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Conway, I think your reference to Kant’s work in relation to the question of infinite reality is quite astute. His ideas about causality being a hardwired paradigm of human perception totally turned the tables on old arguments about the nature of reality and theology, for instance early “proofs” about the existence of god based on the idea of a ‘first cause’. Before we can try to judge the nature of the universe based on rational perception, we must first determine whether our perceptions are actually accurate.
I’ve found that many people have difficulty with contradictions, such as the debate over free will vs. determinism, until they learn to throw out some very basic assumptions. Once a person can do this, he’ll often find that the very question he was asking becomes irrelevant. In any ontological debate, the first instinct is to fall back on paradigms, or models for understanding and viewing reality.
Aristotle wrote that paradigms didn’t relate the general to the particular, or the particular to the general, but rather the particular to the particular. Thus a paradigm often becomes a logical fallacy known as questionable cause, such as saying, “A and B regularly occur together, therefore A is the cause of B.” He also said, “only one of [the individuals concerned in the argument] is more knowable than the other." This is very interesting if you think about it.
In relation to the question of the role of divinity in the universe (ie how can both the Christian and Muslim monotheistic deities both exist simultaneously in a universe where everything that is possible actually exists, including the possibility that neither exists), an interesting philosopher by the name of Whitehead proposed that an actual identity must be the reason for the ordering or valuing of the abstract potentialities and the ideal forms from which our actual universe arises. You can take this to mean that God must exist because order exists, but I prefer to think of it this way:
The universe does simultaneously contain an infinite number of possibilities, but the very fact that we perceive a particular ordering and valuing of the world is evidence of the absolute, ie the ordering we perceive is the divine element. What we perceive, we create, because in a universe of infinite reality the more we perceive the more that exists for us. So, the divine impulse is contained in the very act of questioning and expanding our view if the world (even if we can’t “realize all conceptions”).
""If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand." --Confucius"
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