The Second Coming:
for all us Dummies
Why not Come? 
•	God belongs in heaven. 
–	But can’t she go wherever she darn pleases? 
•	God ought to have better things to do. 
–	Being a Creator is a big deal for God.  
–	She has put a lot of eggs in her Creation basket, and she will attend to it carefully. 
•	There is no God. 
–	Ok, hold that thought, and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy. 
Why come? 
•	If you were the Creator, would you not want to participate in your Creation to a maximal degree? 
–	If Creation were truly important to you, would your not want to pour yourself into it as fully as possible?  

But why should we seriously consider the God hypothesis in the first place?
•	Modern science and technology are here to stay.
–	And so is postmodernism 
•	Postmodernism provides only an incoherent pluralism. 
•	Many of us seek a higher synthesis in order to bring meaning and coherence to our world. 
–	The pluralists rightly criticize any such move as being likely to foster theocratic and totalitarian tendencies.  
•	There is only one way out of this bind: 
–	A rational, coherent synthesis of the various worldviews 
A Rational Synthesis?
•	Most everyone scoffs at this possibility.
•	The last serious attempt was by GHW Hegel (1770-1831). 
•	But how will we know if we don’t even try? 
–	This dummy rushes in where angels fear to tread. 
•	I’ve spent at least thirty years on this synthesis, and I find that the longer I work on it, the simpler it gets.  
A Logical Synthesis:
 Step by Step
•	First comes a shift from the correspondence theory of truth to the coherence theory of truth. 
–	This is the single most important and far reaching step. 
–	If you can grasp this, everything else will follow rather easily, and it is actually very simple, even though its ramifications are earthshaking. 
•	Correspondence theory of truth: 
–	Reality is simply a collection of facts. 
–	The facts need not cohere or have any other pattern except by accident. 
•	Coherence theory of truth: 
–	There is no such thing as an isolated fact, just as there is no such thing as an isolated meaning. 
–	In as much as reality is cognizable, so must it be coherent. 
–	Epistemology and ontology cannot ultimately be separated. 
–	There is a reason for everything.  
•	This is true for physics, as well, with the possible exception of the initial conditions, e.g. the Big Bang. 
•	The next step? 
–	There is no next step. 
–	Everything else is just an elaboration of this one paradigm shift. 
Putting all our Eggs in one Basket?
•	The main point is that we didn’t put them there: they were already there. 
•	This is best seen from the perspective of mathematical physics. 
–	In physics, this coherence is known as the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics.  
–	This is why physicists can cogently speak of a Theory of Everything. 
–	This fact motivates us to seek a higher coherence. 
•	The main thing missing from the prospective physical coherence is the mind. 
–	Our theory of everything must include the mind. 
–	The mind/brain problem is universally regarded as the greatest mystery in the world. 
–	It was over three hundred years ago that Rene Descartes (1596-1650) announced the separation of mind and matter. 
–	This act of great intellectual convenience triggered the Scientific and Technological revolutions and made Democracy possible by also separating the Secular from the Sectarian realms. 
–	We can easily see why the Postmodernists are so reluctant to even reconsider Descartes’ serendipitous act. 
Damned if we do, damned if we don’t
•	The postmodernists would like to see the present state of pluralism continue indefinitely. 
•	In a world being shrunk by a rapidly expanding communication technology, all our disparate ideas and traditions are being thrown together into a disorienting, alienating cacophony. 
•	How can we hope to survive together on this crowded and shrinking planet if we have no common ground for communication, no common worldview? 
A Quantum Leap to Synthesis?
•	Nothing less than a quantum leap, an unprecedented paradigm shift, could now bring coherence out of the present chaos of ideas. 
•	Nothing less than a cosmic vision will suffice. 
•	Let us consider the visions of coherence: 
Visions of Coherence
More visions
Pythagorean visions of coherence 
Archetypes of Unity
•	Ouroboros 
–	Primal psychic circuit, zodiac, bootstrap
•	MDX/Z 
–	Matrix (primal potentiality), Dialectic, Logos/zodiac 
–	trinity of ::  Mother, Spirit, Son(s) 
–	e^i*pi = -1 
–	Mandelbrot 
•	AZO/X/QRP 
–	Alpha, Zodiac, Omega/Logos/Quantum, Reproduction, Pi 
–	Macrocosm/microcosm connected by the Logos
•	Mb:S::An:X 
–	Mandelbrot set : Srinivasa Ramanujan :: Anthropics : Christos 

The role of the archetypes
•	In immaterialism the archetypes replace atoms as the foundation of reality. 
•	The main thing to remember is that coherence demands an organic unity of the archetypes. 
–	We aspire to a Pythagorean harmony rather than a Platonic absolutism. 
–	This is essential to teleology and restitution. 

