God: a personal infinity

Rick and I dug into scale and realm last week (on a bench on Gloucester harbor, late at night). One of his comments: why the boundary between the physical and the spiritual? Why not instead think of a boundless infinity of ever-smaller "atoms," and an ever-larger "universe?"

This is helpful, because I do think fundamentally of a boundless infinity, and the boundary between the physical and spiritual realms is in fact arbitrarily chosen. It is recognizable, though: it is the boundary between what is subject to repeatable observation and what is not, between the non-overlapping magisteria of science and religion.

Now, I recently commented regarding this boundary:

A common atheist line is that "God" is the name religious people give to whatever is just beyond the understanding of science. I think science definitely has God on the run[.]

However, to say science has God "on the run" implies that someday we will find the Atom and the Universe, and then there will be no room left for God. But we find ourselves in an infinity. And that portion of the infinity beyond the view of our science is necessarily larger—and infinitely so!—than the portion within our view. Why is it a bad idea to give this latter infinity a name?

Moreover, we find the (known) universe to exhibit certain properties that also belong to things that we ourselves create, such as scale, abstraction, order, beauty, elegance, creativity, etc. On that pattern—people create order—why is it a bad idea to ascribe some nuanced sort of personality to the infinity out of which this known universe of seeming order arises?

So, far from being a cop-out, God ought precisely to be our name for the infinity that must always lie beyond the known universe. And we could, I think, find ways to speak of this infinity as in some sense personal. Even Dawkins admits as much when pressed. Feed back to Chad Whitacre.