Seeing a Universe and Then a World

I have read a lot of vague arguments that claim to shoot down scientistic attacks upon Christianity. I have read a smaller number of very good arguments of that sort. From a certain viewpoint, those arguments — good or vague — are beside the point. We can divide human knowledge in various basic ways, and I’ve done so in an unpublished manuscript on the four types of knowledge for a reasonable discussion: revealed truths, empirical scientific knowledge, empirical practical knowledge, and the speculative knowledge that ties them together. Of these four, revealed truths deal with the only absolute truths, but it’s quite true that speculative knowledge, philosophical and literary, is the glue that lets us see a world.

And that’s the point. Pragmatists, such as William James in a clear way but most modern thinkers to some extent, recognize only knowledge that arises directly from empirical data. This is a somewhat grotesque characterization of some bodies of thought both subtle and powerful, but useful for the purposes of this discussion which is about the problem faced by most philosophers and theologians and scientists: a universe can’t be constructed from pieces. A universe, conceived as an entity as was done in the General Theory of Relativity, can be both itself — subject to scientific and philosophical analyses, and also home to a variety of entities — also subject to scientific and philosophical analyses.

To focus the point a little more: we’re all pragmatists now. We all believe in environments fragmented and isolated from each other, sometimes by infinitely deep chasms. We Christians try to live on the Mount where Jesus spoke and we look across the various chasms to the interesting but contingent realms of cosmological physics or evolutionary biology or human history. In doing this and not seeking unity in our knowledge, we’re agreeing to a fragmentation of God’s Creation and a separation of those fragmented parts from the Creator Himself.

The incoherence in the Christian worldview in recent centuries is little different from the incoherence in scientific views until Einstein and his successors forced us to think in a more disciplined manner, to recognize that we need to define ‘universe’ — however tentatively — before we speak about it. Neither Christians nor scientists (yes, I know there is great overlap) had a clue what they were really talking about when they said the word ‘universe’ before Einstein provided a tentative technical definition and also an authoritative general definition: our universe is all that is bound by a common gravitational field. “A common gravitation field.” That’s the starting point for Christians to reconstruct their view of God’s Creation and to make it consistent with empirical knowledge in its current state.

You might say that gravity is a physical manifestation in this world of the metaphysical principle of unity which was manifested by God in what I call the Primordial Universe, the underlying stuff of all Creation. So far as I know, Einstein didn’t realize immediately that a deeper understanding of gravity would lead to a coherent definition of ‘universe’. That definition fell out, so to speak, of work which dealt with the force which holds together both local systems and the universe as a whole. It seems conceivable that two different forces might have done those functions or that a single force would have had different attributes locally and universally. If that had happened, we might not have had a coherent way of defining a universe.

Start with a pile of the stuff of matter, energy, and fields. Add the most sophisticated form of Newtonian dynamics (some version of Hamiltonian physics), toss in several tablespoons of statistical physics and chaos theory, and cook it all with the so-called laws of thermodynamics, and… You don’t have a universe. You have a puddle of stuff. A universe exists as an entity and not just a container for the stuff inside of it. Nor can that stuff exist in the way of pragmatic speculation. Even with the theory of General Relativity in place, it took a courageous speculation to posit a universe as we now understand it.

To make sense, a humanly conceived universe must correlate with our perceptible reality as built up from the pieces — but it’s not reducible to those pieces. The history of human thought tells us prophets and poets and theologians had intuitions of a universe, or cosmos, before such could be defined. But a serious definition came only when science, studying the pieces, gave us the tools which Einstein used so well. Still, understanding the more profound implications of General Relativity takes a great leap of faith, faith that those complex equations have a metaphysical meaning, that they provide a solution to a problem that philosophers and scientists had danced around for centuries without really understanding their own anxieties. As often happens in such matters, that leap of faith is trivialized by glossy magazines of popular science and by hour-long documentaries.

But a definition of a universe is still not enough. A universe is a very fragile entity if only because it has no reason to exist. ‘A reason to exist’ is a purpose which can’t be internally generated. It must be set from outside that universe. It is at this point that Christians can begin their work of making sense of the huge piles of modern empirical knowledge, not truly knowledge to be sure until it is part of a more coherent, more unified, more complete whole — a world which is ordered to the purposes of the Almighty.