who do not. But there is a law of diminishing return. Beyond those limits, the search for coherence ends in madness, despair, or the illusion that you found it - the beatific vision. What those "limits" are is hard to pin down. Sometimes that madness is merely personal eccentricity and harmless to others. Other times it is genius.

Still in other cases, our rage for order is the root of the most remarkable acts of love, patriotism and kindness. And again the search for order is the root of hatreds from personal intolerance, to psycho-pathologies, to world wars and racial strife. We are limited, finite, and imperfect.

Yet our knowledge (all of it even the unreflective sort such as brushing teeth) is based on the hypothetical existence and knowability of the unlimited, the infinite, the perfect - as if we could grasp the absolute in our relative, perspective-bound hands. Eternity truly is in the warp and woof of our conscious existence yet we cannot know its end or beginning. These are our limitations. They lead to interesting trade-offs because we cannot have it all either theoretically or in daily life.

The Tradeoffs of Order

Though there is no true group consciousness, within limits those who divide up the possible tasks of life provide each other with a greater ability to achieve their personal goals. A whole that is greater than each part makes each part more fulfilled and effective than the part attempting to supply the whole. The trade-off on a personal level is that the greater the order one brings to one area, the less order and the narrower the range of informed choices one has in other areas.

The trade-off of specialization on a corporate level means that the more finely the labor is divided the more each person knows about less and less, and the less each person knows about more and more. Survival is based on the creation of a human ecology of which economics is only a small index. In this social ecology we must trade with others to fulfill each other's needs and wants. You must also trust others to deliver in areas where you have only limited knowledge.

Covenant becomes the basis of any order involving more than one person. This is as true of love and friendship as it is of which car or tomato to buy. These intrinsic limits and tradeoffs are rooted in the limitations of life-experience itself. This paper is about those limitations and how the ideal of eternity both makes our world possible on the one hand and yet impossible on the other. It is about knowing what you believe and yet being able to question it.

It is about why people cannot help but not get along with each other while at the same time getting along. They must. It is a matter of keeping order and ruling creation or descending into hell. The MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction of the last Century is simply a global expression of our daily experience. We get along because the alternative is destruction.

That's abstract all right, so what does it mean? I'll tell you so what, it is our drive to order everyone, everything and ourselves that is the source of every evil and every good. Perhaps the greatest act of deadly compassion today is the idea that good and evil reside in things around us, or in the drive to order them. But it resides in neither. This drive is neither right nor wrong, good nor bad, this drive simply is what you are. The things around us are neither right nor wrong until they are incorporated in the order we develop and in what we do with those things around us as a result of that order.

This drive is not something you turn off or on. It is not itself right or wrong nor able to tell you what is righteous or evil. It is what and who you are. This won't help you answer the true/false questions you've always wanted answers to: "How can I know the world exists? That I exist? That God exists? That morality exists?

And if there is morality, what is it?" But it can help you understand how to function in a world where people really do see things differently, and a world where those differences are often punished and rewarded entirely apart from any human system of rewards and punishments - a world where gravity and the Ten Commandments will have their way. A world where our sense of order is often confused with the will of God and the way the world really is.

God's will and the world are often quite different from what seems to be a reasonable order in our mind. Having said this, it is still inescapably true that at every point our drive for order presents us with a way of seeing that makes sense and we cannot help but believe that what we see and know is really true - the way things... are. Surely, there is a God and he agrees with us!

"Believe" is really the wrong word to use because it implies a moment of decision where before there was doubt. As if one moment we do not believe our senses and the next moment we decide to believe that we know something truly. Though there are some issues that we believe in this way, the vast majority of our moment to moment life and reflection is the spontaneous conviction that things are as they seem to us. We are capable of stepping back and questioning anything. But we live as if the questions are answered.

Indeed, we cannot live any other way. Those who try doubting everything share the fate of Jabez Daws. Very few exist. Even fewer amount to anything. Though the landscape seems littered with Nietzsche's and palsied artists. Statistically they are few and far between. Occasionally a comic like Woody Allen makes a living portraying the attempt to question everything. We call it neurotic.

If you will bear with the technical discussion, I will try to show you the difference it can make in your perceptions and actions.

The Story

Look, all philosophy is really just a story. You see, I grew up in a family where my mother's brother was killed in World War II. A war that my father sat-out because he did not believe he could kill others. Instead he became a missionary burning with conviction that the weakest and poorest should be the object of his love and life.

First they went to the Appalachian backwaters of North Carolina where they lost their second daughter Carol at birth in inadequate medical facilities. Then in 1949 my father went to China toward the end of the civil war in hopes of establishing contacts that would outlive the Communist creation of the new man. Had he been able to stay he would have spent the rest of his life working with the boys in the tin mines of South West China who never saw the light of day and had a life expectancy of 3 years.

His call to go came in the middle of this civil war. One glance exchanged between him and my mother and he accepted the call, leaving a wife and two children, one not old enough to even remember him when he returned. On his return from a year under Communist arrest, he was introduced to Sam, my brother. Sam told him soberly, "You aren't my father, my father is in China." Within two years of returning from China, they left for Korea, my mother 6 months along with me. It was 1954. The ink on the armistice was wet.

I asked them once why they were so committed to their work and weren't around to spend much time with me. Their answer was that their friends and their family were killed in the war (WWII) for mere material issues how could they shrink back when it was eternal issues at stake? But I was an eternal issue too, wasn't I? Where does family fit into changing the world? If you are a world changer, why is the first thing you sacrifice your family?

Does changing the world mean we have to kill people or be killed ourselves by the stress and strain of trying to change everything? Why does everything need to be changed? Little did I know that 40 years after asking them why they did not give more attention to their family I would spend four years with a community where family was the only thing they would give attention to at the expense of almost every other human consideration and decency.

They would change anything and everything in order to protect their little unit. In this environment did they really save the family or did they simply find a new more devious destruction. Could it be that families were designed to disintegrate over time as the children grow up and leave. Is Socialism and all its various forms merely the search to make permanent on a social even global level what is lost when we come of age and go out to seek our fortune? The Garden of Eden - our Family.

Why do we have to change everything? Why not just have families, spend time with them and live our lives? Why must we choose between calling and family?

My father was fired by the mission board for trying to get the evangelical missionaries in Korea to buck the thoroughly secular even pagan Presbyterian Board of World Missions. Undeterred, he entered Princeton to get a Ph.D. and then teach in one of the unbelieving seminaries and so win back the Southern Presbyterian Church for Christ. After getting his doctorate they settled instead in Montreat, North Carolina, a hot bed of Christian missions where my mother became the first elected mayor.

Her first two years as mayor were consumed with correcting the host of illegal actions of her predecessors, much to the dismay of the ruling clique in that town who did all they could to stop her. There I grew up from 1965 until 1973, embroiled in debating every theological and social issue I could think of, on a mission to change the world.

I could have gone back as many generations in this sketch as you would like, and you would have heard similar stories such as my great, great grandmother a missionary in the wilds of Northern Alabama praying at every turn with her eight children, "Lord set my family apart to serve you." He has. That prayer has endured and became the theme of her great, great, great grand daughter's, (Laurel Anne's), Senior Thesis in college.

She traced the calling of her family to serve God through the generations changing everything around them they could get their hands on. Or I could tell of my great uncle Lapsley who died in the wilds of the Congo bringing the Gospel there with the first black Southern Presbyterian missionary. His goal was to break the slavery on King Leopold's rubber plantations. I've already told you about my mother's brother (also named Lapsley) killed trying to bring change to France and Germany in the Battle of the Bulge.

Or a great, great, great, great, grandfather in Virginia Joseph Lapsley, who when the ballot counting went bad, shot out the lantern, grabbed the ballot box, and shattered the window as he leapt through it onto his horse shouting, "I'll be good for the count boys!" And rode all night to the capital with the ballot box safe. My great grandfather Charles Waldo Foreman nearly killed himself in privations working his way through the University of Rochester.

When newly married he came home after hoisting a few at the pub and his wife Elizabeth tied him to the bed posts and slapped him with wet towels until he sobered up saying, "Charles if you will be my husband, you will never do this again, besides you know that no Lewis has ever been able to take the bottle without the bottle taking him." Our family has been dry ever since and on a crusade to keep all around us dry.

In 1903 the same Elizabeth with two children moved to Montreat North Carolina, a three or four year old Presbyterian retreat deep in the Appalachian Mountains where she taught in the first school in Eastern Buncombe County. This has been our family's home base ever since. I won't stop now to tell you about all the things my Father has done to bring or resist change in this pleasant little valley.

Even a summary would fill a book of its own and you can find it in his faithful daily correspondence to his children, in the annals of the courts of Buncombe County, in the records of the higher courts of the State of North Carolina, and minutes of the Town Commissioners of Montreat andin the minutes of the Mountain Retreat Association. He has lived his life as a thorn in the white man's side.

There has been no escape. I was born and bred to bring change. After College and Seminary, I didn't start a church. Though claiming to be a divine perspective on all of life, everyone knows that theology is designed for Churches. So I started a janitorial service because I wanted to see if the theological ideas and the Reformation ideology I had been committed to for generations, really did work in the real working world. I knew it worked in books, and from pulpits, but how about where the cleanser meets the bowl?

Can you clean ashtrays for Christ? Or is Christianity merely an emotional issue foisted on people in moments of psycho-social-emotional weakness? I mean, if a theology degree from Westminster Theological Seminary fails to teach you how to clean toilets then what good is their theology degree?

For three years I labored and to my gratification I found that Westminster's theology is good for cleaning toilets.

One night while kneeling in front of a porcelain idol with my hand deep in its bowels, I prayed, "Lord, I can see that knowledge of you does apply to every part of life, I'm willing to keep on cleaning toilets and discipling others to do so also, but is there anything else I could do?" He answered that prayer and six months later I was sitting in a prison holding-tank worshipping God, as is so often the case, not even remembering until years later that I had asked God to deliver me from toilets and ash trays.

For the next ten years I committed myself to stopping the murder of children and jails became a second home. I led about 12,000 people into and out of jail, spent over two years there myself and in the course of it all got to know activists really well.... I was never an activist myself of course. Activists are people committed blindly to ideologies. That's not me. I don't know who said it, but it's true: When a normal person digs himself into a hole he throws down his shovel and gets out of it.

When an ideologue digs himself into a hole he thinks he will get out if he digs twice as hard. In time I came to see to my horror that I was the sort who simply kept digging. The question is, how do you know if you are digging in the right spot? The need to dig is our rage for order. We will dig somewhere. But the question that this rage cannot answer is, "Is this the right spot or should I seek another?"

I realize now that the reason I said I was not an activist, is not because my mind does not gravitate to well-oiled systems of thought... it does. I am and always will be a Calvinist. It is not because I didn't do the radical thing... I did. No, I tried to tell myself I was not an activist for two reasons: First: I always distrusted people for whom the patterns of their mind fit together so neatly that nothing they encountered in real life ever shook their theories.

They would bend all legs to dance to the music playing in their head. These are the last people to entrust political power to. They do much better in their anabaptistic, counter-cultural, ludite world slamming their fundamentalistic head against the wall (or liberal, freethinking, peacenik, or tree-hugging, Allahu Akbarring head depending on the ideology - whatever the title, they are all fundamentalists). Besides, sometimes the slamming works and things really do change. Good for them I say.

But that's not me I thought.

Second: I never tried to talk other people out of their positions. I know most people think that is what I was doing. But that is never why I argued. I argue in order to get people to see a different perspective and thereby to better understand theirs. I would state my case for doing this or that. I would explain why they could or should join me. But my conclusion was always, "Make up your mind to do this, or to do something else, but don't just sit there.

Whatever you do, even if you are doing nothing, it has an effect. Own up to the effect and either be proud of it or try something you can be proud of, but don't condemn others for acting. We all act and we all have an effect, the only question is, are you proud of what you have done and are doing?" For me the worst evil was hypocritical apathy. For goodness sakes, there is no such thing as doing nothing, at least own up to it and do nothing on purpose!

For instance, it wasn't until the end of 1996 that I would carry signs to persuade people. Until then I didn't rely on argument, I relied on keeping children from being murdered whether anyone was persuaded or not. You see as long as we blocked access to the killing center, we weren't arguing or persuading, we were saving that life. This was a small, but important distinction. So I couldn't be an activists could I?

You might ask, "How could you think that preventing abortion by sit-ins was less radically activistic than picketing?" And my answer back then would be simple, "Most activists thought of it as the ultimate act short of violence. For them it was the most radical thing they could do. For me, by contrast, it was not activistic because it had nothing to do with attempting to persuade or change a person's mind or heart. It had everything to do with saving a life whether someone's mind were changed or not.

Perhaps change would come. Perhaps the abortionist would return to his grizzly trade the next day. But for today, for now, a moment was bought for the innocent child scheduled for murder. And there was nothing they could do about it." I see now that that is simply a different method of bringing change. But the drive to order things was there none the less.

Certainly I was driven to live by an order radically different both from the killing world and from the church which then as now was willing to let children be murdered within 20 minutes of where it lived, worshipped and worked.

But my answer today to the question: "How could you think that preventing abortion by sit-ins was less radically activistic than picketing?" is truly simple, "You and I today are as much of an activist in defense of our order today, whatever it might be, as I was an activist while sitting in jail."

What I finally came to see is that we are all activists about something. Everyone demands consistency; relies on consistency; and believes they represent a measure of consistency in their life and thought, whether or not they have a shred of it. Everyone strives to find that consistency in the world around them and believes that they are relatively successful in their efforts. The fact is, we must think we are consistent in order to survive at all.

We are so driven by this yen for consistency that we will bend and twist all who get in the way of our ideas - even if those ideas are that we should leave it all alone and not try and change anything. We will hate (or at least resent) all those who try to get us to see the world in such a way that it calls for actions that at the moment we are not willing to take.

The unconscious reasoning goes like this: All deviation from my thoughts and actions is proof that my thoughts aren't final, therefore they are a threat to my self-assurance - my conviction that I really do know something about how the world really is and my conviction in light of this reality that I am acting properly, morally, that I am good apart from the inescapable imperfections common to the human frame.

No one is free of this conviction of consistency. Oddly enough, no one is really successfully consistent either. You would think that someone would succeed in perfectly bending things to fit his theories! Or you would think that someone would successfully bend all his theories to encompass all things and capture the world as it is. The fact is, however, no one escapes the drive to bring order, yet no one succeeds in it either.

The question is not whether changing things is right or wrong. You will change things. You cannot help but change things. The two questions are, "Is there a right or wrong, better or worse way to bring change?" and "Is the change I represent an improvement or a detriment to true progress and goodness?" What will we grasp hold of and re-order to our sense of proportion and how will we do it? For we will grasp hold of something or we are dead, these are the only options - be human or cease to be at all.

In time the fervor of our pro-life cause was broken. Why?

How could Christians one day declare: "Saving Babies is God's will!" And the next day declare with equal fervor: "Go ahead and crucify him, and while your at it kill the little bastards!" This has stuck in my craw, along with the first question: "How can the ideologically committed spend so much time doing nothing but discuss the sub-sub-sub-points of their ideology without end?" and "How can anyone resist being sucked into the ideological maelstrom of reason and logic on any side of any question?" Judges would rant at me saying, "I will not permit you to turn this courtroom into a debating chamber for your ideas." No sooner were these words out of their mouth than they would feverishly lecture me for five or ten minutes about why killing children in the womb was right and why their court would defend it.

Many of these judges did so as professing Christians weaving God into their defense of murder. But of course they were perfectly neutral in what they said, I was the one who was trying to debate the issue though I stood silent and listened to them. We are all actively seeking to impose our order. And to do so we must maintain in our minds that we are the neutral ones and the other guy is the fevered ideologue. The belief in our personal neutrality or objectivity is central to our rage to bring order.

We must believe in the final analysis that we are not bringing order, we are simply supporting the world the way it really is. We after all represent the still point of the turning world.

See I can't even tell you the story without devolving into what this book will soon enough be consumed with. So, back to the thread: Seeing the futility of trying to work outside the Church, I became the pastor of a quiet little church and then immediately became convinced the sky would fall at midnight December 31, 1999. My only comfort is Chase Manhattan and all the major banks spent about a Trillion dollars each laboring under the same Y2K delusion.

Me? I simply liquidated all my assets (a quick task) and the church voted unanimously to sell its property and move to Virginia with me. There we were part of a new community (not a commune) with other ideologically sold out families. (By the way, the crucial difference between a commune and a community is not the ideology, but it is the tools of control. In a community each person owns his own property. In a commune each person gives his property to a person or group of trustees.

Those rulers have close to absolute power when they get hold of your assets. This form of government works only where those in custody are truly dependent such as for children, or in groups where men and women voluntarily give up their liberty and independence for a higher calling, such as religious orders, or military.) For society in general such a social scheme is called a cult, communisms or socialism. It is all the same thing.

This community called Rivendell was a landmark of the back to family movement. Back to the simple life, the soil, and family values where fathers rule and mothers serve them well. I was shocked to discover people who, like me, were moths drawn to the flame of ideological consistency - it was simply a different flame that held them mesmerized. I had preached patriarchy, and family values for years. Feminists hated me to the tune of 1.4 billion dollars worth of lawsuits. Non-Presbyterians found me to be legalistic because of my commitment to God's law, constitutions and other covenantal documents. I was pro-community and pro-Church structure. Pro-Male Elder rule.

Heck, I still am, come to think of it. But in four short years all of the aging I should have done from 10 to 44 caught up to me. If you don't believe me, compare the pictures of me in San Bernardino at age 44 after years of jail, and me after leaving Rivendell to come to Montreat at age 48, four years later. These were procrustean activists (as all activists are) who believe all the same things... almost.

