by Stanley Anderson » May 19th, 2009, 2:10 pm
Certainly for mathematical systems, if you can demonstrate the (seemingly) tiniest contradiction anywhere in the system, you can demonstrate that that contradiction "ripples" through the entire system making anything and everything inconsistent and contradictory. For example if you were somehow able to demonstrate that something we might never "actually" run across in a million years, say, that "pi to the hundred millionth power equals pi to the hundred millionth power plus 1", such a demonstration would immediately allow you to prove any other mathematical condition, say, 1+1=5 or 7 = 5,000,007 or anything at all. It would be cataclysmic for that system.
Can one extrapolate from there to a theological idea about God? I certainly would myself, but that's about as far as I could go in terms of a "convincing argument" to give to someone else. Something like this is probably what Lewis had in mind when he had Aslan respond in LWW to the suggestion that he simply take the traitor Edmund back from the White Witch about the consequences of such a seemingly simple action.
And of course one could wander into all sorts of interesting (but probably ultimately unanswerable) speculations about how something like this is apparently exactly what happened to the otherwise impenetrable gates of death when the innocent lamb of God was slain -- the whole world was turned upside down and reborn (and then given a slap on the butt to start it breathing in the new atmosphere it was born into?:-)
--Stanley
…on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a fair green country under a swift sunrise.