In a recent essay, Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?, I wrote:
Reduce reality to its various components and aspects but stop reducing when you reach components or aspects which cannot be used to fully explain or to `reconstruct’ each other. At that point in the process of analysis, it’s time to look for explanations which include all those seemingly fundamental components and aspects. You might be wrong and the next few generations might busy themselves taking your fundamental components and aspects apart to find still smaller particles. First, we searched for atoms, a search which had lasted for centuries and went through such strange paths as alchemy, but did result in the deep knowledge summarized in modern periodic tables of the elements. Then, we explored subatomic particles and discovered electrons and protons and neutrons and then strange hints of particles which didn’t fit into the simple scheme of things. Then we found out that there is a large zoo of particles out there and they seem to be broken pieces of more symmetric entities.
I used that to address the issue of mind, heart, and hands as being proper and adequate `elements’ for describing human nature. What if we wish to discuss this concrete universe, reality as it presents itself to our senses? Usually, we speak of reducing the world to its basic components in terms of matter and its directly measurable, physical relationships. I’m not about to suggest that there is something supernatural that gets added in to everyday lives in the way of, say, a spirit infusing life into our bodies or Satan putting a temptation into our brains or an angel acting to warn us. Rather am I going to claim that we and our relationships, things and their relationships, lie within the influence of larger-scale forces which shape the way in which our individual and communal lives play out, in the short-term and even over the millenia. I’ll quote Hans Reichenbach out of context, from his interesting book, The Direction of Time:
Time direction is a property of the causal net as a whole, and is transferred from the net to the individual processes. [page 108]
First, I’ll note that Reichenbach’s book is interesting and raised some serious questions in my mind but I’ll be doing little with it because I don’t think his way of explaining, or even describing, the direction of time works well within my way of thinking.
The real issue is what’s implied by Reichenbach’s comment. The forward movement in time of ordinary events is due to some sort of higher-level structure. I’d claim that structure, which he labels a `causal net’, is really a narrative.
To me, a `world’ is a universe which had more demanding aspects: unity and coherence and completeness. You might even say that a world is person-like, reversing my usual order for developing these ideas. At an abstract level, a person or a world is a story.
What is the relationship between a world and a person as I understand them? A creature such as a human being is born a particular sort of physical animal and is more or less invited implicitly by his surroundings (and perhaps explicitly by his Creator) to start shaping himself by response to those surroundings. Human communities play an important role as the centuries go by, developing broader and deeper understandings of those surroundings, perhaps even coming to view that physical entity which we call the `universe’.
I’ll repeat the short quotation from Professor Reichenbach:
Time direction is a property of the causal net as a whole, and is transferred from the net to the individual processes. [page 108]
I’m not convinced we can set up a `causal net’, that is, it’s not clear all the important relations, let me describe them as `co-causative’, can be captured in Reichenbach’s causal net. Something is coming into being in the work of those exploring complex systems and chaotic (usually unpredictable but law-abiding) systems, A number of very intelligent and knowledgeable men and women are doing work on these systems, studying them and developing some powerful tools to understand them or at least to describe them. I’m going about it a different way. I’m exploring the structure of narratives but but I study their ways and look for some sort of higher-level synthesis. I think, based upon my understanding of being and also of God’s purposes for Creation, that narratives are a more abstract, higher-level concept covering not only morally well-ordered stories but also the closely-related movements of physical entities through time.
The overall narrative by which this concrete realm, this universe, moves forward is what makes it a world, unified and coherent and complete. The overall narrative by which we concrete human beings move forward can make us persons, unified and coherent and complete.
The narrative, which is the movement into the future in our world, is as fundamental as the entities and relationships studied by physicists and other physical scientists. It cannot be reduced out of our understanding of this world. It cannot be explained by way of the field equation of general relativity or by Schrodinger’s equation in quantum mechanics. In fact, I would suggest that many physical laws, many physical entities, are what they are because of their role as the `stuff’ of a particular narrative.
Find the story of our universe, or at least a plausible story given our current knowledge. That is the world. At least to a Christian who intends to be a member of the Body of Christ and perhaps to a Jew intending to be a member of Israel, that story is also him, her, us and—expanded properly—that story is the story of all of Creation.