But some in the group took those ideas and created a tight web of social rules and orders that defined righteousness and gender roles to a degree that I and others found to be absurd and destructive even of their own goals. And, truth be told, for all my protestations otherwise, I was one of them: both an activist and committed to ideals so similar to theirs that outsiders would not tell us apart. But my fellow Rivendwellers couldn't see the similarities between me and them, only the differences. Why?

This time instead of changing the world all we wanted to do was get a community going. I traded the outward direction of Operation Rescue for the inward direction of Rivendell. I had no better luck with family issues than I did with abortion issues.

We found that even the simplest of moral dictums resisted our efforts to weave them into a moral and social fabric, which was necessarily deducible from those first principles. There are still many who believe that they had the moral social fabric and if it wasn't for my obstinacy it would have worked. But I contend that their failure is simply an inevitable part of the package they have bought into. It is built into the nature of ideology. All ideologues fall prey to it. And ideologues will always fight and devour one another, especially when they try to form a community of like minded ideologues.

For instance, honor your father and mother; respect your elders and those in authority. Women should dress modestly. Men should lead. The family is the basic unit of social organization and its authority should be honored. Don't steal, don't lie etc. All of these are the fundamental bedrock of social order. No society can exist for long without these or similar convictions. Yet they do not dictate necessarily a particular web of rules and customs.

If you try to derive such a web - such an ecology - you must again and again arbitrarily choose the details of your social order from a vast array of possible rules that could stem from any of these fine principles. There is no necessary set of derivative rules or practices. People as diverse as Hindus, Buddhists, Ancient Greeks, Jews, Christians, Barbarians and Romans held to a similar set of values as the back to family patriarchs of Rivendell, yet their social orders were vastly different from each other.

I discovered that if we were to make this social order work, we would have to act as if there is no other acceptable order, at least for us. You can see, the problem: Women either can or can't pray in public, or make prayer requests. Girls either can or can't wear dresses. You either must say "Yes, Sir or Ma'am" or you don't have to. As soon as you decide one way then you discount the other. A social ideologue insists that to please God (or to please their eternal ideals of philosophical wholeness) you must decide on one set of customs and traditions.

But here's the problem. Take the simple and obviously true dictum that it is vital to know the difference between mine and thine. The 8th commandment is fundamental to civilized and orderly society. But as simple as it seems to say "do not steal," the reality is that most of the things you touch and use in life belong to someone else. The issue is not, "don't steal," but, what is it legitimate to do with what isn't yours?

And that issue is not answered by the 8th commandment or any derivative principle, neither is the issue of clothing answered by the law, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Once worked out, like all other applied details of any moral code, the details are dependent on what everyone decides to finally agree on, not on mere logical necessity flowing from the moral first principles, which we try to follow.

This apparent relativism was unnerving to many in this community. My insisting on this obvious fact and making it stand in the way of fine-tuning the code made me a libertine in their eyes. I can't say I was comfortable with the implications of this myself, but I could see no other alternative. We would either give liberty in these areas, or we would have to make rules where our first principles simply did not give us the rationally necessarily deducible details. First we decide on the details. Secondly we would elevate these detailed rules to the level of the first principles through a series of tortuous arguments linking them all together in a seamless garment.

Me genoito! If we give liberty we are not libertines. If we refuse to confuse man's law with God's we are not evading God's law. So to if we insist on the absoluteness of God's law (or any law) we are not therefore legalists. I am comforted to find this same dilemma in Jesus one of the clearest on the subject - he hated legalists, but he also taught that even the details of Moses' Law must be kept.

What I found disturbing and many there in Rivendell found intolerable is the fact that regardless of how the first principles might descend from heaven, inevitably, details of a social order are covenantal. Which is to say, based on the consent and agreement of the people. Which is to say, arbitrary within limits. They are not necessarily deducible from first principles. And yet this seems to be even the Bible's argument: "Does not nature itself tell you that long hair for a man is shameful?" What is nature?

It is the social convention of the day governing hair in this case. Paul links a divinely revealed standard to the social convention and calls it "Nature." Certainly this is the only word in the Bible condemning long hair and it is based on social norms as a reference point not God's law.

It is that arbitrariness that drives us crazy. We want the details of moral behavior to be fixed, eternal, as simple as the simple moral dicta that we find so direct and refreshing - "taste not touch not handle not." We do things thus and so because thus and so is the pattern of the cosmos. But that logical link between incontrovertible dictum and particular social practice does not exist in a form that gives the particular practice the same authority as the dictum. It is as illusory as the missing link of the evolutionist - which of course the evolutionary fundamentalist like the Biblical fundamentalists believes that link must be there, after all the end result is unarguably true.

A physical example of this search for an eternal pattern of life we can all live by is found in the martial arts. In the execution of balanced patterns the adept enters into the eternal pattern of the cosmos. Of course these patterns were thought up by Sensei So and So, and passed on by his disciples. But they go through their gyrations believing that in doing so they enter the eternal. And so did we in Rivendell in attempting to follow the Tai Chi of intricate patterns of our invented social order.

To bolster this order many argued that all social systems throughout history followed Rivendell's ideas of order, except the moderns of course. This is patently false but the faithful needed the bolstering more than they needed the truth. They needed the sense of consistent pattern more than they needed reality itself. Indeed, many could not function in what might be termed reality and had to create their own special ecology to sustain the order they wished to find.

The movie matrix is not so far off as a social analogy. We may not dwell in cocoons hooked up into a great computer generated illusion, but the fact is, our social ecology by analogy is not necessarily any more grounded in realty.

If Christianity is real, if there is such a thing as a Christian civilization or social order, then it must be more than self-consistent and bolstered by claims of antiquity and our interpretation of divine revelation. It must be true. It must in the end (and beginning) be that divine order.

Now, don't think if you are not a Christian that these same issues do not apply to you. If what you believe is real, if it is capable of sustaining social order or civilization then it must be not only believed and generated by enough people like you, it must be bolstered by claims that this is they way things really always have been, it must be true. Not being a Christian does not mean that you can evade truth claims any more than being a Christian means that you may supersede them. I use the examples found in a Christian community because that is where I have lived. But you can't escape the issues regardless of where you live, nor can I simply by living somewhere else.

Perhaps it can be summarized this way: There were two families in our community whose children in completely different ways and on different issues and at different points asked their parents the same question: "Is this which we are attempting to create here in Rivendell True Christianity?" One Family answered, "Yes." And the price they paid was the apostasy of at least two of their children, so far, and the vain attempt to cover it up since they make a living publishing a magazine that hands out this patriarchal claptrap as if it is found somewhere in either the Bible or written on some rock in the world somewhere.

Another family said, "No!" This family with some difficulty kept its faith but at the expense of relativizing much of its practical content as far as social order went. But the test was grueling and will have after-effects for years to come on all of us. The other families in Rivendell fell somewhere in-between in belief, conviction and outcome.

How can it be that things, which are agreeable to most in the group and are helpful on the level of rough calculation and day to day living, can become deadly when they become the nexus of a tight web of consistent reasoning applied to life? How could something good - family values - become the death of us? It was like a mother dying in child-birth.

Nothing wrong with the child - still God's blessing - but father and child must live with this reality of the part they played in the mother's death for the rest of their lives.

It was here as families were torn apart in the name of FAMILY VALUES that I started to wander again in my old question: what could the world possibly be like if I could agree with so much of what is taught and said, and yet find others in such heart-felt disagreement with me?

By the time I left I had been charged with over 30 pages of charges including heresy, feminism and coarse language in sermons. (Among other things I had brought a cactus into the pulpit as a sermon illustration describe visually what an "offense" might be. I asked why it was that people are so eager to take up an offense. I then mimicked several places that those who take up offenses might put it. Coarse? Yes.

True? A gross understatement of our life in that community.) Incidentally those who brought the charges were themselves disciplined and the intricate church covenantal court system I was so enamored of did protect me and them from what we might have done to each other. But it also made the grueling torture possible at a level that without those church courts their enmity could never had the fertile field to grow as it did. In the end it proved an utter disaster for all of us.

Why? How on earth could it be that we could agree on so much that no outsider would be able to tell us apart... and yet... and yet by the time it was all over, 1/3 (about 70) of our number had slipped away quietly in the first two years and then by the end of the third year another third (about 70) slipped away with great noise and orgiastic schism. Then about 20 more slipped out quietly in the aftermath. And finally I am slipping away myself, bankrupt, no job, my house foreclosing.

The land signed in security to buy our mobile home sucked into the vortex of the foreclosure. And I go back to live with my parents in Montreat, take a coaching job at Montreat College and to make ends meet I grovel for a minimum wage Mr. Fix It job at the college in the maintenance department and people suggest I sell knives from door to door. But I finally settle on earning some extra cash by delivering pizzas for Pizza Hut.

Here is the guy who was so smart he thought he could change the world. And I still think I can, just read this. It is about how and why we all want to find true order and bring it to the world for its own good. I'm not against it. Don't think I'm saying its all a mistake, Candide just go tend your garden. I'm arguing that it is inevitable for all of us to be this way. Even those of us who only tend our garden are simply limiting the extent of the world on which we will impose our order. But imposing order is what makes you human.

What is the nature of human belief, human knowledge, the world, God, morality such that we do these things to each other? Why is it that the drive for purpose, meaning and wholeness, community and individual integrity, peace, truth and justice are the things that make life worth living... and so we end up dying for them - or what we think is them. Or we end up trying to force them on others so that they die for the things that make our life worth living and their life worth removing.

What is Christianity? What is Atheism? Polytheism, who is Joe Six Pack - the fellow who lives moment to moment? What is conversion? What are belief systems? Is everything really relative? If so, why is "everything is relative" a self-contradictory statement? How could everything be self-contradictory in fact? And yet if there are absolutes, how could they be knowable to a finite mind?

As a sign of my rage, I actually think that this paper is the closest I have come to a coherent explanation of the ironies and self-defeating nature of radicalism, belief in God, normalcy and what it is that drives us. It is the rage for order, which can never be fully satisfied. Some of us are driven by it to bend all into the shape of our patterns. Others of us are driven by it to bend themselves into the shape of other people's patterns.

And most of us are somewhere in between, believing that we know a thing or two but with a healthy skepticism about how well we know it. The problem is, that skepticism usually looks an awful lot like apathy and the horror of the unexamined life. But the alternative leaves us on our own or each other's Procrustean beds. Or is it that we can never get others off of that bed or even ourselves off of it without the moral and philosophical equivalent of mind altering drugs?

Is this why the Bible forbids drunkenness but compares the God-directed life to being drunk and encourages moderate drinking especially during times of legitimate rejoicing or when you are on death row? God recognizes that there is no escape from our design to bring order except by dulling down that rage for order to the level where we can accept disorder and not be consumed. Some do it with drugs, others do it naturally, but to live with others in this world we must dull something.

In the same way that my first book was a plea to sell out to the light. This book is a caution against the madness sight brings you. It is my argument that because there is something more, something absolute, therefore we can rest in our finitude and not bend absolutely everyone and everything to our designs. Relativism is only a blessing to those who believe they have a grasp of what is absolute. "Relative" is what everything else is, relative to those absolutes. Without absolutes, of course, everything else would not, could not be relative, everything else would be utterly incoherent. Patterning by its very nature demands more than everything being equal. A pattern always reaches beyond itself to sustain its pattern. No pattern is self evident or self sustaining.

I'm not just shouting hip hip hooray for Christianity. My opinion of those who fancy themselves absolutists is a fairly dim both personally as well as intellectually they have their challenges. For instance, if everything were absolute, then of course there would be no room for change, diversity of opinion, economic exchange, any tolerance at all, or any other human thing we experience in the course of a day which call for our good manners to endure. If there were absolutes then they would be unknowable for all knowledge is finite. So what advantage is there to saying that there are things which are beyond knowledge. If they are beyond knowledge then how do you know about them?

Granted my explanations are a bit technical at this point. In time perhaps I'll spice the old bag up with some clever stories like I did my first book which was every bit this technical and dry before I figured out how to make my life stories into chapter illustrations. Perhaps in time I can do the same here. But for now what you see is what you get. When this is done I'll start on my next project, that, the West, and the Christianity that made it, is not lost and is not losing.

We are winning and have been winning for at least the last 2,000 years. I don't see a significant set-back on the horizon... unless of course they manage to regulate the price of oil and keep it artificially low or high or raise the minimum wage to a point at which the entire economy is destroyed and with it the last hope of the poor for any sort of decent employment. But even that will take a good 200 years to become a major set back.

But that is the next book about the ultimate triumph of all those things which today seem so quaint, like God, like the world, and like morality. This book is about what Martin Marty called our blessed rage for order, which is to say, it is a book about why all those quaint things will inevitably triumph - we are designed for the triumph of God which is why we are designed to be ordering beings.

It's a funny world, but I think it works like this:

Summary

Unlike the physical things of creation and the other animals and plants, we are designed to create an ecology that incorporates, interprets and transcends the physical world around us. This psycho-social ecology is our primary environment.

To do this we are designed to 1) create and test patterns for internal consistency; 2) to test that consistency against the environment; and 3) choose a course of action. Our patterns, our environment, and our evaluation process (P-E-E) interface continuously but only in a never ending instant. No more, and no less... ever. This is the moment of experience - "now". It can never be intentionally repeated. We discover, recreate and test order. We do this in, around, and out of that moment of experience.

That reality is inescapably driven by the patterns that we create to order that experience. In that moment - which is to say at all times - we are inescapably engaged with the objective world order as it is and as we imagine it to be in constant interaction. In actual experience, neither pattern nor objective world may be abandoned without the individual being reduced to chaos.

In the philosophical attempt to make sense of the world, neither the pattern of our understanding nor the reality of the objective world may be abandoned without the philosophy being reduced to chaos.

Each moment - "now" - we are organizing particulars into rational wholes. Those rational wholes are subgroups - particulars - of larger systems because they cannot explain themselves within the terms of the system, which ties them together. Those larger systems to be fully explained must become particulars of yet larger systems in a drive to order everything.

We are always taking these systems apart and putting them back together every moment of our life seeking a better fit, a higher more satisfying order, or just an answer to a question - such as, where are my sox? or Does God really care when I suffer? This is how we both shape and are shaped by our environment. This is why we are always attracted to utopian ideals, rational patterns, and ideologies - in the very neatness of their explanation and scope they represent ultimate order and our place in it.

They are the irresistible candles of our design drawing us like moths. The failure of ideals is why we become discouraged when nothing works or fits perfectly, and we are consumed by the flame even as our flapping puts it out in a guttering smoking waxy mess.

Because we are self-conscious and self-reflective, the patterns we create are also part of our environment as are the patterns of others like us. There is no knowledge, meaning, purpose or awareness apart from the order discovered and imposed by a patterning person. It is impossible to share the same awareness or pattern with another. The individual is the lonely center of his experience - and yet that experience is always one of comparing patterns with others so he is never utterly alone, he can to a certain extent match up his understanding with those around him.

Greater order demands greater abstraction and theoretical distance from our environment and its ability to correct a developing pattern. So while greater abstraction enables us to gain more coherent patterns, and broader range of action and knowledge, we may also be shooting further and further in the wrong direction with less and less ability to note the error. The more developed our order the harder it is to prove or disprove that it is coordinate with our environment. Thus the definition of the activist is one who digs in the same hole with all the more zeal in direct proportion to his lack of finding the treasure chest.

To avoid being stuck in a fruitless rut of logical and ideological dead ends, doubt plays a crucial role reigning our patterns in. Doubt questions everything that order organizes. Neither order, nor doubt is reliable in the end to tell us what is there or what is not there, what is true or false, what is right or wrong, what is illusion and what is reality. This is because both are tools of our PEE, not themselves things that are true or false, existent or non-existent. Our patterning drive finds connections everywhere. Our doubt keeps sifting through those connections discarding the ones which are... doubtful.

The areas in which individuals develop their patterns give them a more effective range of information and of action. The trade-off is that every decision to go in one direction is a decision not to go in all other directions because we only have a finite series of moments to do any thing at all.

Cooperating with others compliments personal specialization and thereby brings order to more than we could order alone as we rely on the results of each other's ordering efforts. This cooperation shortens the learning loop enabling us to start with the patterning work of others rather than force every man to reinvent the wheel in every issue of life. This cooperative effort is more a social ecology than an economy. It puts far larger areas of our environment within reach granting a higher range of choices in some respects while limiting even fundamental choices in other respects. In fact it becomes our ultimate environment. It is our ecosystem, the spidery web of our psycho-social reality. It is man's true environment.

The Story: Buying a Hot Water Heater

The other day Anne and I went down to look for a new hot water heater. We didn't know anything about hot water heaters, but we knew the people who did. We went to Lowes, Sears, and Home Depot. The interesting thing is, the sales people there did not know much more than we did about hot water heaters. In the months and years before we got there, they had been approached by representatives of different hot water heater manufacturers who told them quite a bit about the product.

Not enough for them to make one, but enough for them to decide which ones were the best to offer their public. Before going out, the sales reps of the manufacturer were educated by those who made them. Those who made the heaters were given the design by engineers who had spent their lives studying how to make water hot efficiently. Here is a wealth of knowledge that was mysterious to any given level of the chain that passed it on.

But the varying degrees of understanding were sufficient to serve as an index for those who needed to make a choice. The fact is, manufacture and sales are as mysterious to the engineers who know all about heaters as the principles and engineering that undergirds the invention of heaters is to those who make and sell them.

Specialization and those who organize or manage specialists (a field mysterious to all including management) is what puts vast amounts of knowledge, power, learning and technology at our fingertips. All we need to know is where to go and who to ask.

This same three-dimensional web exists for government, for business, for entertainment, and literally everything in any civilization. It depends on a moral code at every point as much as it does on engineering, manufacture and sales. We must be able to trust each link in the chain and forget our natural cynicism that such a chain could produce anything for in theory no one can see its end from its beginning. Only the hermit puts his cynicism into actual practice. The rest of us trust each other no matter how much our grumbling, doubt, regret or frustration disguise that trust. It is the moral code that produces the benefits of the cooperative whole.