The ‘emergence’ of the archetypes
•	The organic unity of the archetypes is ensured by keeping in mind their essential relations to each other and to a common source or ground of being. 
•	The Matrix is that Source. 
–	It is potentiality. 
–	The BPW is the realization of that potentiality. 
•	The dynamic element is the dialectic. 
–	It is the source of multiplicity. 
–	It is the cosmic bootstrap, which we also experience as love. 
•	The christos/logos is the original thesis and archetype. 
–	It is necessarily the Alpha and Omega, Creator and Telos. 
–	In some strong sense, Creation is the antithesis, and the eschatological restitution of Creation, i.e. apokatastasis, is the cosmic synthesis. 

Ugly Facts? 
•	"The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." 
–	Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) 
–	Perhaps the theory in question was not sufficiently coherent. 
•	Yes, we do have to tough it out.  
–	One needs a mustard seed of faith and confidence.
–	Cosmology is not for the faint of heart. 
•	Scientific materialism has been on a roll for more than three centuries. 
–	There are many signs, however, that its grip on our minds is waning. 
•	We can sit on our hands, or we can start figuring out how to transcend its increasingly obvious limitations. 
•	Will it be revisionism or revolution, i.e. a paradigm shift? 

The Way Forward? 
•	No point in rolling back the clock into dualism. 
–	We’ve been there, done that! 
•	The only way forward is into a non-material monism. 
•	This quantum leap forward will necessarily have a spiritual content and so will impact every religious tradition. 
–	As such, it will come as a revelation of ‘biblical proportions’.  
–	There will surely be a significant messianic component.
–	This vision will not emerge from a committee.
–	Once again, the faint of heart need not apply! 
–	Fools rush in?  Yet, according to Google there are not many who are rushing down this particular path.  
Immaterialism
•	This is a hard pill to swallow, especially for us in the western tradition. 
•	We have taken matter more seriously than others. 
–	Ironically, this is due in no small part to the Incarnation.  
–	Materialism, in a dualist context, is almost a part of our catechism.  
•	How can we give up that absolutism without devaluing the world and our lives? 
–	This is too often the case with pantheism. 
–	We replace pantheism with coherentism. 
–	Then we replace atoms with archetypes, taking care to treat the archetypes as part of a Pythagorean harmony, and not as Platonic absolutes. 
Dinosaurs and Stars
•	If we can choose the archetypes to be robust, the rest of Creation will spin itself off. 
–	God does not have to place every hair on every head, or every star in the sky. 
–	The same is true for the Mandelbrot. 
•	It operates under its own internal logic and coherence. 
•	God sets the example. 
–	The example is to love and to strive for perfect understanding through time, knowing that perfection is never absent. 
•	Mainly it is in this sense that time is an illusion. 
•	It is mainly our understanding of perfection that is to be perfected. 
•	The Second Coming triggers the final quantum leap in our understanding. 
–	God calls the tune.  God is the tune. 
–	Creator and Creation are mutually essential.  
•	We cannot understand the part without the whole, nor the whole without the parts. 
•	One hair cannot be disturbed without disturbing the rest, as with the Mandelbrot.  

Omega
•	The critical idea here is apokatastasis. 
–	This is the restoration/restitution of all things in God.  This is universal salvation. 
–	This is now a heresy.  
–	Originally it was the orthodoxy of the Orthodox. 
–	All dualisms and paradoxes are transcended. 
–	This is the temporal completion of Creator, Creation and history. 
•	The Omega is the beginning of eternity. 
–	Eternity is not endless time. 
–	It is the dimensions beyond space and time. 
–	It is a timeless ending/beginning. 
–	It is the ouroboros in its entirety. 
The Millennium 
•	The BPWH envisions pre-millennialism.  
–	The Best Possible World hypothesis envisions the completion of God’s salvific, sacrificial errand into Creation. 
–	This enables the establishment of God’s eschatological kingdom, traditionally to last a thousand years. 
–	The actual time frame is likely to be substantially shorter rather than longer. 
•	And what may we expect of the Millennium? 
–	It is a period of realignment between our hearts and intellects, after the long drought of materialism. 
–	We finish our business here and prepare to transcend the barriers of space and time. 
•	This may include the return of unprepared souls. 
–	There will be a gradual breaking down of barriers between our individual egos, and between our separate states of consciousness.  
–	Codified society gives way to organic community.  
Second Coming? 
•	By all accounts the prophetic tradition remains unfulfilled. 
•	The pantheist traditions envision an eventual collapse followed by a return to a golden age inaugurated by an avatar.  
•	The fulfilling of the prophesies is the prerequisite of the Millennium. 
•	The christocentric hypothesis is essential to the incarnational requisite of rational monism and its concomitant of an eschatological restitution. 
–	The illogic of a dualistic monotheism had its historical purposes, but now we are poised to transcend dualism. 
The One World Hypothesis
•	Rationalism demands a teleology. 
•	Teleology requires a OWH.  
•	Teleology is a concomitant of monotheism. 
•	All four of these concepts should be treated as virtually synonymous. 
•	All of these are essential to Coherence. 

•	Remaining topics
–	Explanation of the archetypes
•	Matrix and bootstrap
•	Dialectic 
–	Immaterialism & physics 
•	Azo/x/qrp