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Gary,

I'm taking the Deuteronomy verse and asking a child's question: What is one?

One is a quantity which must have its own intrinsic value. Ever the age at which we learned to count using our fingers, we've taken for granted our idea of one enough to be able to use it to describe things. Obviously this is an attempt to understand it at a much more foundational level than that.

Essentially what I'm doing is trying to understand a theoretical, or philosophical, idea of "one." I'm taking it from being an adjective that describes things (one tree, one car, etc.) and looking at its essence as a noun (one-ness itself).

Along the way I'm observing that, whatever this thing called "one" is, it is strikingly similar to all of our established Church teaching about the Tri-personal nature of God. In my first reply to Jman I added some parts that I had forgotten to include in the original post. There I mainly focused on the three different components of the equation (Numerator, Denominator and Result).

There are two steps that I've taken to arrive at a definition for the concept of "oneness." The first step is to show the obvious: that it must equal itself. The second step is to show that it exists. I'm not really sure that this is mathematics, but it is using the same notation as mathematics, so for lack of a better word I'm calling it that. Perhaps it is more philosophical than mathematical.

I stop once I establish this, because I realized that I had obtained what I was looking for: A definition is a point of uniqueness that makes it different than everything else. It might be possible to define it more narrowly than that, but it cannot be defined as anything less than that.

1/1=1 and the similar equation 1=1x1 are the simplest unique expressions for the value of one. Unlike dictionary definitions, this is the final source definition of "one" because it is defined solely in terms of itself. That means there is no other concept that we have to find a definition for.

Conversely, if we used a dictionary we would have to look up the definitions of other words used in the definition of "one," and then the definitions of those definitions, and so one. That process would repeat itself infinitely without finding a final definition. Here we have found it using arithmetic activities like division, equality, and multiplication.


This goes much farther than any creation-based illustration goes, because it allows us to make a simple logical deduction based on two premises:
if God exists, and
if God is one,
then by definition (definition of one), God must be a tri-personal being as we have already understood him in the creeds.

Ironically, buried within the definition of one is the proof that the full, true value of One can be known only to One itself. This is because its value is defined exclusively in terms of itself. So if God is one, we might use this to explain "how" God is (tri-personal, etc.), but not "what" God is (his substance). That can only be known through "one" revealing itself, and that happens in the Word, both written and Living.

In regard to what eternal means, my mind was stretched a bit when I noticed the ideas of "true" and "false." Any statement that can never be false is eternally true.

This could be taken a step further to explain why souls are not annihilated in the death of the body.
The Numerator of "one" is a concept that "just is." The Numerators of every other number "just are" because they are founded on the "just is" nature of "one." However the Expression of those values are contingent on the presence of the Denominator. As we noticed earlier, every number must have a denominator of One to exist. So when the Denominator is removed, the Result ceases to be expressed, and the equation (the being) is destroyed, yet the Numerator necessarily exists and cannot be destroyed because it is implied by the existence of the Numerator of one. We might restate this by saying that the soul eternally exists as a concept in the mind of God.

P.S. A lot of this I've had to think very carefully about and many times over in the last two years to be sure of how it fit together. Go easy on yourself. I had to take Calculus 1 twice and Calculus 2 three times before I passed. It was during the second time through Calc 2 that something random and off-topic got me started on noticing this. That's the highest math I've had to take, thankfully.

Let me know if this clears anything up for you. I'm still trying to find the best way to explain it to people.

[Updated on: Sat, 02 November 2013 22:28]

Also, I only made it through Algebra II at a local community college.

Why do we have to deal with negative numbers, x = blah, blah, blah.



I usually love school and studying. But math......



God is one and He manifests Himself in three different ways.

I am a wife, mother, and daughter.....just like the Bible says God is, only in masculine form.

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