At a number of points, this moral code prevents us from taking many actions that would be of direct benefit to us at the moment. Theft, murder, adultery and coveting are among those things that might momentarily benefit us, but we refrain from them in order to make broader benefits possible, even though no one can trace a one to one relationship in any given case.

So Anne and I paid good money, which we had earned through hard labor trading our lives for the index of trade - cash - and then trading that cash for a heater. It was real, not forged money. It was earned not stolen money. We came during store hours, and didn't break in to steal. We did not curse or resent the salesman for the price. The salesmen told enough of the truth conveyed by the sales reps who in turn received it from the engineers and brochure copywriters.

We enjoy hot water even though we don't have a real clue as to why or how it stays hot. Our guests believe we are civilized and we have status in society. Status? Everyone has hot water heaters, they aren't status symbols like a BMW. Yes, status. You would think a family with no hot water to be scarcely above the cave men. One thing that greater social organization does is require a higher and higher minimum standard of living.

The reason you don't think of it as a status symbol is that it has become a minim requirement of cultural status.

At every point we repress a quick though immoral solution to our need for hot water that would destroy the social fabric. And hot water is a central piece of that fabric though it makes it into no book on social ethics. And this is where the trouble lies. As long as we don't see an immediate benefit to ourselves of breaking it, the code makes sense.

The moral fabric of civilization also makes sense by protecting us, our wives, our husbands, children and possessions from others who need them as much as we needed that hot water heater. But when we want what isn't ours; when we have an appetite that can only be fulfilled with someone else's property, wife, husband, labor etc. Suddenly the code gets in the way of true prosperity, true love, true dominion and power. How could it be wrong if it feels so right to light up your life at someone else's expense?

And yet the irony is, as long as we live in a cooperative effort, everything we do is partially at someone else's expense. There is no such thing as a pure pay-as-you-go system. Grace and keeping the law are essential to organized life with others. WE all function with grace and law even though none of us really knows what it is. As with all things in our life.

Back to the Summary

The benefits of living in a cooperative whole have over the centuries gradually increased. Until now the minimum standard of moderate success are impressive: one-touch heating, individual homes (or apartments) with separate rooms for all with common and touch of the finger cooking. Vacuum cleaners, garbage disposal, hot and cold running water, individualized fingertip transportation and mass communication in most rooms. These have lost their wonder and are minimum requirements of civilized living - that is to say cooperative living.

Obviously they are not minimum requirements of survival. Yet in a true sense they have become the minimum requirements of survival in the western ecosystem. But whether we include them in the minimum requirements of true survival or not, we find that we cannot live without the benefits of the cooperative whole. At the same time we enjoy the fruit of cooperation, we find it easy to resent the restraint on our actions imposed by the common consent needed to make cooperation work.

Issues of property, infringement of others, telling the truth, the attraction between men and women, offense, praise, glory and blame are things, which govern our actions far beyond the material profit/loss statement or anything in the physical world itself. These are all human habitat issues - including the concept of profit and loss.

Isolated individualism and the perfectly coordinated cooperative are the two polar illusions of this tension. Like everything else, adopting one or the other pole as the only legitimate principle of operation can give you a tight internally consistent ideology. Indeed, the demands of rational coherence will drive you toward one pole and away from the other.

However, if you give in to this, in time you will develop insurmountable conflict with your environment even while suggesting courses of action, which may be highly beneficial in the sense that they seem free of doubt because of their tight coherence to the patterns of your mind. These courses of action often work in the beginning. For instance, the third Reich in 1941 attacked in a series of brilliant strikes through the Ardennes forest and forever changed the nature of modern strategy naming it blitz kreig.

Four years later the same army did the same thing to a similarly unprepared enemy in the same forest. They failed miserably. We know of that attempt not as a brilliant shift in strategy but as a failed push called the Battle of the Bulge. Many of us experience a similar failure of design as the diet of our energetic youth produces a sleek physique enabling us to streak through life, though in later years the same diet is reduced to a vain battle of the bulge.

With the greater benefit of diversification and cooperation also comes a decreasing ability to produce our basic necessities for ourselves. We depend on others to feed, clothe, house, educate, entertain, and defend us. In fact, there is a threshold of social diversity that when passed over renders the overwhelming majority of society utterly unable to create the bare necessities of life for themselves.

These things are beyond them whether we are talking about food and shelter on a survival basis, or those minim social requirements for civilized living like the vacuum cleaner and hot water heater. How the cooperation of diverse specializations in our social ecology should be organized, if at all, has been the endless debate of history. The debate is beyond resolution.

It is rooted in the finite nature of personal experience and so defies any final answer to the problem of the morality/benefit of personal freedom vs. the morality/benefit of the constraints on that freedom required by corporate cooperation.

But this social restraint on our actions goes further. The boundaries of socially agreed upon patterns both limit and expand how we interact with the environment or even perceive it. Seat belts are the foolish luxuries of over protective worry warts in one decade only to become the legally enforced symbol of good parenting three decades later. The mad scientist today is the Nobel Prize winner tomorrow.

Heroes and villains alike break the social boundaries - disrupt the psycho-social ecosystem - and there is nothing within the ordering process itself to tell you which is the hero. Who is the hero and who is the villain, Antigone or Creon? Bacchus or Pentheus? Dirty Harry or Scorpio? Simba or Scar? Each accuses the other of tearing down the foundations of social order. Each believes that they are upholding social order.

Every year movies and art portray the villain as hero (In Moulin Rouge a French whore is the fascinating heroin) and hero as villain (Dirty Harry must break the law in order to protect citizens who curse him for protecting them). Some proper citizens are thrilled by the show and others are deeply disturbed. In either case, their reaction proves that art is touching something fundamental to the ambiguity of their life.

If the social fabric were sufficient there would be no need of heroes. And yet without heroes there would in time be no social fabric since the ultimate work of a hero is to confirm that social fabric even as they might violate it to accomplish that higher confirmation. Without a higher purpose there are no lower purposes. It is the nature of patterns and systems.

This larger social environment is as vital to our life as the physical environment is to an animal. Our existence is an ordering force that interfaces with our personal, social, and physical environment. But we can never have sufficient interface to grant finality to any order we attain. And yet we cannot live outside of an order which in many crucial respects we create and sustain.

Like Jonathan Edward's loathsome spider, we cannot resist fiddling with our web, constantly reordering, redefining, reinventing it and finally forcing it on everyone else while trying to get their sticky webs off of us. Unlike the spider, however we do this through reflection more than instinct. The nature of order (and living in a cooperative whole) demands satisfaction, completion, comprehensiveness - perfection and above all that others see it our way and agree with us.

We are intrinsically held back from that comprehensive satisfaction which our ordering nature demands. Yet we strive for it none the less. It is a rage we cannot restrain because it is who we are. Order demands but cannot produce certainty, objectivity, thing-in-itself, clear and distinct ideas that correlate perfectly with our environment.

And yet everything we learn, every paradigm shift we experience, every conversion, every important conversation, like a good meal, fills us with a real though temporary satisfaction as if we had found that full-orbed completion our rage for order dangles before us like a carrot on a stick driving us on, never letting us rest. It should not surprise us that even the ideal of rest holds out two very different possible ideals.

The one is the satisfaction of a full-orbed pattern-evaluation-environment perfectly fitting together - abundant life, wisdom - and the other is Entropy, Nothingness, Oneness, Death. The Medieval Rose contrasts sharply with the 8 fold path of the meditating enlightened one. The wild-eyed stare of the icon and desert mystic contrasts with the sleepy inward eye of the Buddah. But both are symbols of infinite rest.

The one is the rest of final resolution of an infinite being, the other is the disciplined disintegration into the infinite nothingness - the Tovu Wuvohu, the Deep, Chaos, the Void. Both claim ultimate meaning.

Our patterns are inevitably finite, limited by the single moment of awareness on the one hand and the constraints of abstraction on the other. From these limitations come the contradictions of life which are the explicit study of theoretical thought and the necessary limits of normal thought and action in the marketplace. These contradictions are often defined in terms of matched pairs of balancing ideas.

Taken alone, either side of the pair leads to impossible patterns both in terms of their own internal logic as well as in their divergence from experience. Together they form balanced dualisms of different sorts which share the following characteristics: 1) if both are true then neither is true; and 2) if only one is true then neither is finally explicable. The fact is, dualistic pairs reflect the limitation of our patterning. They are the result of abstract knowledge, which is to say all finite knowledge.

Like the balance of any ecology whether social or physical, the dynamic competition of check and balance seems to be what moves us forward making life and awareness as we know it possible. Some basic examples of these in the theoretical realm are the one and the many problem, and Freedom and Determinism.

Politically these are reflected by the polarity of individual freedom and the constraints of the corporate state; perfection and imperfection; abstract knowledge vs exhaustive knowledge; absolute moral standards and the variations of a million applications.

But this dualism of finite thought is not perfect. The two sides are never equally ultimate because the dualism is a result of how things really are, not merely how they must be to be rational in our patterns. The early astronomers and mathematicians were disappointed to discover that the spheres were not perfectly spherical. The elliptical orbits of the planets let them down. So too, the opposites, which define our patterns, are not truly balanced dualisms.

This is discouraging to some, and you know why, it is discouraging because most of us gravitate toward symmetry. It is more orderly. Nonetheless, like Order and Doubt, one side is primary and the other derivative, dependent or relative. That is to say, life is conceivable if one side is fully realized even if it is impossible to attain or explain. Whereas life is inconceivable if the other side were realizable. For finite creatures, dynamic balance between unattainable ideals is the mechanism that moves us forward.

The alternative is entropy. As any Special Forces commando can tell you about combat operations, if you stop you die.

This drive - to make order; to find order; to create order; to impose order; to accept order, the sense that order must be grounded in the absolute, with the secondary check that doubt provides to balance and keep us honest - is not merely the most fundamental drive of existence. Our rage for order is inescapably a moral rage and is existence, as we know it. It is an order of being designed for a fellowship that on its own it can never attain.

We were meant for fellowship with ourselves, each other, the physical world and God. We can neither prove nor escape the reality of any of these objects of our fellowship - our purpose. This order is somehow connected with the way the universe really is and we ought to be connected with that pattern. That connection lies deeper than argument, we either know it exists or we are deeply disturbed and deracinated by trying to deny that existence.

The Moment of Consciousness: “Now”

What is a moment? Look inward (or outward) and try to define that moment which you call consciousness, or "now". That moment of awareness, though it must have dimension and time, lacks these things as significant, measurable quantities, even though it is the integration point of space, time, consciousness, action, and personal identity. "Now" is the only point of interaction of our environment and the pattern of memories, anticipation, and action.

These are the things, which we build within that moment of interaction with our environment and ourselves to make sense of it and tie it together with all other moments. We sustain those patterns into the next moment and the next and the next in a way that makes it irrelevant whether or not each "now" is a discrete time period, or simply a continuous process. In either case, the pattern sustaining process gives continuity to the evaluation and the physical and social environment, which "now" plugs us into.

In each "now" we evaluate pattern and environment by contrasting the patterns in the environment we experience in that moment with the environment, as we believe it to have been, to be, and to become in our patterns.

I have no doubt that some day even "now" will be abstracted and quantified in some mathematical or spiritual model. This knowledge may help us understand the mechanics of the process the way neurophysiology and psycho linguists sheds light on the interface of mind, brain and world. If so it will be no more relevant to us than it would be for a batter, before going to bat in the bottom of the ninth, to work out on paper the mathematical dimension of the trajectory of a grand slam.

And there is no math yet discovered that can describe the significance of that one ball going over the fence with three men on base at the end of a game. The simple reality of our experience (or non-experience) of "now" will not change. The batter has within him what it takes to connect with the pitch.

Reality is our inextricable attachment to our environment by a never-ending moment called "now." That attachment is made by building up a set of patterns, which interface with that environment and open up a range of possible actions. Some actions we will take and others we will reject. Some things we will see which are there. Others we think we see but they are either not there, or not there the way we think they are.

Still other things will remain beyond our sight even though they are right in front of our face because we do not have a pattern capable of granting internal reality to match the external presence. This is demonstrated in things as different as radio waves and love. But if something is to be seen, unseen, or denied "now" is the only moment in which it happens. If you have worked your way through that sentence you have exhibited a high degree of exactly what I am talking about.

Even the word "see" is used both literally as a sensation as well as figuratively as a metaphor for all understanding interaction with the environment. In reading this paragraph and understanding it, you have in the end done no more than even retarded people do when they navigate their way through the simplest of actions such as nodding to indicate "yes." Your mechanisms for ordering are simply superior... but they are the same mechanism for bringing and dealing with order.

We can no more shake ourselves of the reality of the environment than we can shake ourselves of the illusory nature of that awareness. We simultaneously organize and doubt our organization. In the moment called "now," order and doubt weave together to sharpen and perfect the patterns we create, comparing them to each other and the environment, so providing the best range of choices in the widest areas we can to make things better.

We hope. P-E-E the Elements of Consciousness or Experience Three things go to make up Experience:

1. Patterns - "Abstract" means to connect the dots. We take from experience salient features - dots as it were - as opposed to all experience exhaustively. We relate them in a pattern that represents like a map how the world works. This pattern grows and develops throughout our life and directs our attention.
2. Environment - Everything external to the evaluation process at any given moment including, the external world, other people, the social ecology and remembered patterns.
3. Evaluation - We constantly test our patterns for consistency with themselves and with the environment, and we test our environment for consistency with our patterns and our memories of prior perceptions of it.

Three presuppositions make Experience possible but cannot be proved within P-E-E:

1. Concerning our Environment - that the objects and relationships in the environment are truly related apart from the patterns we have created to abstract and describe that relationship. (Objectivity, Ontology, Cosmology, Beauty, Aesthetics, the study of things and relationships existing apart from us.)
2. Concerning our Patterns - that the relationships in our environment are knowable - reproducible by the patterns we create. In those patterns we really do have a workable analogical understanding of the world. We believe that internal consistency of patterns really is the key to dealing successfully with the world. (Epistemology, how we can know the things and relationships that exist apart from us, Psychology, Sociology, Love, Jealousy Hatred and Attraction.)
3. Evaluation - that our evaluation process really does enable us to gain a more correct and increasingly comprehensive grip on and control over our environment and our patterns. Both self-correction and environmental correction are possible. (Morality, ethics, methodology, test controls, models, any sort of testing or valuation process that enables us to evaluate our environment and patterns and check them against each other uncovering causal relationships and consequences of patterns.)

The fact is, no one would do or know anything if they, the world or God did not exist. There is no doubt that we not only know these things because they are what we must presuppose in order to make knowledge or doubt itself possible. We know them because they are there. Without them there would be nothing.

This P-E-E mechanism is not what we ought to do, it is what we do that makes us what we are. It is inescapable human reality. The only way to escape is through catatonic madness, or highly artificial and contrived meditation based on the illusion that there is benefit in suppressing the reality that makes us human.

Our experience is the comparison of the feedback between selective patterned order (internal, subjective) and exhaustive environmental order (external, objective). In this comparison, we evaluate and change the order found in both the pattern and the environment. Moment by moment we sustain a pattern that gives meaning and continuity to our consciousness. In the feedback of experience, the following things (among others) take place: We experience the environment.

We experience the patterns we create of that experience with the environment. We examine our pattern for internal consistency. We test the pattern against the environment. We test the environment against the pattern. We test it all against our memory of these things. We predict what will happen next and take appropriate action to change ourselves, our pattern and our environment.

All this in the twinkling of an eye. Animal existence is this ordering process, more fundamental than the things we often call basic drives and appetites such as survival, sex, power, chaos, food, shelter, beauty, pleasure, rest, or control. "Do all things decently and in order." Some argue that it is good to have order. They create seminars and schools to encourage methods that increase our order. They believe that goodness is found in proportion to order. But surely not all order results in beatitude. The irony of course is that though Paul urged greater order, his lasting impact on Christianity lay in a series of ad hoc letters, which survived the decay of time.

"Paul! Your learning has driven you mad!" "Of the writing of books there is no end."" Others argue that it is bad to have too much order and urge us to kick back and smell some roses, not get too educated, and not to think too much - to get out of the box, to spend a bit of our time in irrational things, chaos. These recognize that goodness is not found in proportion to order.

But surely there is no blessing in disorder is there. The irony here is that it was the governor who represented the order of Rome, the most vastly ordered empire to that date who was upbraiding Paul for being too ideological, too ordered, mad. "Tend your Garden" Some despair of ordering the whole world yet cling to the idea that a perfect order is attainable. These argue for perfecting order on a scale that is manageable - such as one's personal life, or one's family, church or business. Various self-control movements such as EST, or back to family movements such as the Patriarchy movement, some Wiccans, and even the Know-Nothings, Mugwumps and Anti immigrationists of political isolationism are examples of this limited perfectionism.

Some argue that this or that method of ordering our experience gives us objectivity and therefore more control, power, sex, food, knowledge, technology, pleasure, friends, satisfaction, or whatever else we believe we must have. These methods run the gamut from the scientific method, to spiritual disciplines, to "God's way of raising children," to self-help books, marriage and sex manuals, business franchising and the vast legal systems of modern government.

This rage for order is not only found in the ideologically driven tyrant, sybarite, desert hermit, or academician. It is present in those not ideologically driven such as the proverbial housewife, the working stiff, and in any of us in between from the least to the greatest. Creatively ordering our experience is as inescapable to the living animal as breathing or heart beat. It is the relative excellence of our rage that puts us at the top of the heap.

Bacon's scientific method and Kipling's Poem "If" makes explicit the ideal of securing certainty through methodology. The futile Eastern Mystic makes use of methodology to erase the possibility of method. In either case both are extreme examples of what all people have always done and always do every moment of their existence. Experience = Pattern-Examination-Environment. Ordering is the fundamental process of life beyond which we cannot go.

