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Research program introduction, Research program overview

I do think a lot about God, which is understandable. I want to know everything and apply that knowledge usefully. Thus God's vantage point is relevant, whether or not God exists. Mathematically, I would say that God is the state of contradiction, in which all statements are true. I also suspect that one model for God is the purported field with one element, which is to say, a field where supposedly zero equals one equals infinity. When I read in Wikipedia that the action of the anharmonic group on zero, one and infinity gives an isomorphism with {$S_3$}, as the quotient of {$S_4$} over the Klein group, then I wonder, what does that say about God?

Yet what is the point of such thinking? I very much appreciate the podcasts by physicist Sean Carroll, especially his series on The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, and I accept as reasonable his critique of God as a theory. I expect he would ask me, what do I understand to be God? I think of God as the Indefinite, which is what we mathematicians wrestle with as we try to make things definite. Why not try to understand, imagine and engage the Indefinite? In my understanding, from the Indefinite proceeds the definite, and then the imaginable, and then the Unimaginable. In my words, God grows by going from the Indefinite, which is nobody's God, to the Unimaginable, which is somebody's God. Indeed, how can God truly be God unless God is somebody's God? This progression manifests the strange words that I heard from God in a dream, when I was eighteen, and struggling with how to understand him: "Those things are which show themselves to be." These words, which I heard from a fiery furnace, at the time sounded like nothing more than a tautology. I started to appreciate them only decades later. In mathematics, I would say they take the form of Morita equivalence, which is relevant for Bott periodicity, and more generally, they take the form of Voevodsky's Univalence Axiom, that identity is equivalent to equivalence. "Those things are which show themselves to be."

In practice, how can anything arise from a God who is the Indefinite? It seems to me only through God's question: Is God necessary? Would God be if God was not? At the start, God is a state of contradiction. He proceeds by various divisions to remove himself and thus yield a state of noncontradiction. Will God arise where there is no God? God has no perspective, but I arise as a perspective, You as a perspective upon a perspective, and Other as a perspective upon a perspective upon a perspective. I suspect that we can identify these with affine geometry, projective geometry, conformal geometry and symplectic geometry.

What does this all mean for us within the godless state of noncontradiction? Well, mathematicians make good use of the concept of contradiction, especially in proofs by contradiction. Similarly, we can allow for God as the unimaginable. Here is my maxim: Life is the fact that God is good but eternal life is understanding that God doesn't have to be good, and accordingly, life isn't fair. This is wisdom. We can't be good to ourselves or God if we insist that life has to be fair and God has to be good. Our never ending personal growth, here and now, depends on us growing beyond our conditions, thus ever letting go of what is fair or good in the conditions we know and seeking and acting from the vantage point of the unconditional beyond what we know. Similarly, we can take up the vantage point of Other in this world, the people who we don't know or imagine yet around whom You and I and God should unite. You and I are but intermediaries between God beyond us and Other within us and amongst us.

What does this mean practically? Why is God's point of view relevant for me? It frees me from other people's expectations, and lets me live on the edge of this world, without a family or a job. God's point of view is necessary for me to love my enemies, which requires a split mind. I know atheists who are good people in many, many ways, but they avoid having enemies. When I go against this world, and stand with its victims, then I gain enemies, and I appreciate a higher vantage point which commands me to love them. Which is to say, I can accept the reality of negative numbers, and not restrict myself to positive numbers. Finally, challenging others to grow, as I am challenging you, requires that I have a higher vantage point from which to check whether I am doing so for your own sake or for my own. Sometimes I don't know. I do need to care about others who I can't even imagine.