A despatch from just in front of the Printer, slightly to the left of the A3010

Evening all.

There was a thought I had, a long time ago, that ran along these lines:

1. If God has responses we could categorise as emotional (bearing in mind problems of perception and comprehension) then, given the transcendental nature of these responses, their power would be infinite - unimaginable - since they were the product of a perfect understanding and a perfect empathy, utterly beyond the reach of imperfect humanity.
2. Provided that God does have the responses described above then God will have an 'emotional' response to the state of humanity.
3. A lot of Charismatic Evangelicals want to know God's 'Heart for the World/Poor/etc'. A seemingly commendable action, excepting points one and two.
4. A lot of Charismatic Evangelicals are therefor asking for their brains to be reduced to mush in the throes of some kind of trans-finite, trans-perception, look at what God thinks about stuff: A sort of Holy Acid trip.

What this all really has to do with anything at all is the film I just watched. Pi. A film about a number. In fact the number in question was the Golden Ratio, but there is a relationship and Pi is a much catchier title.

Pi concerns the search for a number determined through its relationship to the Golden Ratio. To cut a long story short, the number is (amongst other things) the physical manifestation of the True name of God: That the Golden Ratio, and its attendant partners the Golden Section and the Golden Spiral, occur all throughout nature and that these are the pointers towards this number, the number of the name of God. The protagonist, one Maximillian Cohen (The historical Cohens being the Jewish high priests as were), searches for and finds this number, melting lots of cool-looking computer bits along the way. His apprehension and partial comprehension of the number begins to kill him. He has the Holy acid trip. He drills the part of his brain that this relates to (I'm hazy at this point because I missed the first half hour) the number and can't do hideously complex maths in his head anymore, thus not knowing the number and thus saving his sanity and life.

It's an interesting proposition that God, through her role as creator, has intrinsically seeded the universe with this spiral, this proportion, that are pointers towards himself. That because of our createdness we perpetuate the spread of the self same proportion and spiral, kind of like the fingerprints of God:

That as a created order we cannot help but reflect a portion of our creator, and while the films premise is essentially a really silly 'what if?' it certainly throws up some interesting questions.

Matt

PS the subject line reference is to the fact that Cohen's apartment looked like our spare room would if someone gave us a million quid to spend on electronic junk.

• 1.6.1999, 12.0
• File under: film, theology, Pi