The feedback of experience is not a truly circular process because our experience of time as moment flowing into moment does not permit us to come back to repeat any starting point. There is no "GO" to pass, no $200 to collect. And so the trick is to be able to create the pattern that really does square with the world as it is, the world as we have conceived it before, and the world as others conceive of it. The closest we come to re-experiencing something is to reenact a situation that simulates a previous situation and comparing our memories of prior moments that were like it and from these adjust our patterns.

Now

Fig. 1 Pattern maintenance spiral - Pattern-Evaluation-Environment. Our moment of experience "now" moves through situations, which are similar to former situations, where we see the lines crossing over, but they can never go back to re-experience the past. All we can do is attempt to create methods of remembering what happened and controlling the context of experiences or experiments and compare notes, Dejavu. The rough nature of the diagram grates on our sense of order. The spirals should be neat.

We demand this even though we have no experience of an orderly sequence of the Patterning-Examination-Environment correction process. Longing for symmetry is part of our rage for order and pattern which enable us to carry out the tasks beholden to those at the top of the heap of the created order.

Who I Am

Human personality, personhood, "I," is something you can never put your finger on. By now this should not be too surprising. Where doubt is granted ultimate status not even you exist... except as the self-made ignoramus who just doubted. Such doubting does not prove that you exist any more than any other verb, or action you might engage in. The presupposition of anything you do is that you and your environment exist in a way that for better or worse makes possible your interaction.

But what is that presupposed "I"? If you take a deductive approach, you peel back the layers of who you are. What this really means, is you examine all the verbs of your life - all the things you have done and thought - your patterning processes and their interaction with your environment. This is as fruitful as peeling an onion in search of its core. In the process you aren't sure whether the tears are from laughter, sadness, or boredom. There are many different levels. But there is no core.

What you are left with is different piles of onionskins. In one pile are standards we hope to keep. In another pile are our successes, and in another our failures to keep them. In another pile is the way we feel about it all, and in yet another pile is our opinion of what others think of it all. We can feel praise and blame radiating from them, but we can't find out where it is coming from or what it is that is feeling it in the first place.

In still another pile are all the things which have to do with our physical bodies which like every other pile of skins are inextricably "I" and yet not "I".

This is disturbing, because if your "I" or your "self" has existence, then there should be a core down there somewhere - something measurable. But you won't find it. How can I know "I" exist and yet not be able to know it or prove it? So what am I? If you take an inductive approach you add up the different layers and make the total the reality of who you are - I am the sum of all I have thought and done and not to be limited to any one thing that went into that sum.

It is no surprise that we end up with what is nonsense mathematically, but still the simple reality we cannot escape: We are more than the sum of our parts. That pile of onion skins taken severally or jointly is less then what we know ourselves to be. That onion growing under ground is more than what it is when placed under the analyst's microscope. And yet it is also everything the analyst sees.

So what am I? No, it is, so who am I? Though it is possible to speak of the "I" as a thing - a what - we are more, we are persons - Who. We are self-defining and we are defined by what is outside ourselves. We are both defined by what we have done, also by what we might do. Yet we are beyond all these things. This ambiguity is consistent with what we know of our experience being that integration point of Pattern, Evaluation, and Environment.

That it is something real, that we can know it, is part of the presupposition of experience even as it also may become a part of the objective experience itself. That I am more than the sum of my parts, and yet that I am connected integrally with each part is another dynamic aspect of our reality built into the core of who we are. We are that point of balance, the parts and the greater than the parts. But exactly what that is, is beyond us.

Is this evaluating "I" an illusion to which we grant pretended objectivity in order to make sense of things but in the end it has no existence? Is it merely a delusive projection? No, it is that which makes all projection possible. "I," like "now," like "morality", like "God", like the "reality of the world", like the priority of one pole of a dynamic balance over the other, is not an illusion. These are the realities that make experience every moment of our existence possible as a coherent experience.

They are realities that when systematically doubted result in our own and even society's corporate destruction. And finally, these are realities that cannot be established by measurement, argument or force. They are prior to these things. It is their reality that establishes them in our beliefs making understanding of even the most mundane thing possible, not our belief which establishes them. You don't prove God's existence or nature's existence, their existence proves you.

Our social ecology cannot sustain itself without them, and yet they must be established in each heart - freely known and understood or they have no lasting power.

The deviant person is the one who does one of two things. He tries to take one or another onion layer and make it the core of reality - which is idolatry; or he denies his own existence because he cannot define that "I" and uses this as a pretext to engage in destructive activities. This is akin to chewing on your tongue or cheek before the Novocain wears off. If you can't feel it, it must not exist.

If "I" is not a definable core of existence that you can measure, weigh and number, then the fool deduces that any Pattern-Evaluation-Environment is as good as any other and so he chomps away. The harmless fool hurts only himself. The ideologically driven fool destroys as many people and things as he can touch in his mad drive to conform the earth to his image. Not content to chew on his own cheek he requires us all to chew on ours, and failing that he wants to bite off our tongues on our behalf.

The substance of reality is found in Faith Hope and Love even these terms are most often reserved for things we know are not. The normal person is the one who knows his limitations and positively builds a world that is better than the one he found. He knows that his ideas of "better" are limited, and yet he also knows that "better" is more than his subjective valuing. He must believe that it is worth being better. He puts his hope on it and even falls in love as he is driven to achieve it.

He knows that there are true standards, which are knowable even if not perfectly knowable. He knows that he cannot do or be perfect. He knows he is an individual, an "I." He knows he must work with many other "I's." He knows that there is more to it than he can grasp. Yet he is confident - he has faith - that when he grasps something, he himself is real who grasps. He is confident - he hopes - that the grasping is real and that there is reality to what he grasps.

And finally there is the inescapable reality that in this whole process there is one who has first grasped him. To be human is to have felt that grasp however one might have defined it. This desire for what is real and true leads him on - he wants to walk in the footsteps of that greater reality. Faith, Hope and Love are inescapable realities of who we are as individuals, and the good we can accomplish in this life.

They are fundamental to "I." Remove yourself as a responsible individual agent drain dry the presuppositional reality of faith, hope, or love and you have removed the possibility of humanity and any possibility of yourself as more than a speck of fly's dung on the wall of someone else's reality.

Many pit the responsibility of the individual against the responsibilities of being part of a greater whole, the corporate man. But the individual is always himself and a part of a greater self, though never fully integrated. The one is necessary to the other. There is no such thing as one who is perfectly individualistic and no such thing as a corporate consciousness comparable to that found in an ant hill, a bee hive or for the more fanciful, the Borg.

But however you want to say it, the "I" is whatever it is that creates and examines the pattern from its impression of the environment. It is forever distinct from whatever it examines including itself. And yet it is identified with what it examines. The word for this identification between the "I" and what it examines is "Responsibility." It is impossible to doubt it, yet it is impossible to define or prove it. It is not an illusionary figment of the need for an ordering principle. It is the ordering principle for individuals.

The Rage for Order

The drive to order anything is necessarily the drive to order everything. "He has put eternity into the heart of man yet in such a way that he cannot see the end from the beginning." The process of establishing order when you are finite has maddening side effects. They all stem from the fact that the drive for order itself has no internal rational limitation - it is a drive to comprehend all in a unified field.

It causes us to see that which fits the pattern and ignore or explain away that which does not. We feel a wholeness and completion, which our drive for order gives to everything. Yet we never escape the sense of diversity and particularity which defies the wholeness and completeness of any pattern. On the one hand, people are able to function. They can sense the world around them. They do remember the past, evaluate their circumstances, enjoy the fruit of good decisions and suffer the consequences of the bad.

All of these things are the result of their P-E-E. But there is nothing within the pattern or its brief though never ending interaction with the physical world that tells them when the order in the pattern is sufficiently deviant from the environment to cause them problems.

Sometimes our patterns create an illusion that is harmless - we dream, we see a mirage. Sometimes our patterns create illusions that are beneficial - we set goals, we write and read novels, start businesses, get married, sign Declarations of Independence, bind ourselves to contracts, see movies, dance and sing... We see or understand anything at all as meaningful assomething more than random sensations.

Other times our patterns create what seems to be an illusion in terms of prior experience but it turns out that we have discovered a more fundamental organization of our environment - we make scientific and technological discoveries, learn skills, learn anything at all, have a paradigm shift, solve mysteries, have a religious awakening, develop a more unified field theory that explains our experience, become heroes, fall in love, or discover that we were cuckolded.

Other times our patterns create a deadly illusion where the logic of the pattern drives us further and further from the environment as others understand it and as it really is - insanity, perversion, alienation, anomie, paranoia, blasphemy, murder, theft, adultery, rape, covetousness, conspiracy theories, suicide, just one more drink, signing the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Communist Manifesto, the Humanist Manifestos, and other forms of ideological fanaticism such as Mein Kampf or almost anything coming from Marx and Engels and their idiot children.

And finally when we are in conflict, we try to create a pattern that will give us sound information about what is happening and disrupt our opponent's ability to create a pattern that would give him sound information. We also use our patterns to define our opponents in any way that creates an advantage for us and justifies our victory over them and in some cases our destruction of them. Puni Delendum est.

Our capacity to order does not have within the patterns we create the ability to determine when order has gone awry. There are built in safeguards such as pain mechanisms, logical inconsistency, social sensitivity to others, and anomalous observations (observations of things which suggest a different pattern, or at least do not fit our current pattern) which if true would force us to change our pattern to one in which the observation along with the rest of what we know is explainable in terms of a new pattern.

The crazy doctor who like a bestial raccoon is constantly washing his hands and imposing his neurotic fetish on the doctors and nurses around him is kicked out of medicine one day and then hailed as a visionary the next when the germ theory is proven to the medical world's satisfaction. And the opposite happens. A man with a powerful gift to explain and order the world one century, such as John Locke, is utterly ignored by the analytical thinkers of another century except as an historical curiosity.

And in some cases even the name of the most widely published man in one era is utterly forgotten in the next. (The name of the most widely published thinker of the French enlightenment has been so thoroughly forgotten that he slips my mind even as I write this. If I or a future editor were to recall him to mind you still would not recognize him unless Continental Enlightenment happened to be a curious fetish of yours. Joseph Butler I think is his name. May 29, 2007) Yet this rage to order burns on.

We are convinced that what we know and see is true. We also know that it might not be. So we develop methods to distinguish truth from error, fact from opinion, reality from illusion. Our temptation is to trust the result of the method - to raise it to an ultimate height. And yet when we engage in systematic doubt, none of these methods is capable of grounding any of their results in absolute reality whether mathematical, intuitional or spiritual.

The best we can do is use doubt to minimize error because the most we have to work with are abstractions of a partial though real perception of our environment and patterns. When these interact they give order to our world.

We must have order, but the ordering process itself cannot tell us when it is advancing our cause or degrading it. Sometimes our errors and illusions are deadly and sometimes they are delightful. But most often error is merely irritating. Greater certainty lies in greater order. So does greater insanity. Doubting the order is healthy. It is how we correct ourselves and gain a higher order. But there is no formula for knowing when we have doubted, or even not doubted, enough. Doubt can lead to paralysis, weakness, and abject fear. The lack of doubt can lead to arrogance and foolishly destructive errors. Both doubt and order by their nature drive us toward unachievable goals. Neither can tell us when to quit or which is appropriate at the moment.

What is the difference between the Alchemist and the Chemist? The astrologer and the astronomer? The Numerologist and the Mathematician? The theoretical mathematician of the 19th Century and the nuclear physicist of the 20th Century? The Philosopher and the Theologian? The cult leader in the desert and John the Baptist? or Moses? Mohammed, Sidhartha, or Jesus? Nostradamus or Isaiah and John? The Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Matthew?

John Newton was the leading alchemist of his day not before he wrote the Principia but during and after his writing. There is nothing in the ordering or doubting process itself that can tell you the difference between these examples of contrasting belief systems and the men who forge them. Not all belief systems are equally true. The differences between belief systems are real. They are rooted in both the world and in our P-E-E mechanism. If you chose wrongly in the end you will pay for it.

The world is a very unforgiving place and no amount of wishful P-E-E will change that. Nature is not a kind loving place it is a harshly unforgiving place where failure winds you up on someone else's dinner plate. The only place Nature seems kind is in the patterns mankind has given to it putting it to use in our stewardship. Outside of that, the otter is carefully nursed back to life in a safe human environment. This seems unnatural to some and therefore unkind and unloving, so they release it.

Within five minutes the entire town who came to witness this symbolic freeing of nature and spontaneous joy watched in horror as an Orca ate the otter after first playing cruelly with it for an hour. Hell is not merely a place for eternal consequences to be realized it is the reality we experience here and now for those who do not think that responsibility and consequences are real. For those who think there is a kindness in nature apart from the kindness of a purposing agent who reshapes nature to be kind.

Order, Disorder and Dualism. Order and disorder are not coequal forces. The drive for order is primary. Even disorder is not the original state of the external world. It too is ordered and we seek to know that order and transcend it as well. That is what true progress is all about. That is why faith hope and love are integral to any reality system of man. Our whole being is to create a higher organization making use of the real structures of the physical, spiritual and social world.

Doubt tears order apart so as to examine its constituents. Think of the things you know like boxes. They are coherent wholes containing constituent parts that are bound together by an idea. Doubt dissolves the unifying idea in order to take the box apart to see what the parts are apart from the box/idea which unifies them. Doubt asks how we can know for sure that these contents all belong in this box.

Once scattered on the floor you discover that each part in that box is also a smaller box made up of things in it which can be taken out and asked if they belong in that littler box. You also discover that you can put many of the parts into different boxes which often do not suggest themselves until after you have torn the boxes apart. This is the proper function of doubt. This is the essence of creativity - we tear apart what is and imagine what might be if we reorder the "what is" a bit differently.

The world will forever be divided between those who want to freeze the process - the box tearing project - at some point of development, and those who want to forever think outside of any preconceived boxes. Both of these are impossible ideals and those who ideologically pursue them make life miserable for all those around them who have learned to be content with partial success. Creative thinking means tearing the boxes apart in a controlled way that produces a better box in the end.

This is what most of us do most of the time. The fall of a social order is marked by the ascendance of either a legalist freezing of the box project or the unbridled tearing apart until we lose faith in the possibility of boxes at all and the culture loses faith in the idea that its boxes are better or worthy of their faith, hope and love.

In all of this what is evident is that you don't begin with doubt, you begin with concrete attempts to put two and two together. When the patterns don't match the environment, it gives rise to the doubt that our patterns and their coherence with the environment are perfect. This doubt can remain simply as a random humility - I can be wrong so I won't shout too loudly - or it can itself be turned into a systematic method and made part of the ordering process to check ourselves. But in neither case is it primary. Doubt enters in after there is something positive to doubt. Doubt doesn't build the boxes or fill them. Doubt can only examine what is in them and tear them apart. Order is primary because without it there would be no box to tear apart and no ability to construct a better box.

Another reason doubt, or disorder, is not a coequal of order is that the ideal of order, though unachievable, is nonetheless livable. Order is the ideal of perfect knowledge and perfect actions based on it. By contrast, the ideal of doubt is that formless void, the "field" of perfect entropy where there is truly no order, which is to say, nothing, or death - the ideal of Eastern mystical trance where the one is submerged in the ALL. There can be something if the finite ordering process could be perfectly ordered.

There is in fact a reality that is exhaustively ordered, whether we understand it or perceive it correctly or not. But it can only be known in part. By contrast, there is nothing if the ideal of doubt were achieved. If achieved, even the ability to refer to doubt as an "it" or as an "ideal" or in any way at all would be impossible. If skepticism were the last word, there would be no word at all first or last. To even argue for it is to deny it. This is not true of order.

Perfect order may be impossible to attain in our understanding, but if attained, it is indeed something because it is the attempt to correctly understand the fullness of order that does exist in the world of our environment and in the world of our knowing life. Perfect doubt if attained in our understanding is nothing and there is nothing in the world of or environment that corresponds to it. Doubt is what enables us to think hypothetically and therefore it cannot be something substantial on its own.

Doubt is the servant of order and not vice versa. They are not equal concepts or drives. They are not equally productive. As the doubt-corrected order grows it becomes more effective in solving problems and giving us broader explanatory systems. Disorder can go no further than entropy. Destruction and construction though both an aspect of creativity, are not coequal actions. In a finite world we advance only when the destroyer is the servant of the builder.

Yet we cannot advance without the destroyer tearing down and doubting those things which need perfecting in our order. This can be deeply disturbing, but it is necessary if our thinking is to advance. The question we face is how to keep that doubt in check where it can carry out its useful function without taking over. Destruction is an inescapable part of creativity and any private or social order. There is no escaping law and its consequences.

This is why we do not simply dabble with order. We do not try to bring order when it is fun or convenient or as opposed to those who do not want order. We are beings who try to order everything regardless of what we do with it. And that drive to order has no internal boundaries, it is a rage that we might try to direct, and control but we can never turn it on or off. Regardless of how much we might doubt, all who continue to live deny by their very life whatever argument they make that either doubt is final or that doubt and order are a balanced coequal dualism.

The Psycho-social Rage for Order

Our rage for order creates psychological and social environments which are more real to us than the physical world because they are patterns created by processes similar to the one which provides our own experience. And yet the social environment is less objective or ultimately provable than the physical world, which is at least there in a tactile sense and far more agreeable to measurement.

All animals to some extent create a social environment that has a reality comparable to their physical environment. We, however, create a social environment or ecology that is more real than our physical environment. Words hurt more than sticks and stones. Creatively tearing apart and rebuilding our social patterns is what we are, it is not something we strive to be. We do this on the level of individual perception and we do it on the broader scale of our social ecology.

We create our social environment and then use it as the foundation for our patterns and evaluation process. This environment then constrains us until it is torn down and rebuilt with new constraints. It is the most significant aspect of our environment. Because it is generated by social concensus and not found in any "natural" law or process, many have bought into the illusion that it is therefore whimsical, or relative or lacks objective substance. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is the stuff of which objective substance is given its meaning and reality to the perceiver.

