It is possible that we will one day discover that every law of every kind that we have ever discovered is reducible, as a totality, to something different altogether from law: to a RULE. A single formula that has generated them all. The laws of fundamental physics would be shown to be epiphenomenal - accurate descriptions of patterns generated by a more primal series. Perhaps at this point the eternity of nature will be subsumed by a higher temporality - the time needed by the rule to carry out its concrete steps (Wolfram). Or maybe it will be shown to eternally give itself all at once (Tegmark). The question then arises: why this rule and not others? If it has any determinateness at all, it must be contingent. The answer could be that it itself is one of an infinite number of rules - some producing physical universes, others yielding various mathematical and chaotic heavens, still others producing phenomena we can't yet begin to conceive (the term "phenomena" being hardly an adequate term here). This points us to the mathematical infinite itself, our knowledge of which continues to develop (Conway's surreal numbers and beyond). This hypothetical rule, and the infinite continuum to which it belongs, is the horizon of the cathartic aspect of Renihilation.
And yet isn't there something beyond this mathematical infinite? Catharsis gives way to the other Cardinals. The question points in two seemingly opposed directions: towards the theological and towards the social history of humanity.
On the theological side, we arrive at the mind of God. Who made these numbers? Whose mind holds the infinite quasi-determinacy of number as such? Here we arrive at the Qabalistic and Pythagorean account of God's creation of the world - that is, we arrive at God's will .
But we cannot ignore the social history of mathematics and science. Isn't it we ourselves who have constructed infinity? Isn't it a primordial human torsion that has driven the development of mathematics - economic need, the drive for prestige, the thirst for catharsis as such that has driven the genius of the likes of Dedekind and Cantor?
Hegel seems to have bridged the gap between the social and the divine by positing that the mind of God is none other than social history itself, temporalizing the divine attributes as so many eras and paradigms in a horrifying history, a Great Labor that yields greater and greater tragedies even as it succeeds in advancing towards a culmination in peace, justice and glory.
There is a certain gnosis that entails grasping that we ourselves are already God, that we are given the contradictory task of giving birth to ourselves and to God in the same stroke. God is the alpha and the omega because God is a cause that can only be posterior and antecedent at the same time. There is only a God because something is wrong, and there is only something wrong because of God. God is the reason for the world.