The claim in the title of this entry is currently a vague idea, one based on a recent reading of Time and Free Will and a currently ongoing reading of Creative Evolution — I’m about halfway through. A little intellectual history:
- Etienne Gilson studied under Henri Bergson.
- At some point, perhaps after finishing his studies with Bergson, Gilson discovered St. Thomas Aquinas and had an ah-ha experience in which he realized that Aquinas was a radical existentialist who seemed to make more sense of the world than other philosophers.
- In various writings, Gilson drew out what he thought to be the true thought of Aquinas and saw him as being far more consistent and coherent than the more modern existentialists, such as Kierkegaard and Sartre.
- During the 1960s through the 1990s, Alasdair MacIntyre constructed a narrative of a major line of moral and ethical thought in the West (roughly speaking, the line beginning with Aristotle and running through St. Thomas Aquinas). He ended up a Thomist and claimed that the noisy incoherence in public moral conversations is due to traditionalists having a radically different vocabulary and set of concepts from the modernists (whom he separated into two groups of genealogists and encyclopedists in his Gifford lectures, published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry). We moderns in different groups talk past each other, not having a clue at times what the other is really saying.
- Starting around 1985, I was still crawling around on hands and knees in my efforts to recover a robust mind after years of American education and life in corporations. I started reading MacIntyre, first After Virtue and then going back to his early efforts to see what the Greeks did and to try to understand what was inadequate in Aristotle. He finally decided that Aristotle was close to seeing the truth but his ideal man was the proud gentleman of Athenian society, missing an appreciation of his own dependence upon others (see “Dependent Rational Animals”, a book version of Professor MacIntyre’s Carus Lectures.)
- Being monolingual, as Aquinas also was so far as scholarly languages go, I read Summa Contra Gentiles in English, a scattering of other translated works by Aquinas, MacIntyre’s books which tracked his movement towards Thomism, and a number of historical and interpretive books by Gilson. (MacIntyre moved towards the Catholic Church in parallel with his movement towards Thomism but he has insisted the two journeys were independent, a claim which seems implausible even from an honest and profound thinker.)
- As I was reading philosophical and theological works, I was also reading many of the more serious but accessible works on modern physics and biology, including not only some written for literate non-scientists but also some difficult works such as Weyl’s “Space-Time-Matter” (which is actually outside of the mainstream view of general relativity) and Dirac’s “Principles of Quantum Mechanics”. On first readings over the course of several years, I struggled to get anything at all out of these classics of science, but finally began to understand a bit. I was also starting to read some works in mathematics, the most important of which proved to be some of Chaitin’s articles and books on random numbers.
- Starting out to write a simple book to let my fellow-Christians know they don’t have to fear modern science, I found myself writing a book which created what I call a worldview. In my case, this was a very preliminary narrative of Creation, as a true Creation with a Creator. The foundation is Christian revelation, most importantly that the Holy Trinity is one God, a Creator and that Jesus Christ was true God and true man. The basic tools of narrative understanding were derived from Thomistic existentialism and applied to modern empirical knowledge. The universe, defined first in a coherent and dangerous way by Einstein, becomes a world when seen as created by the God of Jesus Christ for His pleasure and to meet certain ends such as producing companions for His Son.
Oddly enough, while seeing much that lay outside of the playing field of pragmatists, such as William James, Bergson was like the pragmatists in not seeing a universe let alone a world or the greater Creation of which this universe is only a phase. This is a little surprising only because Bergson anticipated so many other aspects of the more complete quantum theory and the more general theory of relativity that Einstein was working on when Creative Evolution was published.
In Creative Evolution, Bergson saw that philosophers crippled themselves by accepting a division of labor that left them the job of cleaning up the statements of scientists. What is the job of philosophers? Well, the more serious philosophers will try to make sense of it all. That does involve some clean-up work. For example, back in the 1960s, Stephan Toulmin told theorists in evolutionary biology that they would do well to replace the concept of ‘random’ with the more complex and meaningful idea of ‘unpredictability at points of interaction between two complex systems’. The more important task for serious philosophers — in my opinion — would build upon work by mathematicians in the years following Professor Toulmin’s critique: randomness is a form of factuality. (Gregory Chaitin has been generous in acknowledging the contributions of those who anticipated the insights into randomness which he and Kolmogorov proposed independently around 1965, but he doesn’t seem to know about Toulmin’s contribution.)
And what can we do with the insight that we can avoid an irrational understanding of ‘randomness’? First of all, we move on to try to understand ‘factuality’ and then try to understand the universe on that more basic understanding. What sort of a universe is factual in such a way that much is unpredictable? Already, many thinkers are in trouble, possibly including Henri Bergson — I don’t know for sure at this point in reading Creative Evolution. What is clear to me that a lack of emphasis on the concept of ‘universe’, defined with shocking clarity in the work of Einstein, will cripple a body of philosophical thought even when it contains serious and worthwhile insights. From ‘universe’, a Christian — and perhaps a thinker from another faith — can move on to develop a ‘worldview’ as I define it, that is, to see a ‘world’: a universe seen in light of moral order.