The process of conscious awareness - experience, P-E-E - secures order on the individual level that if analyzed sufficiently (that is systematically torn apart by doubt) will ultimately end in disorder. If that disorder is anything more than an intellectual exercise, it will render the individual helpless, useless, or dangerous to himself and everyone around him.

On the social level, it is equally true that if enough people lose their stake in maintaining the social pattern of agreements, (cultural norms) then the disorder - the anomie, psycho-pathology, alienation, mental illness, clinical insanity in all its forms, and in simple human terms the looting and lawlessness - can be disastrous. This leads social theorists (and parents and politicians) to look for some way to ground the social order in an ultimate confidence that this really is the way things are.

But by its nature the contradictions and dynamics of life are built-in socially no less than individually. We are beings who must order ourselves to survive and discover that this very attempt to bring order can have deadly consequences in reality and insoluble dilemmas for the theoretician, whether academician, businessman, parent or politician.

The limitation of our drive for order creates the psychological and social anomaly of being complete and yet incomplete at the same time. Organizing with others gives us a greater independence while at the same time making us dependant. We are always alone, and yet we are always working with others in an interdependent social fabric or ecology.

These are a few examples of dynamic processes, which serve as checks and balances that order reality, from economics, to physical systems, to legal/social systems and politics. It is not that a free market is better than a command economy. It is not that a government with checks and balances is better than one without them. It is not that community is better than living alone.

The fact is check and balance, free market, individuals living in community is how we function regardless of how someone might try to take complete control of anything including himself. It is not "better" it is. The ideal of absolute control is the illusion. Our ability to control is always limited and yet our desire to control is infinite.

What is "better" is seeing the best way to control what we can and work with others to extend a cooperative control or order that does not confuse what we can change with what cannot be changed - what we can organize with what cannot be organized. The market will always be free no matter how much an individual or group tries to control it. Governments will always have some form of check and balance regardless of how much a tyrant tries to remove all opposition.

You will always want to do things outside the box you build of how you ought to live, no matter what that box is. The problem is how to order and control what can be ordered without using this as excuse for disorder, or a mandate for utter control resulting in idealizing a complete-command organization as if we were God.

In fact the basis of the Christian concept of freedom lies precisely in the first commandment - Have no other Gods. The Bible relativezes all human attempts to control and compares them to stewards working for the final authority and controller, God. To aid this project, Christian societies have turned toward checks and balances in government and in economic theory in order to mitigate our tendency to grasp after ultimate power to ultimately order all things. It is not our task and having checks and balances in government helps keep the governors from acting like gods. It helps keep businessmen honest. Recognizing the limitations of all human projects and building safeguards against absolutizing one or another's drive to order is the real structure of our constructed world.

The Contradictions of Order

By its very nature, order generates a simultaneous conviction of determinism and freedom; objectivity and subjectivity; a sense of knowing the difference between fact and opinion and the inability to prove it; morality and immorality; reality and illusion, particular and universal. Though these distinctions are impossible to fully explain rationally, we know there is a difference. We know that though they are balancing realities in our experience, in each case, one is prior to the other.

We search for a unified field of explanation, and yet cannot find a single thing, concept or pattern in the created world under which to unify everything. Such a pattern or concept by definition would lie outside of the order and by definition would be unknowable. Of course we know all this.

The side effects of our rage for order give us the compelling conviction that logic and mathematics provide conclusions that must be true, objective, real, the thing-itself, and indubitably clear and distinct ideas. It is not just Jesus who came with miracles to attest that he was the Truth, these mathematical-logical conclusions of modern science linked with the scientific method seem to verify their ultimate truth claims by the attending technological miracles of our modern world.

But at the same time the processes that produce logic, math and the scientific method produce with them mathematical-logical conclusion that these ways of ordering the world are dreadfully incomplete and their truth-value an illusion, or at best only one small side of things as they really are. The validity of this doubt has been logically and mathematically proven showing that logic, math and scientific method cannot explain themselves or any ultimate issue.

All ordered patterns have in them statements which are true but incapable of proof in terms of the pattern itself. At the very least, no system can provide proof of its own presuppositions in terms of which it justifies the rest of the system. When self-contained, no system in our environment can supply the energy (or logic) necessary to order itself forever. It must reach outside itself for support. Every action of a system to create or maintain order moves it one step closer to entropy - that is, no order.

The observer influences what he observes. The closer the tools of observation come to the size of what is observed, the more they affect the outcome of their observation. This is why the more particular things are analyzed and broken down to be explained by a theory, the more particular observations will be found which deviate from that theory and defy regular description. When we get to the point that we must kill in order to see and only see by killing should it be a surprise that death is all we know?

The more internally consistent a pattern of order is, the more of our experience it will seem to explain in its system and finally the more it will disagree with our observation of the environment in increasing detail. This is true on the perceptual level as more and more actions have unexpected results and the system to remain harmonious must adopt increasing convolutions and epicycles - or undergo a systemic shift in its explanatory model.

This is true on a personal level where individuals try to understand their world. And it is true on the political and social level: the more a system of law (or social order) strives for perfect objectivity and comprehensive application, the more it becomes a rigid system cut off from human experience and reality and the more it must depend on coercion to sustain itself.

Yet in a social order as with the mathematical sciences there is systematic regularity which we call "law." This is both undeniable and necessary to our existence or the existence of our system and it is what ultimately undoes any system.

Order by its very nature demands exhaustive correspondence in P-E-E, which would result in actions which can exhaustively control and maintain that order. But finite ordering systems cannot be exhaustive. This limitation builds anomalies into our experience, understanding and explanation. These anomalies are not the peculiar problem of math and science, nor are they the whimsy of sophists and philosophical theorists, nor are they the illusion of religion and morality.

The demands of order require that we always reach for more and more which brings in less and less. More than the law of diminishing returns, our rage for order is an appetite that insatiably demands more, more wholeness, more completeness, more explanation, more order. "The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Nor the ear filled with hearing."

This is why government will always tend toward tyranny. It is why economically we tend toward socialism in order to insure against failure by controlling all facets of our market. It is why personally we want to discipline ourselves to perfect performance and decisions. It is why legally we create more and more laws, rules and customs. It is why we search for the smallest particles of matter and the magnitude of the outer limits of our space time continuum. We seek after the beginning of all things and their end.

We know things to be true, yet we know there is no way to finally prove their truth because we cannot access perfect coherence between pattern and environment. We know that we can rationally doubt anything, including the apparent agreement of others. Yet we know that the end result of unfettered doubt is that even doubt itself becomes doubtful. We search for the single thing to unite our patterns, and yet that universal simply becomes a particular in need of a higher order to explain it.

We break every universal down into its parts only to find that each part is a universal set of its own.

In this search some realize the limitations of finitude and so abandon the quest for complete control of all things and turn to the quest for perfect control in limited areas. This turn is equally disastrous. It is as impossible for a finite person to control even the smallest particles of life and society. This person is just as obnoxious to all he touches as was Napoleon or Stalin.

And finally some realizing the futility of perfection make an ideal out of the imperfect. But this never works either for obvious reasons. You can't make an ideal out of something that is by definition incomplete. Imperfection is a lack, a null set. Again look at the eastern monk, the western ascetic. They too along with a science which can only see by freezing a moment have met their dead end in idealizing the individual which demands though cannot incorporate unity or the unity with which admits no individuality though if experienced at all is meaningful because of the reality of the individual.

The reason for all of these dead ends regardless of our direction is that the pattern produces our security - it does work, we can function in the world. But it also produces our insecurity - our patterns are correctable and need correcting meaning that right now we may well be wrong about whatever it is we figured out. They cannot explain themselves or all we experience nor can they guarantee the future. We know that more order produces a wider range of choices.

But that way also lies madness where all choices are based on uncorrectable illusion. Our ordering process simultaneously produces our longing while our fulfillment lies at hand discarded. We starve in the land of plenty - the rich steal; the happily married commit adultery; the wisest of philosophers realizes that he is the most ignorant, while the ignorant man think himself wise.

Ordered life is impossible without law, and yet unchecked order turns that law into a destructive force making the Hydrogen bomb look like match. The more a scientist learns the more questions he has. Children resent those who have given them everything including life itself. Those pregnant with life abort their only future. The science, which gave us absolute objectivity, truth and methodology, is in the end based on creative hunches and cannot provide a coherent explanation of its own processes.

Nonetheless, the technology it produces tells us that something is working out there. And regardless of the tree hugger's ideology, he still posts madly on websites living in the city or on city produced goods to sustain his "back to nature," the hippie-techno-peasant ideal. The advocate of world population reduction refuses to kill himself. In this they all admit that something is better than nothing even though they cleave madly to their starving nothingness as if they had found the crown jewels.

In all this they have a considerable rage and frustration as well they should. Though they find their ideological horse shit good, they resent the fact that the rest of us simply aren't ready to partake of their sacrament and would prefer to leave it in the stable. Indeed they don't really like it either. But where is a grown man or woman to turn?

Once mastered the thing that consumed our entire attention, now bores us. To define imperfectly, the finite must develop a theoretical ideal of exhaustive perfection and yet it can never comprehend it much less grasp such perfection as long as it is finite. Our patterns, to be true must be complete - infinite - and yet we know things to be true even though that truth is forever limited. To properly govern the affairs of state (or of family, club or business) we must have absolute knowledge and absolute control. To make an ideal of improper government... is an oxymoron. But we function none the less with what we have, imperfect as it is. To think or define limited or particular truth at all requires the unlimited to measure against, yet there is no measurement where there is no limit.

The full long for one more bite and go away empty. Nothing under the sun can satisfy, even the drive to make others perfect. Complete and Incomplete Our ordering patterns are always incomplete because they are the salient features of our experience stitched together, remembered, and tested over time. They are not nor can be exhaustive reproductions of every aspect of things, much less every aspect of what we can experience or remember.

Therefore the seeds of disorder lie in the heart of every order we try to impose. This is called abstraction. It is incomplete. Yet it gives the illusion of completion when it is not rationally examined the way swiftly moving frames give the movie the illusion of action, the way a photograph gives an illusion of the person photographed. When rationally examined, our experiece gives the illusion that perfect knowledge must surely lie beyond the next hill in a coming synthesis.

But that perfection does not lie on the far side of any hill in this world.

For instance, all systems of order have in them things that must be true for the system to be orderly and true, and yet cannot be proven true by that system - so there is the drive to provide an ultimate order that enfolds all subsets of order and proves the unproven aspects and incorporates the anomalous observations of a lesser system. Yet that new order will require a greater one. All definitions of objectivity have this built in problem: anything less than perfect coherence and exhaustive one-to-one correlation between pattern and environment are by definition subjectively approximate reproductions masquerading as objectively exact and complete realities.

The more our drive for order produces internal consistency in the details, the more those details are inconsistent with the environment. This inconsistency demands that those patterns be torn apart, discarded or reassembled in a more comprehensive order. For instance, we cannot do without rules and laws, and yet laws are capable of infinite proliferation until we strangle in them and their very consistency demands that we be executed on our own guillotine or find a way to develop laws without their suffocating us.

The same is true of theological systems, of scientific and mathematical systems, and of social systems that govern families, communities and nations. All subjectively correct or internally coherent patterns have this problem built into them - the mathematical as well as the social. The drive to consistency is ultimately the drive to trash the pattern and start over.

The patterns of our order tell us what is dangerous and what is safe, friend and foe. But they can't tell us infallibly and so we must curse or bless before we can verify the full worth of our object of blessing and cursing. We must shoot before we can verify our target - and so must those around us. There is no simple internally consistent solution such as pacifism (the drive to perfect the world by controlling nothing at any cost to yourself and those around you) or activism (the drive to perfect the world by controlling everything at any cost to yourself and those around you). Both pacifism and activism are the result of striving for perfect internal consistency in the face of the intrinsic ambiguity of our experience.

Morality is rooted in the nature of the ordering process itself. Morality is what we ought to do given our pattern. Therefore it shares the problem of all of our patterns, evaluations and environment. We must rely on our moral principles as if they absolutely define the consequences of good or bad organization and yet like the proven results of mathematical science, they too are finite and lack exhaustive definition either in our patterning, environment or our evaluation processes. And so we find ourselves see-sawing between libertinism and legalism, anarchy and tyranny - ecologies that have abandoned dynamic balance and spun into cocoons of monolithic consistency.

The examples above (and in the prior section) set forth theoretical problems of finite order. In a word: The ordering process intrinsically demands more information and greater order than our finite experience is capable of providing, processing, encompassing or acting on. The conclusion is that objective truth must be impossible based on a theoretical dilemma that would do Zeno justice: to know anything we must know everything. The corollary is that if we cannot know everything then we must know nothing.

The good news is that, theoretical difficulties notwithstanding, our patterning process of experience provides sufficient objectivity and testability to enable us to function in, work with others, and even master our environment in many important ways. The bad news is that, for the sake of order, many conclude that absolute power to enforce a way of life must be given to a person or small group of people who to be free to act must be free of many of the social restraints of the system they are controlling.

To function beyond the most rudimentary level of organization comparable to an amoebae, someone one or some group is given a level of public power far beyond the private person. But those who grant that power cannot grant the absolute knowledge (P-E-E) to match the power. This leads to horrific results.

Seeing these horrific results, others retreat to anarchy which ineffectively solves the problem by lodging absolute power in the individual. This too leads to horrific results, abject poverty of all is only the least of the horrors. Others create various utopias which can only work on paper, but never with flesh and blood reality. A utopia is an illusion created by a social pattern which solves the social ills of society as it now is. This pattern seduces others to the ideal which when attempted runs afoul all of the above problem in a much higher degree than a normal socially evolved society because of the commitment to make the system work regardless of how disastrous the result. In the end, it devours its devotes. The pattern consumes the pattern makers.

And so we career down the halls of history bouncing from Tyranny to Riot and back with only an occasional respite. Here is the frustration of it: we should be able to dismiss the broader reaches of theoretical and religious thought as the unnecessary illusion of a constructive ordering process of awareness that doesn't know when to quit. We should be able to dismiss the broader popular reaches of superstition and religious behavior as a similar patterning process on a more personal and practical level.

Yet we cannot resist powerful systems of thought directing our actions - ideologies. And the average person apparently cannot resist the idea that there is more and he should do something to respect that "more" even if it to knock on wood, go to Easter mass, or burn a bit of incenses or candle at the local pagoda.

It is all the rage in the modern scientific world to argue that we should be able to see through the illusion of absolute truth and cast it off the way so many cast off God, morality, art, athletics, social conventions and the human studies themselves in favor of the hard sciences, hard reality, or just plain common sense living from day to day.

And too it is the similar illusion of the Post modern post-scientific world that we can see through the illusion of absolute truth and cast it off the way so many cast off God, morality, art, athletics, social conventions and the human studies. With the moderns the Post Moderns cast off God, morality and self, but they go on to get rid of the hard sciences, hard reality, or just plain common sense living from day to day as well.

Some extremists cast off anything that is not a mathematically reducible description declaring it a meaningless subjective illusion. Other extremists cast off theoretical thinking believing that virtue lies in ignorance, and simply doing the task at hand. Others cast off any hope of the possibility that there could be agreement or understanding between people whether political or literary. "Reality is what you make it." "May the best story win," Is the deconstructionist's motto.

Romantics, whether Buddhist or New Age, speak of "experiencing the moment fully." But when pressed as to what a "full moment" might be, they often fall back to vague self-contradictory statements, analogies or stories and myths.

One delightful, back to the good old days, homey example of this, comes from a man who uses computer desktop publishing to put out a magazine devoted to what he calls Biblical family living and morality, "It's a good thing for mothers to can with their daughters instead of buying everything from the store. It keeps them at home and out of trouble learning useful skills and values.

They learn all they need to know without having to leave home or go to college." The humor of course comes from the fact that while he finds the relatively primitive life good for others, he himself uses the cutting edge of technology rather than keep himself and his sons busy and out of trouble on a genuine lead type screw down printing press. Of course like all idealists he has no way to explain why canning is superior to sending the girls out foraging day to day for just enough daily bread to eat for that day.

Why preserve any food at all? Why print? Why not make your sons scribes the good old fashioned way. It worked for thousands of years look at all the evil that Gutenberg unleashed with his dawning information age. Golden age idealists whether looking back to Biblical ages, or to the Victorians have no basis to freeze one era and accept it in place of another era. This fellow is simply a picture in my back yard of the nonsense and even evil all back to naturists create.

The problem is that in the end the broader reach of theoretical and religious thought make greater ordering and therefore control of our environment and our lives possible at every level even for extremists as seemingly different as scientists, Tree hugging earth firsters, Ludites, Bohemians, and back to 1890's (er... Biblical) family advocates. They are all intellectual street people. They are all fundamentalists of varying stripe.

That is, they adhere to a fundamental text, or methodology and find all others deviant or derivative. But this rage for order and control has no intrinsic end. Limiting it has no intrinsic mid balancing point. And in the end we are all found to be fundamentalists of one sort or another since we all attempt to order our lives and this order depends on accepting some text as final. In the search for truth the text of one's heart has not advanced the cause beyond the text of Deuteronomy.

Indeed it seems to have placed whatever good we might have gained over the last 5,000 years forever out of our reach. The inner light often proves to be the most direct route to outer darkness.

You might say that theoretical thought's benefit to overall advancement in personal, social, and technological organization of our patterns is like my father-in-law, a golfer who hit enough excellent strokes (say one of 50) to keep him coming back to the course for more torture. But that is not it at all. In reality, we are theoretical and religious because finite organization presupposes it - it is not an illusion, it is the insatiable hunger of our existence requiring regular finite satisfaction for us to exist at all as surely as we require food, water and air to live, though no one meal or lung full will fully satisfy our life-long need.

