Every so often, I’ll review my own long-range goals for developing a more complete worldview. The term ‘worldview’ as I use it is first an empirical understanding of this physical universe and then a more complete understanding in light of God’s purposes as best I can understand them given Christian teachings, my own readings of the Bible, prayer, and worship . I find that I’ll otherwise lose focus, perhaps because of my nearly complete intellectual and spiritual isolation as I go about a task I consider necessary for Christians to be able to understand God’s world as part of our duties to our Creator. So, here goes…
In the blurb he so kindly provided for my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand, Stanley Hauerwas said, “Loyd Fueston may be our Spinoza“. I didn’t understand that comment at the time, not having read any Spinoza and not knowing much about him, but I’ve discovered one reason that I might be “our Spinoza” where “our” would refer to Christians. Spinoza played a major role in breaking up the unity of human knowledge, creating the sorts of attitudes that led to our modern academic disciplines, where specialization isn’t just a practical response to the limitations of the human mind and the shortness of the human life but rather a claim to a fragmented universe which is to be described only by disjunct realms of knowledge.
If human beings are truly images of God, then ultimately, human knowledge and reality are equivalent, that is, the proper and ideal human mind is an encapsulation of the world which is a manifestation of thoughts of God, including those which are His purposes for Creation. This means that a real human mind can’t actually encapsulate the world without the gift of a share in the divine life, but we are capable of sharing that divine life just because our minds are the sorts of entities which can — in principle — encapsulate God’s world, understanding in imitation of His acts-of-being, His acts of creation from nothing and also His ongoing acts of creation and acts of shaping ‘stuff’ into particular things or living creatures.
Without an idea of at least a universe, the physical aspects of a world, the mind, even from the viewpoint of only empirical knowledge, is little more than a bottom-up probe of reality, which probe can’t really reach any level of ultimate truth because it’s blind to the very existence of truth beyond the factual truths derived from studying individual entities. At the same time, we have to remember that such a bottom-up probe, in the form of an active engagement, is the major process by which the human mind forms, starting in infancy. We can see a world in a grain of sand, poets earlier than philosophers or physicists, but we have to first see that grain of sand and understand its relationship to beaches and to healthy soils and to that irritated feeling in our feet. before we can see a world in that grain of sand.