I Do Not Think That God Desires Praise

If God possesses all virtues, and humility is a virtue, then God must be humble.

God does not desire praise from us.

For God, the autonomous individuality of our free will choices is praise enough.

The nature of God's creation is the praise.

God's praise is the nature of nature.

I am appending this postscript for Bad Grace, who is that graduate student with a good mind that I met in Myspace forum chat. He asks me regarding the "nature of nature" and what I might mean.

Perhaps it is clearer to say that the "nature of nature" may be understood as a "very good" that is seen when one stands back and surveys the panorama of all of creation, is the proof and substance of praisworthyness, and is better than empty words of praise from flawed beings who congregate in vast televised amphitheatres as choruses of parrots squawking Halleluia.

We read in Genesis that at the end of each day the first five days of creation, God sees that it is "good", but when creation is complete, God sees that it is "very good."

The Talmud interprets this "very good" related to the "yetzer hara" or tendency towards evil. If a man is greedy, then that is a bad thing, BUT, there is a way for a man to harness that evil so that he is greedy for TORAH knowledge (religious knowledge), and when that happens, an evil becomes a good. We see a hint of this when Joseph's brothers come to him in Egypt, to ask forgiveness, and Joseph answers "you intended evil, but God transformed your evil into good." They had intended to murder Joseph because of their jealousy, but instead sold him into slavery. But their action lead to Joseph rising to a high position of authority, which enabled him to save his family from famine and starvation.


Hegel stood back, surveyed the history of philosophy, and saw a grand pattern of thesis, followed by refutation and antithesis, only to be followed by a synthesis of seemingly opposing notions into a new thesis, from which the same process repeats, again and again, endlessly. This "meta-philosophy" Hegel called the "flower of philosophy", in that each stage or theory, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, is one petal of a flower unfolding.

Kurt Godel had his dispute with that other mathematician around 1905 (I must google for his name since I always forget it). That mathematician stated that if something is true in mathematics, it must be provable. Godel disagreed, and ultimately PROVED that there must of necessity in any axiomatic system be truths that cannot be proven true within the context of that axiomatic system. This "incompleteness" of axiomatic systems has to do with the limits of logic and axioms and postulates. For several centuries, mathematicians assumed that Fermat's Last Theorum was one such unprovable truth. But in recent years, that Princeton mathematician proved it.


One may see a similar notion of meta-religion in such religions as Jain, and in the Pusti Marga (Path of Grace) of Vallabhachaya.

Now, is it possible to take one step further back, and behold all of these meta-ologies as a meta-meta-ology. How many levels can there be?

Perhaps it is a third level that we take when we stand back and behold the similarities of all these meta-ologies.

Stephen Hawkings recently conceded, in a bet with a fellow physicist, that it is not possible for a black hole singularity to harbor within itself another expanding time-space continuum big bang. We such a thing possible, then our universe would itself be inside a black hole, and contain within it countless other black holes harboring baby universes. The whole thing might be termed a meta-universe.


I have on my bookshelf Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh, which describes how Andrew Wiles solved Fermat's Last Theorem. It mentions that the opponent of Godel was Hilbert.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hilbert

Hilbert lived to see the Nazis purge many of the prominent faculty members at University of Göttingen, in 1933 [4]. Among those forced out were Hermann Weyl, who had taken Hilbert's chair when he retired in 1930, Emmy Noether and Edmund Landau. One of those who had to leave Germany was Paul Bernays, Hilbert's collaborator in mathematical logic, and co-author with him of the important book Grundlagen der Mathematik (which eventually appeared in two volumes, in 1934 and 1939). This was a sequel to the Hilbert-Ackermann book Principles of Theoretical Logic from 1928.

About a year later, he attended a banquet, and was seated next to the new Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust. Rust asked, "How is mathematics in Göttingen now that it has been freed of the Jewish influence?" Hilbert replied, "Mathematics in Göttingen? There is really none any more".[5]

By the time Hilbert died in 1943, the Nazis had nearly completely restructured the university, many of the former faculty being either Jewish or married to Jews. Hilbert's funeral was attended by fewer than a dozen people, only two of whom were fellow academics.[6]

On his tombstone, at Göttingen, one can read his epitaph:

Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen - We must know, we will know.

Ironically, the day before Hilbert pronounced this phrase, Kurt Gödel had presented his thesis, containing the famous incompleteness theorem.




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St. Paul is basically speaking of a "meta-good" which is beyond good and evil, in one of the epistles, when he says that "all things work unto good for that person who loves God".

http://rev-ed.blogspot.com/2005/08/all-things-work-together-for-good.html

Romans 8:28

And Jorge Luise Borges makes a career of portraying such meta-structures in stories like "The Library of Babel"

http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html
.....

and stories like "The Heretic" in which a righteous man (so he presumes), spends his life in pursuit of an "heresiarch" or heretical bishop (religious leader). He finally succeeds in executing the Heresiarch, and then later, dies himself, and in the afterlife learns that, in God's sight, the orthodox and the heresiarch are both cells or components in a much larger meta-organism.