Can there be a well of water that if you drink from it, you will never thirst? Bread that if eaten will end your hunger? Labor that if entered into is our rest? A still point in the turning text? A fountain of youth, a meal that when consumes grants eternal life? A bush that burns without being consumed? Everything about us demands this at every level of existence, but nothing in this order of existence though demanding it can either produce it or sustain life without it.

The Rage for God

"There is more in this world than is dreamt of in your small philosophy Horatio." It is this incompleteness groping for more that gives rise to the classical proofs of God's existence and at the same time they are the basis for the proof that He could not exist. These proofs from incompleteness run from the simple argument that you have a God or Jesus shaped hole in your life, to the most complex causal and ontological proofs of God's existence.

Our incompleteness argues for One who will complete us. And so we hear argued that we are complete except for one small hole and that small hole is God's little acre. Others argue that causal chains require a PRIMAL CAUSE to start them outside the system. Others argue that all the patterns we find in creation demand one who Patterns; that the Personal does not arise from the impersonal; that something cannot come from nothing; that there is no such thing as autogenesis as any Biologist can tell you.

And the Great Mother of them all: the idea of perfection to be perfect it must also exist or it is not perfect, therefore God to be a perfect being must also exist or he is only an idea and less than He would be if He existed. Each of these with their children is capable of elaboration into a book but they are all variations of the idea that being incomplete and groping for completion proves that the COMPLETE must exist.

The proof that God does not exist is the same as proof of His existence turned inside out - everything works just fine without a starting point, without God the great organizer. Reality is groping for completeness, but that doesn't mean that "The Complete" is really out there. We are simply beings who attempt to fill that void but cannot. This might lead some to despair and others to the illusion of religion.

But for the truly enlightened it leads to Promethean greatness realizing that the world, especially right and wrong, are what you make them. They go on to say that you cannot argue from a finite cause that there must be an infinite uncaused cause. Nor can you argue from the existence of order to an infinite person who orders all things. And that God shaped hole? It's just that, a hole, nothing. You cannot argue from nothing that there must be something that fills the void.

Besides, if God were to fill that hole, then he would no longer be God. He would have to be reduced to the dimension of that hole at the very least. This hole shaped "God" would be measurable and therefore not God at all. If the hole can be filled at all, then it could not be God who fills it because by definition he is not reducible to any measurable shape, size or hole. But if this is what you want to worship, have at it.

By definition God cannot be of this finite created order and therefore He can have no influence in it whatever else His function might be in realms beyond it. He is infinite therefore unknowable. If unknowable, then why speak more of him? Imperfection does not prove that The Perfect exists. Incompleteness does not prove Completeness. If anything 5,000 years of recorded imperfection with no perfection on the horizon would seem to prove that the perfect is an illusion.

To one the need for completion proves the existence of God and to the other the need proves the non-existence, or at best the irrelevance of God. In reality it proves neither in the classical or mathematical sense of the word "proof". These are the same proofs. They both argue that experience points beyond us to this need for fulfillment. They both argue that God is demanded by this rage for order that doesn't know when to quit. At this point they diverge: One says the demand for order proves the reality of God, and the other says that the demand for order is the basis of the illusion of God.

The problem is, neither is capable of reaching beyond the finite to prove that God is or is not there. Proof of the existence of God, like proof of the existence of ourselves and even proof of our environment rises and falls together. Transcendence - "I"; the existence of a world external to the "I," morality, and finally God - has this peculiar problem. We directly experience these four - the "I", God, the world, morality - all the time, but they defy the sort of measurement, which is the limit of our experience.

The search for the perfect pattern or system to order our thought and world caused 16th and 17th Century skeptic and saint alike to embrace the scientific method and mathematical logic as a final resting place for human certainty. Christians found in it a metaphysical foundation for an absolute God who has provided an absolute way of knowing and absolute morality. It is parallel to the idea that this absolute God in an absolutely knowable world has given an absolute and inerrant revelation.

By contrast, skeptics found in the methods of an absolute mathematical science proof that God was unnecessary. The ironic mark of this new age which is so skeptical of God is that with God's irrelevance so too "I" and morality became impossible to quantify and so too illusory. In time even the world, our physical environment, became impossible to define. But those first two hundred years were a heady time for everyone on all sides of any question. The world was now utterly knowable.

Both skeptic and saint turned to do all they could to tear down the metaphysical efforts of the world up to that era which had become to them cobwebs of religious and scientific superstition from a Dark Age.

But mathematical science did not and could not transcend human finitude. Neither did mathematical Christian fundamentalism which capitalized on that absolutism. "Nature lay in darkest night, God said, let Newton be and all was light." The light of John Newton, failed to give a foundation for the Transcendent Christian God, but rather could only produce an emaciated god dependent on the finite, the imperfect.

God became dependent on Newton to give value and substance to His infinite perfection and independence. A primal billiard ball putting things in motion is not worth worshipping and is certainly not the personal God of the Bible or else Democritus would be a saint. The skeptic did not fare much better than the saint in Newton's light.

But is was not just religion which suffered, Newton and Bacon could not advance math, logic, and physics past the intrinsic inability of all finite systems and ordering patterns to comprehend all. It was not just the saint who was let down, the skeptic as well found that math, logic and method failed to give him those god-like qualities he has longed for since the garden. These observations of the one side against the other have filled books since Newton.

Our incompleteness is the ground of our rage to order both our patterns and our environment and in that order to transcend the moments of our life to which we are bound. But they neither prove nor disprove God, our selves, nor the reality of the world around us. They do not guarantee a method of knowing reality. Our dilemma has been aptly described by Paul in the First Century.

Speaking of people both as individuals and in society, he said, 24God... 26has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, 27so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; 28for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, "For we are also His offspring." 29Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man's devising.

We can never comprehend God fully nor properly represent Him with anything in the created order such as gold, silver or philosophical/religious concepts devised by man. Yet we will always believe in God because we will always experience our finitude longing for the infinite. We will always believe that effects must have a cause, that pattern must be the result of purposeful reason and action. We cannot escape believing that these things represent truly significant aspects of the world.

Though we apprehend them imperfectly we know that they are more than constructs of our imagination. The fact is, our reality, whatever it is, is requires these conviction/truths if we are to escape madness. This reality itself is only escaped in madness - which madness itself if it is human, is merely another order, or a principled disorder, cut off from the possibility of correction. Those who prove or disprove God are stuck with the same maddening dilemma of those who prove or disprove anything.

He is not far from us. Like children we cannot escape our parent. He is not just in everything around us, His character is stamped in our being. Our circumstances have designed us to grope after him. His existence - like the existence of the world, the "I" and morality - is obvious. It is demanded by the nature of our own existence. And yet it is always beyond that experience and not reducible to it which if you think about it is the only way it could be.

Those who do not believe that they exist will always presuppose their existence in their argument against it. Those who do not believe that the external world exists must presuppose that world in order to argue at all. Those who do not believe in morality must be kept at a safe distance from everyone else because they become a danger to everyone - choices have consequences and morality is the study of those consequences which are quite real.

And so too in the same way those who do not believe in God will always have to work hard to doubt Him because they must suppress the fulfillment and completion that their very being and their environment - their conscious awareness itself - demands if anything is to exist for them at all. And by the same token those who try to prove God must work at believing because they are unable able to go beyond the limits of human experience to prove anything they experience much less God.

Which of course is the same maddening thing about all we seem to know. We know we know something, but when we set about proving what we know, we fail to prove that we can know anything at all much less the thing we thought was so obvious. The reason we fail is because all knowledge depends on the existence of our selves, of an external world, of God and of the right and wrong actions to take in light of anything we know.

These four are by definition unknowable and known as the structure of all thought and perception. Take these away and there is no knowledge, no personhood, no right and wrong, no God, no world, no "I".

Proof of God's existence stands or falls with the proof of the existence of everything else we believe exists, including the one who believes or doubts in the first place. God, like our environment and our patterns, is beyond proof because these are proven by everything and yet not "proven" at all. There is no final proof of God or anything else because of the limitations of our ordering processes. There is no temple of silver or gold, which we can build to hold him. And yet there is no escape from the proof in all we are - our silver and gold cry out to us that there is a God and we depend on Him. And so we worship something. Worship or ultimate wonder, allegiance, and the drive to explain is inescapable to the human condition - it is our condition.

Therefore Paul says to the post modern world: 22"... I perceive that in all things you are very religious; 23.... Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: 24God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. 25Nor is He worshipped with men's hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things.... 30Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, 31because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead."

Anything on earth whether pattern or environment, method or madness has been seized on to worship - to bring comprehensive order to our life and reality. The intrinsic inadequacy of any thing in pattern or environment to sustain the burden of reality does not change the conviction that reality is held together at every level, not merely internally in our patterning drive for order, but out there in our environment as we experience it. Only in despair do we say, "Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing." Even then very few act as if that statement is true however much they may say it. For Lear to even speak it is for him to deny it.

The nature of experience and environment requires us to find that unifying field theory to explain the unified field. But the limitation of our pattern and environment is that there can be no concept, thing, or pattern - no temple - that is sufficient to order all reality - no ark in which select abstractions from creation may rest above the flood of doubt - no human approach, much less a human bridge, to God.

If such a thing exists that will grant a comprehensive order, then it cannot be called a "thing" at all, and yet it must be able to order all things. God cannot be worshipped in temples which hands can make, and yet that is all we have - hands which create patterns, and environments which can be shaped and which shape us. The most our hands can do is hope that their work is good enough to receive a reward, and yet we know that no one, much less you or I is that good, that perfect.

The most our hands can do is to point to the unknowable which must be known if we are to know anything. But this is not proof. This is not a system, which ends all systems offering final verification for all subsets but needing no verification itself. It is simply the final reality of our condition - we cannot reach God, yet we cannot do anything that is not reaching for him.

We were designed to reach HiNovemberm because we cannot lower our arms if we wanted to, if we are alive at all we are trying to order that life and that drive for order constantly reaches out for what it can never create.

If our reach is to become finally the embrace it longs for, the infinite must take the initiative. The infinite must become finite, the divine must become human. God must explain what is true, as incomplete and perspective bound as that explanation might be. That explanation must be the starting point or there is in the end no explanation at all. To even curse God or deny His existence requires that He lift us into his lap so that we can pluck out his beard.

Human reality is the inescapable fact that the fundamental things of life are both knowable and unknowable at the same time. This is the significance of, "now". There is the hope and conviction that though 12For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. In its most fundament form, despair is when we lose our faith and abandon our hope that disorder and partial order will some day be swallowed up in order - when we set our love on that which can never fulfill.

Our hope - whether skeptic or saint - is that we are sufficiently like God to be able to understand His world and Him with the apparatus we have been given assuming He directs our steps. With this perceptual apparatus, P-E-E we can understand the need for the Infinite, the Perfect, the Personal, the Good, the Beautiful, the Rational even though they cannot be fully comprehended by finite systems.

This understanding of God or His world cannot be proven since all proofs depend on the finite system of which they are a part and God is not a finite part of anything however present He is to everything. It cannot be disproven, since any disproof of God attacks our ability to be certain of (that is, to prove) anything at all - His is the universal order intrinsically demanded by every skeptic's disproof for that disproof to even approach coherence of meaningful doubt and avoid nihilism.

The skeptic cannot disprove God or the environment (that is, the psychological, social and physical environment of all thought) except by assuming the very thing he is disproving.

What we know is that there is an order producing reality, which seems to be as incapable of sustaining its own existence as the image in a mirror is incapable of self-generation regardless of how perfect its partial reproduction of the reality might be. What we are is a mirror image of One Who creatively puts all things in place and sustains them for His purpose.

You can't point to the mechanism of understanding and order within each of us and say that it proves or disproves its maker. A mechanism is just a mechanism. Discussing or discovering this mechanism does not disprove or establish any part of either religion or philosophy or knowledge any more than the discovery of sound waves would prove or disprove the love conveyed in the love song carried on them. Nor does the most ardent love song mean that the singer loves you... or anyone else.

What you can say is that this mechanism forces us to recognize our incomplete finitude and with it the incomplete finitude of our environment as we perceive it. We can say that this mechanism's very existence drives us to either create perfect order ourselves or accept that there must be a perfect order and seek to approximate it. This does not prove a perfect order, much less that our approximation is correct or that it is personal.

What it does prove is that we are beings with whom God can communicate because we are finite representations of His order - His image. We are beings with whom He can have communion and even take on their finite form without losing His infinitude. This does not prove that this happened or will happen. But there is nothing in the nature of our experience or experiential mechanism that would make this either impossible or as improbable as the alternatives. As both sides would agree, everything points to God.

It should be no surprise then that the most powerful argument for God's existence does not come from the classical proofs, and is not a rational "proof" at all. It comes from the nature of our own experience which is utterly consistent with the idea that we are His offspring, His dependents, made in His image: "for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, 'For we are also His offspring.' Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man's devising."

I don't know what you would call this sort of argument. But it argues from the possibility of meaningful perceptions. To deny the God set forth in the Bible would be to deny the possibility of not merely argument, but meaningful perceptions themselves. Having said this, you know it is true. To deny it would be to deny something that resonates with the very nature of how and what you know to your core if you know anything at all.

To deny God is to suppress what even your poets, philosophers and wise men of the post modern age have said. To deny God is to suppress what all our P-E-E tells us at every moment. It is as futile as trying to deny existence itself. This is not the same as arguing that because you can think of the most perfect thing, therefore it must exist since without existence it would not be perfect.

Rather it is to argue that argument, evaluation, speech itself requires that we assume the infinite in order to make any finite argument, evaluation or speech meaningful at all. Our existence is predicated on His Existence. Our knowledge, our patterns, our actions are predicated on His. Our personhood is based on reflect his Person. We can suppress this awareness. We can flee it, ignore it and focus on the particular tasks at hand or lofty alternatives.

We can replace Him with a surrogate whether another deity, aspect of this order, or concept. We can discover the mechanism and use it to replace the creator. We can worship something else, anything else.

But, 20since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, 21because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man--and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. 24Therefore God also gave them up... 32who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.

Whether in terms of our ordering process as we know it - the "clearly seen" created world P-E-E - or its moral dimension - the relationship between P-E-E and the consequences of our actions - we cannot escape knowing God and what He requires. The only question is will He accept us, or will He permit you to continue suppressing Him? All of your creative efforts to find a unified field run into this same anomaly: if your standard is truly infinite you cannot know it or measure yourself by it.

If finite, then it is inadequate to give you certainty. And so, however much we speculate in our theories, we forever recognize in our practice the limitations of our psychological and social ecologies. We recognize the limitations of our physical environment. After contemplating the infinite, we return to the finite as the only means we have to reach beyond to where our being demands we reach.

Physical, theoretical, psychological and social environments cannot reach beyond themselves, yet built into them is that reach. We are driven to try and cannot ignore that drive - it is life itself. This is the source of idolatry whether physical statues, theoretical constructs and patterns, or mere day to day busyness with job, car, family or tending your personal garden as if these are the limit of what gives meaning and pattern to life.

It is also the source of true worship because we were designed to figure things out and run all these things in God's Name. Man was made for dominion and order. Order, checked by tempered doubt, acted upon rightly is the basic tool of that dominion. And worship of God, is what brings it all into perspective.

It is naïve to think that religion is one more illusion of our experience. That is a similar error to putting doubt on the same level as ordering. The illusion lies in our attempt to make the finite serve for the infinite. Idolatry is the illusion. Idolatry exchanges the glory of the infinite God for images of man or beast or theoretical constructs such as "oneness" or prime movers, or any attempt at ultimate understanding which makes ultimate either the particulars or universals of this world order.

The unknown God must reach to us if He is to be known. All we can know apart from Him is that more is required but we can never reach that more. Someone who made things the way they are must reach those things and He has done so by making us able to truly know as He can know, and yet know finitely and imperfectly as an image or analogue of how He knows infinitely and perfectly.

Every mechanism of science and understanding indicates that this is our nature. The things we discover about our patterns and environment cannot do more than provide the mechanisms dependent on faith, hope, and love. Our P-E-E and its products are finite tools in search of an infinite redemption. Their lack finds its expression in the failure to replace God at any level with an explanation of how the world works.

God cannot be replaced on the level of 2+2=4 and He can't be replaced at the level of the most complex psycho-social organization, moral conviction or law order - even those coming from His revelation of Himself. He can't be replaced in the simplest of materialistic hope we might place in our job, our wife our husband or our children giving us meaning in life. The things we would replace God with must themselves have someone to give them meaning. Our reality is finite, our need is infinite.

This is what the Bible says we can expect to find. God can and does communicate and supplies the answers whether at the level of 2+2=4, or the most complex psycho-social organization or at the level of moral conviction and the order brought by law. He does it in a way that we are able to understand and so necessarily our being - pattern, evaluation and environment - demands more, must constructively use doubt to understand, and yet knows that what He said is true, reliable and sound.

And so He not only reaches through and speaks to men, He becomes a man. He takes on the ambiguity of His finite created order and those within it whose Rage to Order demands daily that He appear to justify himself. But his appearance is not to justify himself to us, it is to justify those he wants to reach to make them fit to be with him, it is to bridge with His life the death our incompleteness and our moral dereliction inevitably leaves us.

The Morality of Experience

Morality is not an illusion thrown off by our way of experiencing the world. Morality is the most fundamental ordering of that experience. It ties pattern, environment and evaluation together with their consequences. Morality ties the principles, which govern our patterning, to the consequences of following them.

We find that the success in our ability to organize our personal life revolves around the ability to harmonize and order more and more discrete subsets of patterns finding greater and greater coherence with the environment. We therefore discipline our thoughts, actions and environment accordingly. This is the root of personal morality. In the same way, greater success lies in the ability to coordinate our patterns with others like us who, by virtue of their humanity, have this same mechanism at work in their life.

This ordering extends into getting animals to cooperate. They, like us, find the order of their world improved when they work with the human order of existence. (Training is how we get animals to agree with our order.) This ordering extends into the inanimate world, which we break down and reorganized in ways that make life better for our ordering patterns as all animals do to a less organized extent.

Consequences are an inescapable aspect of all organizing and patterning. It is why we call "law" the most important causal regularities between pattern and environment, which perceived regularities organize our patterns and actions. For instance, we speak of the laws of mechanics such as F=MA or; of Math such as the Associative Property of Addition; or of the land such as No Trespassing; or geometry such as a2 +b2 = c2; or of community, such as the significance of certain forms of clothing, gender distinctions and propriety; or of God such as Thou Shalt Have No Other gods Before Me. All these and many more are forms of moral organization that have different consequences if we keep or violate them.

Morality is more than a word for the coherent application of the principles governing the patterns we create. Morality encompasses the consequences of keeping or violating those principles - the unwanted outcomes in both the internal pattern and its external application. Morality, like God, is not a subjective illusion of the ordering process simply because we can subjectively outline its reality. Morality is an intrinsic a part of both the ordering process and the fruit of its interaction with the environment.

To the extent that the environment is capable of being patterned, understood and acted upon, the morality of that understanding and action is part of its character, and not merely something we attribute to it. Morality is the internal consequence to correctly ordering our patterns and the consequence to those patterns' coherence with the order of the environment from which they are an abstracted model. There is no human experience, pattern evaluation process, or environment apart from moral structure and its consequences.

Decision-making is quite impossible when cut free of moral principles. In this world, ideas and actions both have consequences - regular, describable causal connections which must be incorporated into our patterns and acted on. So fundamental is the connection between thought systems and the consequences of acting on them, that morality can be seen to be an organizing factor for every form of knowledge that has an application.

The fundamental laws of ethics are not mysterious or left up to each imagination. But rather ethical systems (even those Eastern ethical systems in which ethics is fundamentally a contradiction to their denial of reality) will to one degree or another reflect the same laws. They reflect them because these laws are the presupposition of the human habitat. To escape them is inconceivable and beyond our ability.

The following ten laws are not rules imposed by men, but are the very structure of humanity. They are the presupposition of what it is to be human. Without them there is no human. Have no other God - no society can grow or survive without some metaphysical ideal that binds it together. But a metaphysical ideal that is nothing more than an idea or personification of ideals is a thin emaciated shadow of the full blooded Personal God of Creation who reveals himself.

All societies prosper in proportion to their ideals which are absolute binding them together. But ideals without the embodiment of the Personal God who made them are not sufficient to ground human order. The god of any society must not be too theoretical, impersonal or abstract. That fundamental relationship must remain in tact personally and corporately.

There is no human society that is conceivable where the opposite of this is made an ideal, where God and each member are not covenantally bound to each other through ritual and conviction. It will fly apart.

Make no graven image - Materialism will ultimately destroy a society because this world will always end in dust as will any part of it that we try to elevate to the level of the infinite. Societies (human relationships) must have a God, but the God must not be too small. Anything that stands within the world order is finite and therefore incapable of the weight of Deity - and yet societies will settle for something because they must have a God to exist at all.

Don't take the name of the Lord your God in vain - Society will embody its fundamental ideals. If they loose respect in society, it will fall apart. Each society is called by the name of its God and His values. It must maintain those values. And they must be good values. But ultimately it cannot be coerced. Each member must find them reasonable in their own heart. (See the 10th.) You must work and you must rest relation to your God - Interspersing rest with work is fundamental to prosperity. Society will only be as strong as its work ethic and its play ethic as these reinforce its relationship with is God.

Honor your Father and Mother - The family must stay in tact and parents even when finite and wrong must be respected or the society will not pass on to the next generation the values and laws which make it possible. By extension Honor is due to all who are in authority even where they must be disobeyed. Society without respect for those bound together in covenantal authority is inconceivable. Authority structures with officers in charge is fundamental to human organization and division of labor.

Do no murder - Society where a principle is made of killing those who are innocent is impossible. Thou shalt not commit adultery - confining sex to covenantal relationships is not simply one option among others, its opposite is inconceivable since it breaks down the family unit, and in the end will denigrate women and children making them the property of the strongest to use as they will.

Don't steal - human society is inconceivable if an ideal is made of taking whatever you want. Beyond that impossibility, the concept of private property is the concept of personal responsibility. It is fundamental to being an adult as opposed to a child. The only human institution which can function on a communal command economy is the family and that only works while the parents are distinguished from the children. As the children grow up each particular family form of human organization falls apart, and replaced by the children's families. The illusion of utopian socialized thinking is that human society is possible where all but a few people are treated as children.

Don't bear false witness - Covenant is the basis of social life. You cannot even imagine a coherent social order based on lying as an ideal or breaking your word as an ideal. Human organization and economics depends on the truth being the ideal and distinguished from the lie.

Don't covet - For human society to be possible these values must be more than grudgingly forced on society from the outside. They must be convictions from the heart, from the center of our patterning drive for order. Though these values can, must and will be enforced in different ways, it is from the inside that they must take root or society dissolves.

These ten laws when made universal ideals make personal and social life possible. By contrast to the extent that their opposite is made a universal ideal society and knowledge become inconceivable, not merely impossible. The inversion of these laws is only socially possible when those who embody the inverted ideal are able to pimp parasitically off of a morally healthy host which embodies the ethics and fundamental principles of the human social habitat.

In other words, morality is not an imaginary ideal based on the illusion of absolute right and wrong. It is a nonnegotiable necessity for any human ecology. Virtue If morality is how we tie the structure of our patterns with the consequences of their application, virtue is how we proceed. The chief of these is humility.

Humility is the ability to change our patterns without losing confidence in our ability to change our environment. And the converse, humility is the confidence to change our environment without losing our ability to be corrected by it. "I send you out to be sheep among wolves, therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves." "And he set a little child among them and said he who would humble himself as this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." "Moses was the meekest of men."

Humility is not the opposite of confidence, or boldness. We are humble in the face of the possibility of error and look for needed correction without losing the courage to do the best we can with what we know But more than humility is needed. To function effectively, we must have faith that there is a past and our patterns can actually capture it sufficiently to shed a true light on the present. We must hope that our patterns are sufficient to provide a range of wise choices from which our future will grow. We must love what is right and good and do it. "Therefore these three remain, Faith, Hope and Love and the greatest of these is Love."

Virtue is not morality or knowledge, or experience, or anything else we have discussed so far. Virtue is not the principles or patterns of organization or a description of their consequences. Virtue is not a process of evaluation or a thing found in our environment. The ignorant are no more incapable of virtue than the knowledgeable. The immoral no less capable of virtue than the moral. The weak no less capable than the strong. Those who do wrong no less capable of virtue than those who do right. Virtue describes how we approach, use and interact with our own patterns, evaluation methods, and the environment. It is how we deal with the decisions and consequences of life.

Virtue does not commend one pattern, principle, moral, or environmental option over another. Rather it makes the ongoing evaluation and growth of our lives as pleasant and fruitful for ourselves and others as circumstances permit. The lack of virtue makes the ongoing evaluation of our life, fearful, a burden and odious to others.

Demanded by the Nature of Human Reality God - Our patterns and systems are always incomplete driving us to seek that which is infinite in its comprehensive grasp. God is that infinite person in whom all finite persons and their patterns may rest fully comprehended. Despite its foray into emergent evolution, the Biological sciences are discovering this same inescapable purpose either presupposing their theoretical efforts, or their efforts dissolving into nonsense.

I - Our self is always capable of distinguishing itself from any object it considers including the self that is considering. I is never capable of being known but it must exist or meaning and knowledge are impossible. Environment - The Environment is always out there, and our perception of it is confined to the patterns we create out of what seems significant. But there is a real world that is the object and source of our patterning. It is what we are patterning abstractly and it is the place which we reconstruct and change based on those patterns.

Ethics - Morality is always debatable in its fine applications, but that there are consequences to our patterns and actions is beyond debate as are the fundamental moral laws which make private and social ecosystems possible.

Having no other God (1-3), interspersing rest with work (4), honor to parents and to all whom honor and respect is due (5), confining sex to covenantal relationships (6-9), prohibiting murder, theft, and lies (6,8,9), finding the source of these ethics in the center of our patterning (10), these ten commands when made universal ideals make personal and social life possible. By contrast to the extent that their opposite is made a universal ideal Society and knowledge become inconceivable, not merely impossible.

The inversion of these laws is only socially possible when those who embody the inverted ideal are able to pimp parasitically off of a morally healthy host which embodies the ethics and fundamental principles of the human social habitat. (Some of these pimps are simply called thieves robbers, adulterers and murderers.

Others elevate these inversions to a noble level and call themselves, socialists, communists, artists and idealists as if they are capable of transcending their human frame because of their theories or gifts and abilities.) In fact one might make the argument, that if social order is the fundamental habitat of human beings, then these four structural realities will always force themselves to the surface and societies which embody them will in the end prosper to a greater extent than those which either do not embody them as ideal, or embody some set of ideals that is close to them.

This could be seen as the evolutionary argument for the social version of the survival of the fittest. The physical form is that the strongest and meanest who spread their seed the farthest will ultimately take over.

The social version is that faith, hope and love will ensure the ultimate take over of those who are most truly human, who most clearly ground their patterns in what the Personal God has revealed, who believe that there is an objective world which is knowable and that they exist as responsible moral agents whose reality is structured by the Ten Commandments whether they acknowledge them or not.

Control, Power, Survival, Sex, Food, etc.. The drive to organize is a more fundamental drive than any other such as survival, power, sex, food or shelter. In fact, it is not a drive at all in the same sense that these things are drives. You can overcome your desire for sex, food, control and power and do without them. But you cannot overcome your drive to organize even for an instant except by suicide or sedation.

If life is supported at all, your body and the autonomic nervous system is keeping the heart beating the lungs breathing and making order out of nutrients and biological processes. This is only the rudimentary bare bones of our ordering efforts. But it shows that life at every level from biological to psychological, social and spiritual is an ordering process. This ordering at every level is the life force that animates us. We can know no other reality or drive apart from it.

In fact, though we experience it or we would experience nothing, we can't even describe it. Go ahead, try examining the moment called "now" and tell us when it began, when it ended, and what you did in it. The most mundane and common of human experience - the consciousness of "now" - is the only concrete thing we ever experience and yet it is beyond our experience because it is that experience.

What ordering does is make sex, eating, working, controlling, thinking, planning and all other things of life, possible. The more we order our lives, the greater the range of informed choices we have and the greater control we have. This opens the door for better satisfying whatever it is our appetites desire - sex, food, friendship, recreation, productive labor, intellectual stimulation, rest or any other good thing.

Particulars and Universals

There is no such thing as a universal or a particular. They are the result of the internal demand of a finite system of organization. Our process of organization depends on the ideal of a pattern that exhaustively replicates the environment. To organize at all is to organize toward this ideal seeking perfect knowledge of particulars in the environment and perfect knowledge of how they all fit together in a unified field. This ideal in both directions is intrinsically demanded yet unattainable.

Human thought can be defined as an organizing effort that finds relationships among particulars and so organizes them into groups. Duh! As the modern scholar might say. And he is right. It is a useless truism. As useless as it is, if you try to go further what you find is that you are incapable of actually grasping anything more on the question. We find that "universal" and "particular" are words used to describe relatively smaller and relatively larger groupings, neither capable of exhaustive categorization in either direction, both demanding it.

If we are to organize at all, organization demands a satisfaction the finite knower strives for but cannot experience. When we turn our attention to examine any universal we find it becomes a particular along with other particulars fitting into a larger pattern which becomes the particular of yet a larger pattern. This progression is infinite because no system is capable of proving every part of itself in terms of the system and so its unresolved elements drive us to more universal systems of explanation and order.

When we look in the other direction at any particular, we discover that it is its own universal system made up of yet smaller groups of particulars which are in fact universals in their own right. The process is driven to break down these ever-descending groups of particulars because our concept of order demands that we find the irresolvable particulars on which we can inerrantly build our larger concepts. This demand for absolute particularity is intrinsically doomed to fail because the smaller the particulars get, the more they resist measurement from perceptual tools that are not fine enough to determine their nature, much less the composition of what makes them up.

East and West

The West asks, "How do we make use of each moment to make the next moment better in a steadily improving progression?" Kipling's answer is as Western as you can get: If you can fill each minute to the fullest, then you qualify as fully human, and can own the world. For the last 500 years we have done this by abstracting from our experience a quantifiable model of the world - one that does well with mathematics - breaking minutes to seconds and seconds to nanoseconds in our drive to fill each minute as full as it can be and so fulfill our manhood and world dominion. This is the ideal of computerization now a term which is interchangeable with digitalization.

The East asks, "How do we escape the cycle of pain which is the inevitable result of the limitations and ambiguities of each moment of human experience?" Their answer is to erase human experience by disciplines, which plug into personal nothingness/oneness with the Great All. The Buddha (light or enlightenment) leads us into an eight fold path to shut the ordered world out, to create entropy in our minds that merges all order into ultimate non-order - the illusion of entropy.

The reason it is illusion is not a bias against Eastern thought forms in favor of the Western. There is a fundamental difference between the priority that order has over disorder. The East does not mean by Oneness an organized field that unifies all particulars. By "oneness" or "unity" they mean the oxymoron of a distinctionless field at rest - entropy or nothingness where all values are equal. The object of Eastern enlightenment is not a "field" at all whether at rest or otherwise. It is despair.

It is giving up hope in life even while seeming to cherish it as an illusion. The Zen monk devoted to preserving every life whether insect or otherwise, nonetheless is personally devoted to the idea that that life is an illusion and his discipline calls him to erase the illusions of existence through his various disciplines whether of meditation, diet, exercises, or martial arts.

By contrast, though impossible to achieve, a unified field of all particulars such a goal embraces the ideal of the fullness of life, whereas entropy is quite literally nothing at all. The West may make an idol out of order, but at least there is substance to their error and hope for correction. In nothingness, there is nothing to correct, only a living death.

But whichever way you turn, East or West, fullness of comprehension or entropy, perfect measure or suppression of all distinctions, it is still that same fundamental pattern-creating ability at work in the Western Scientist or the Eastern Monk/scholar. We create patterns and compare them to reality, and compare reality to that pattern and take action - even if that action is to deny that it is all happening. Ironically in the case of the East, the systematic attempt is made to obliterate the patterning itself.

The eight-fold path of the enlightened one, the Buddha, leads to the elimination of even the illusion of eight-foldness or "path". Their method of ending illusion is itself an illusion. Regardless of the direction we turn, we find ourselves changing the environment on the one hand and trying to fit into it on the other. You might say the West is the ultimate attempt to change the environment and the East is the ultimate attempt to fit in. Neither is fully human.

For 500 years we stayed in the Casino of Western materialistic objectivity as long as we thought we could win and this is the great appeal of the West: we have won a lot. But in the 1960's when we thought we were losing, suddenly a whole generation tried to cut its loss, collect their chips and go home to our Inner Light and Peace, only to discover that there is no home in Eastern subjectivism any more than in the drafty sterile castles of Western materialism.

The escape into subjectivity, like the escape into objectivity is trying to escape who and what you really are. When the objective materialism's answer could not provide a unified explanation of why we are winning - or that we were winning, or that material well being is worth winning - we turned to subjectivity and finally the East where we despair of winning at all in spite of all that our winnings have created for our ease and comfort.

The pattern-evaluation-environment ordering mechanism itself is both the source of truth as well as the source of illusion. It creates an illusion, an analogy, of what is in our environment. But what it creates an illusion or pattern of is truly there and the pattern truly approximates it and can truly be discussed and corrected. The mechanism that creates the possibility of true knowledge is also the mechanism which is itself an illusion creator. How can we know the difference?

Yet we do whether we can explain it or not. It is why we argue with the umpire. It is why we are careful when we cross the street. We have all experienced how the order in the environment, though defiant of full explanation, is often the final judge of fatal illusions. "Give her the fruit of her hands and let her works praise her in the gates," is more than a kind piece of advice for how to make your wife happy. More than a dictum of justice calling for honorable action or what we should do.

It describes what actually and inescapably happens as the end result of our Patterning-Evaluation-Environment behavior - we take action and those actions have consequences. Whether bitter or sweet, we must eat "the fruit of our hands". Our actions, come to final judgment and that result is served back to us for better or worse.

The question is not: Can we escape consequences of behavior? Is God unfair for making the world the sort of place where there are consequences to our behavior? The question is not: Seeing I can't control the whole world perfectly, Does God want me to cut out a segment of the world so small that I can exhaustively govern and control it and so guarantee only good consequences and make Him and those around me happy (righteous, fulfilled, mature etc.)?

The answer to those questions is, not only, "no." it is "Wrong question that only leads you around in circles at best." The question is, "Is it possible to do or know anything, small and great that will make the consequences of your life good?" The answer to that last question is, "Yes." But you can't know fully, you can't guarantee the outcome, you can't become one with anything or anyone, you can't do it entirely on your own, you can't depend on others to do it all for you, you can't do it all yourself, and whatever happens, you can't take it with you.

But within these constraints you have lived all your life crying out to God for the sort of wholeness that He does not give you and rejecting the forgiveness, love and fulfillment that He does give. Why not accept it? Bringing order when pattern conflicts with environment There are three consequences of disagreement between our organizing patterns and the environment.

1. You are driven to force that internal order and pattern onto the world. Thus we have the good fruit of cultural differences, laws, courts to sort out legal differences, schools and teachers, artists, craftsmen, athletes, technology, police and soldiers, inventors, builders, bankers, traders, clubs and organizations, leaders in business and government, fathers and mothers, saints, and heroes. Thus we have the evil fruit of slave masters, tyrants, tax collectors, warlords, torture chambers, perverts, villains and glory hogs. Our order enables us to glory in our diversity while at the same time it can cause us to hate those who are different and fit everyone to our bed.
2. You are driven to impose your perception of the external order onto your internal patterns and calculations. Thus the positive fruit of change and growth in ourselves and our understanding; increased pattern-to-environment consistency; personal satisfaction; and the improved decision making these bring - in a word, wisdom. And with these come the threat of the negative fruit of imposing external order on our internal patterns: slaves, taxpayers, opium dens, paralysis, pusillanimity, neurosis, self-doubt, paranoia, and sophomoric pontification.
3. You are driven to impose the order of your patterns onto the environment or the order of your environment on your patterns and yet lack the ability or grit do to either. The positive solution is to peacefully accept your limitations and make small changes in your pattern and in your environment that move in the right direction. But there can be an evil fruit of your frustration with your inability to change things internally or externally: you can engage in bitter introspection.

You prove to yourself at every twist of the pattern the rightness of using your personal order as a basis to force others by any means necessary to twist with your twisting pattern turn by turn, even if you fail yourself to be consistent with your own vision. The vengeance is masked by the altruism of acting in their best interests.

It is driven by the idea that your lack of virtue is the fault of those around you who fail to be virtuous themselves - that is, they fail to fulfill the ideology your pattern has become. Not having the grit to do it yourself drives you to think of more and more terrible ways and justifications for using political power to force your way on others.

Your daydreams will consist of new and better fantasies of how force could reduce those around you to your ideal; avenge yourself on the world which has ignored you; and make it all a better place for everyone. And perhaps if all could be forced to live by your ideal you too might be able to do so. If you are a writer and thinker, you put all this into an ideological system, and write it down to be picked up by others (or yourself at a later date) who can do what you only dream of today.

Humorously this is seen in Liza Doolittle's song of revenge on Henry Higgins, "Just you Waits!" In a mundane way we experience petty bitterness that snips and tears small holes in the social fabric around us every day as we join with our fellow workers, sociologists, politicians, wives husbands, and children, in a litany of how things ought to be and how much better the world would be if I could run it.

But far more deadly are the theories of greed and envy that have spawned concepts of social "justice," class envy, class warfare, socialism in general and Marxism and fascism in particular.

Rejected Addenda

If this is true, then error is built into our patterns, Evaluation and Environment for the following reasons.

1) We are limited to knowing directly only what takes place in the moment we call "now." This moment is like a geometric point, though "now" in some cases seems to be as long as a day, week or year, when we examine excatly when now is, we find that it can shrink to a point beyond measurement. So what gives it the illusion of having duration? It is the continuity of the pattern we bring to the moment. As we examine and define "moment" or "now" what we are doing is breaking down that pattern of continuity in search of the actual point of interface between space, time and pattern. It cannot be found, but we all experience it. Thus our experience itself is mostly memory and that memory is the structure of our expectation, even though we experience everything at first hand.

1. The significance of points in our pattern is granted by their connection in the pattern. Since what we are doing is abstracting salient features of our experience - including our memories - we could mistakenly select the wrong points to abstract and overlook significant points simply because our pattern does not recognize their significance. The significance of any particular lies in grasping the pattern in which that particular finds its significance.

Sherlock Holmes is a delightful example of this, but so is all problem solving. This limitation is part of the warp and woof of how we know and see. When looked at one way the salient points of the pattern indicate such and such a relationship, when looked at another way their relationship indicates something different. The significance of oil was missed for most of recorded history until it was finally seen from the point view of a refinable energy source.

1. Objectivity in a scientific sense is impossible since no moment is repeatable nor can it be revisited. All we have are memories of what happened and patterns of which memories are significant. The Scientific Method posits the ideal of controlled repeatability but no point in time is repeatable. The best we can do is reconstruct as closely as possible similar conditions, and develop ways of recording our memories of earlier events to compare the results.

Statistics helps us smooth out the different results we run into when we repeat experiments. The ideal of repeating an event is unattainable yet it still stands as the standard for confirming truth when we can see it happened twice the same way. What we replace actual repetitiveness with is a method to control the approximate repetition, the salient features we believe are causally related, and our mechanism for recording them.

1. Objectivity in a scientific sense is impossible since we cannot measure anything without affecting the object being measured thus skewing the observation. (Heisenberg)
2. Objectivity in a mathematical sense is impossible since the examination is of the internal pattern which can only prove anything based on assumptions that cannot be proven within the system. (Goedel)

We create and sustain each moment a pattern of awareness which governs our perception, our understanding and our actions. The first thing we compare those patterns to is our social environment. Creating patterns that cohere with other's patterns is our primary source of meaning.

We are aware of the limitations of our experience. We know that some patterns are not true, some are delusions, some are harmful some are harmless. We call objective and factual those patterns which we believe are demonstrably coordinate with patterns in our environment. We call opinion those patters, which we believe are probably coordinate with our environment. And we call humor those patterns, which intentionally reverse or twist our environment harmlessly.

We call entertainment/art those patterns, which create imaginary worlds or environments for purposes of telling a story or recording an impression for later enjoyment, edification or meditation. We call Science, and in other cases Court, patterns that are sustained beyond shadow of reasonable doubt only after rigorously examination by multiple witnesses and if possible repeatable tests subject to rigorous methods and controls.

Since human awareness is fundamentally a creative enterprise, what are the fundamental illusions that our form of experience creates? Limitations on our P-E-E is built in. We are finite, therefore knowledge cannot be exhaustive but is limited to abstraction of significant points woven together in a framework of meaning -- or pattern of relationships constantly checked for internal and external consistency.

Our patterns depend on a regular and evaluation with the environment. There are two definitions of truth which are often used by skeptics to prove that because we cannot know something according to those definitions it means we can know nothing.

1. The demand for exhaustive reproduction in our minds of the pattern that is actually found in our environment. Since this is the ideal of knowledge, and since this ideal can never be achieved, therefore all human knowledge will never be true. Our patterns are always abstractions, and therefore by definition capable of improvement -- higher coherence to the environment.
2. The demand for perfect internal coherence within a pattern. Since perfect coherence is intrinsically impossible, therefore true knowledge of even our patterns apart from comparison with the external world will be found lacking.

The odd thing about this is, no one has been able to demonstrate that we can know anything outside of our model. And yet at the same time we all act, think, and assume a real and verifiable connection between what we think and the world. That is to say, objectivity means that something is true apart from out opinions concerning it. In theory this is possible, in life we believe we experience the objective world most of the time. And yet proof of what we experience or our conclusions concerning it are impossible to maintain.

The history of subjectivity, or doubt winds its way through every religion and philosophy. In the east the road is so convincing that all positive attempts to build a comprehensive model assume the fundamentally illusory nature of the world. In the West, the skeptical critique has never been overcome. But every attempt has been made to incorporate it into a constructive philosophy or religious statement. Skepticism is used to tear down the opposition. The result has been a general 500 year retreat into subjectivism.

The irony of course is that this retreat into subjectivism has been made during recorded history's greatest growth in objective and tangible advances. With the success of mathematical science, one might ask how is it that the philosophy that has grown with it is a philosophy that denies the possibility of the very objectivity that Science would seem to demonstrate.

We stay in the Casino of objectivity as long as we think we can win and this is the great appeal of the West we have won a lot. But when we start to lose, suddenly we try to cut our loss, collect our chips and go home, only to discover that we are home.. When it comes to providing a unified explanation of why we are winning we turn to subjectivity and finally the east where we despair of meaning in spite of all which our belief in meaning has created for our ease and comfort.

What sort of people are we such that we can do the things we do and think the things we think - so clearly so precisely and yet not be able to find the end or the beginning of our thought? We have quantified and proven and described more than all men put together and yet we have no idea of how to explain how it all goes together or works.

Early modern Philosophy, a number of the ancient Greeks and much Buddhist and Hindu thinking takes time to prove the illusory nature of experience and our internal models. We are able to pull memories together into patterns that follow that internal coherence. We are able to piece patterns together into larger coherent orders.

We are able to compare our patterns with further experience with two results, we correct our patterns where they diverge from the world, We experience something different from what is out there. We share patterns of understanding sufficiently to understand others.

Patterns understood by the broader society are part of the world of experience we account for. Order is the definition of the reality of our experience. Order defines meaning, purpose and perception. The definition of disorder is that there is no meaning, purpose or ultimately even perception only perfect entropy - a state of null order.

Our goal is always the same as our assumption: Goal - to find the coherence between the order of the patterns we create and the order of our environment. Assumption: there is coherent order and pattern in our environment that can correct our effort. The presupposition of human existence is that the environment is ordered; its order is capable of being abstracted and patterned; and that our abstract patterns are sufficiently accurate to be able to reorder both themselves and the environment.

Theoretical thought searches out those boundaries of change, to define the objective and the subjective and provide an explanation of how we can know truly and do rightly with what we know. However, theoretical thought cannot overcome the limitations of life - our moment by moment experience. The ordering process of experience demands theoretical coherence at higher and higher levels of abstraction. And yet that process denies order its goal because it is limited by the bottleneck time, finitude and abstraction creates for observation and evaluation.

The things of this world - power, control, sex, food, recognition - are more readily attained if you have a grasp on how the world works. The better your pattern, the more it will give you the information necessary to do the things needed to secure whatever it is you value. That may be as simple as self-supporting solitude or as complicated as the life of a president of a great multinational corporation or the founder of a religious sect (or their respective wives and children). Whatever the environment is you are ordering, the better your model or pattern is, the better you will be able to see in each situation the important things to develop a course of action that will secure what you value most.

As a general rule you only discover what you value most when you look back and see what you have done.

Some Afterthoughts

With due respect to Martin Marty for the title of a book I never read but have thought about ever since hearing the title cited by Grady Spires, and spending my entire life as an activist in the midst of activists of very different sorts. My first activism was in a family of missionaries.

My broader experience was growing up in a Church where evangelism was preached and practiced and we were expected to be and were radical Christians in the midst of the Jesus Revolution of the late sixties and early seventies. During that time I lived in a Christian conference ground where people came from all over the world to have their lives changed and change the lives of others. Finally I started my own business creating it out of nothing.

Then I went into full time Pro-life activism of the 2nd most extreme sort, becoming a national leader of Operation Rescue. From there moving to Missionaries to the Pre-born an organization designed to recruit the few willing to be full time missionaries who would either sit in jail or at the door of an abortion clinic as a calling as opposed to a weekend activity.

After a three year hiatus in the mid nineties, I became concerned about Y2K and we moved our entire Church from California to the Appalachian mountains of South Western Virginia. There I became involved in a community of the hardest core activists I had ever met and it was with them that I began to sit back and wonder where this rage for order was coming from. I have spent my whole life trying to get everyone else in line with my idea of order.

Now I was out in the middle of nowhere with these folks who were committed to making the family the central pillar that ordered all of life. No family, no life, no order. This is good you might say. Our society is destroying the family and might not survive its destruction. Yes it is. It is also destroying the idea of law, constitutional consistency, gender roles, community traditions, and high moral standards.

But mumbling affirmation of these things you have only repeated the rhetoric of family values and the broad issues of patriarchy which in effect say it's good to have men being manly with warm family ties and values. Even the non radical extremist feminist like a man to be manly. But get a few families off in a corner where they can invent the perfect society and church and enforce it and no one can afford to leave...

"And they redecorate your home from the cellar to the dome and when done with that they start about the enthralling task of overhauling you." (Henry Higgins) I have never seen anything like it. Where does this rage for order come from? Are they/we wacked? Is it normal? Do we all have it? What is it? If we discover the mechanism of order, and why we cannot help but do it, do we disprove God? Or prove Him? Can we now explain the things that we used to resurrect God in order to explain?

Twelve men in a boarding house bed, Roll over roll over. They all rolled over when anyone said, "Roll over, roll over." One of them thought it would be a great joke, not to roll over when anyone spoke, and in the confusion he got his neck broke, roll over, roll over. Eleven men in a boarding house...

Did you notice that masculine pronoun, "his." If you did it is because the feminists have accomplished the Herculean task of bending the language to fit its grammar to their ideology whether you applaud or abhor their success. On the other hand, if you didn't notice the masculine "his" it means that you are thoroughly bent in the other direction and have no clue about the psycho-social forces swirling about you in the world today, a personal achievement equal to that of the feminists.

The Bible, I Corinthians 10. Thomas Kuhn The Bible, Proverbs 10 vs the ideal of Eastern Meditation. The Apostle Paul's First Letter of pastoral advice to the Corinthian Church (Chapter 14) Felix Agrippa, in response to Paul's statements when on trial before him. Also Solomon on the vanity of life in the words of the Preacher found in The Bible Acts 24 and Ecclesiastes 11.) Voltair's Candid at the conclusion of his idealistic journey through the world that killed all idealism except this last isolationist dream that perhaps he himself is an region he can control and order infinitely.

With Voltair there are some unsuspecting bed fellows who advocate isolationist perfection. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, "Avoid foreign entanglements." The modern cry to seal our borders and cut off immigration. The naturalist searches for simplicity in harmony with the spiritual rhythms of a fecund nature.

The desire to start isolated Christian communities or develop theories of the family, church or state that cut us from others as if our community (or family) is a perfectible domain if we could just remove all foreign influences flowing from the chaos of the rest of the world which is out of control, and now out of bounds.

And yet the scientific method, like the religious commune and isolationistic political thinking is based on the idea that we can isolate elements to determine their true causes and so take coercive control our environment.

Kipling made hortatory use of our ability to change our environment moment by moment. to define manhood If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son Bacon turned our ability to change our environment into a stylized method to guarantee an objective result now enshrined as "The Scientific Method." Eastern mystics recognize the intrinsic illusion of seeking ultimate objectivity or success.

They reject the search for reality in the particulars of life. Instead they commit themselves to passive indifference - the ultimate attempt to fit into the environment - surrendering objectivity and particularity - becoming one with the Great All.

By contrast Saint Francis sought Christian realism, "Lord Grant me the Grace to change what I can and accept what I cannot change." And perhaps this is why Christianity like no other thought form has created the greatest civilization to date bringing under its wing east and west.

Cogito ergo sum is no more profound, indubitable or fundamental to existence than what one wag wrote on the bathroom wall in my high school: Coito ergo sum. Nor is thinking more indubitable than any other verb which "I" might engage in. An example of the political conundrum this gives rise to is appropriate. Destructive belief systems ultimately destroy both the individual and the cooperative effort. The temptation is always there to solve the defects of a belief system by imposing it by force.

This is intrinsically impossible. If people don't believe from their own convictions, then no external force on earth can sustain the belief. The very nature of belief systems is that they must be believed because they are true, not because someone says they are. Yet a belief system that drives us to use force on others to believe it denies the very nature of the limitations of systems. This is the terrible temptation of all ideologies - to supply with force what is lacking in argument or self-evident proofs.

Yet all governments are created to use force to defend society's ideals. No ideology, no government. No government, no order. Yet at some point we must remove by force those who are sufficiently deviant from an agreed upon order because sufficient deviation threatens the order that makes ordered life in society possible. But "how much deviation should lead to how much force to correct it and what sort of 'force'?" is the question which defies exact measurement.

There is no doubt that "From the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks." But that heart is beyond the reach of coercion. One solution to this conundrum is to strictly punish behavior, not belief. And to severely limit the list of punishable behaviors.

This is just a metaphor you say? Just last month Ahmed Adinijad ruler of Iran brought the head of Iran's Bus Driver's Union into the middle of the main square of Tehran and had his tongue torn out of his head publicly. The Bible, Ecclesiastes 5 John Boyd This is the conclusion Dilthey came to. But it is not some abstract philosopher's ideal. If you have been delighted by a book from another era or meditated on an artifact, a Grecian Urn perhaps, then you have experienced this common bond of humanity as you recognize the Patterns-Evaluations-Environments of old and the light these remains shed on our own.

Peter Berger Solomon in The Bible, Ecclesiastes Godel; 2nd Law of Thermodynamics; Heisenberg; Boyd. Jesus Christ, as quoted in the Bible, Matthew 23 applies a similar withering analysis to those who attempt to create a perfect social law order even when they try to do it with God's law itself. Even divine, law, revealed from heaven will not guarantee that the law order or civilization based on it will share those divine perfections.

CS Lewis, The Abolition of Man. And the more those who try to uphold it will abandon argument and turn to force if it is available to them. If it is not they will articulate an argument for why someone should use force to defend it. And those who oppose it will either want to take over that power for themselves, or to adopt a hyper individualism to resist it.

The Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:8 C.P. Snow, Thomas Kuhn Sartre; Being and Nothingness; Solomon, the Bible, Ecclesiastes. John Boyd, Destruction and Creation. Jesus Christ, The Bible, Matthew 23, C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, provocatively answers this illusory solution to illusion.

Hamlet Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra; Ayn Rand. CS Lewis, The Silver Chair Alexander Pope The Bible, Genesis 3. The Bible, Acts 17 Nihilism, absurdism, irrationality. The Bible, Acts 17 Shakespeare, King Lear. The Bible, I Corinthians 13 For example, who is the skeptic arguing with? Why does he think he is understood? In the same way that order cannot provide its own ultimate order, neither can doubt doubt everything without doubting itself.

The Bible, Genesis 1:28 The Bible, Acts 17:28-29. The Bible, Romans 1. The Bible, Matthew, 10; 19; & Deuteronomy The Bible, I Corinthians 13. Godel Democritus Heisenberg "If you can fill each unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run, yours is the world and everything that's in it, and what is more you'll be a man my son."

The experience of everything is in the end the experience of nothing. The Bible, Proverbs 31 Like this paper?

Appendix: Pattern, Evaluation, and Environment

It's too bad that environment is a noun and has no verbal form. How about experiencing-examining-surrounding? The endings align - ing - but the parts of speech are still not parallel. This exercise is itself an exercise in testing our internal consistency. And what I find most irritatingly is that the offness of the symmetry.

Look for the correspondence between this list and the list in the section preceding (Contradictions).

Point of reexamining or recreating a prior experience

Point of experience, "now" where Pattern-Evaluation-environment, come together