The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 2. God as the Creator of Truths

It sounds strange to speak of God creating truths — even God, but I have two lines of reasoning that lead to this conclusion that God has created the truths of our universe, mathematical and metaphysical, as well as the things of our universe. I discuss this claim in my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand though I’m still working on a richer and deeper understanding of my own worldview. I’m going to present a rough outline of the reasoning behind my claim rather than a complete argument, the initial form of which was the text of my book. It might not be clear even to me for a while if this presentation moves towards that richer and deeper understanding of my claim.

In this first installment about the creation of truths, I’ll address some aspects of the theological and metaphysical reasoning. Basically, the reasoning falls out naturally from Thomistic existentialism though that ‘naturally’ part depends upon an expansion of Thomistic existentialism in response to modern empirical knowledge. Our understanding of the universe, this phase of God’s Creation, has widened and deepened, leading to new possibilities regarding other phases of Creation, and new possibilities regarding the greater totality of Creation.

The first line, and more important line of reasoning comes from my basic beliefs: an expanded and updated version of Thomistic Existentialism. God has no substance, not even something that could be labeled as ‘divine substance’. God is a pure act-of-being, His own Act-of-being. He is the supreme Act-of-being. As such He is the only being who truly exists. He is being itself. This is the starting point for all my philosophical and theological work. Soon, I’ll be posting an entry discussing the second line of reasoning which involves the modern discovery as to the true nature of random numbers and the questions it raises about the nature of human mathematics and the truths which seem to be its foundations.

St. Thomas Aquinas upset a lot of thinkers over the past seven centuries with the claim: things are true. I would say that this claim makes him the most consistent empirical thinker in history amongst the more famous philosophers and theologians. This led me to a crazy line of thought culminating in the speculation that not only are things true, but truths are thing-like in a sense. This is not to say that all truths are thing-like but only those manifested in the underlying, abstract stuff of this universe — the Primordial Universe as I called it in my book. These manifested truths must include all those accessible to human thought, which is mediated through mostly the brain but through the entire human animal and its relationships with other physical entities. Even revelations of truths beyond Creation, those regarding God Himself, have to be expressed in terms of truths which are manifested in the Primordial Universe and then are included in the stuff which God shaped into this universe.

Things are true. They have to be true. How could something not exist if it were not true? Well, that might be possible under pagan conceptions of physical reality where matter co-exists from eternity along with any possible Creator, more accurately — a shaper. There is — possibly — a realm different from the realm of concrete beings and there might even be a realm of untruths. So why is it different for a Christian? A simplified explanation is:

In a Christian worldview, God creates from nothing all that is not Him. Any creaturely entity — quark or rock or porpoise — is a manifestation of a thought of God. A thought of God is necessarily true.

God told us Creation is good. It’s also beautiful and true. Since this phase of Creation, our universe, develops over time, the goodness and beauty and truth can sometimes be obscured or even under development itself. That is, we live not in a static Creation but one which is undergoing some sort of birth or development. Creation is a group of stories, one of which is our physical universe seen as morally ordered.

It’s important to note that a Thomistic-existentialist viewpoint can handle a developing universe — still a great difficulty for philosophies, Christian or other, which accept the pagan claim that matter exists co-eternally with any Creator — who might Himself be the universe. More importantly, distortions come in the dualistic concept that there are separate realms of truths and concrete being.

Some might be surprised that I say there are Christians who accept that pagan claim that matter co-exists with God. This pagan, or paganistic Christian, God is really a Shaper and not a Creator. Or else Himself the universe. Unfortunately, many of the philosophies of Christian history, including that of St. Augustine, took pagan philosophies based on that view and then patched them crudely with the valid but inconsistent claim that God created this universe from nothing. You can’t patch up a metaphysics that undervalues the act-of-being, or slights it completely, by pasting on vague statements about the acts-of-being which are God’s acts of creating from nothing.

Yet, there is a truth in this view of God as Shaper, a truth easily absorbed into a Thomistic existentialist worldview. God is seen as both He who created the Primordial Universe from nothing and He who shaped this universe from that Primordial Universe.

Things are true. There is another way to argue to this claim and that is simply to note that any metaphysics which separates thing-ness and truth is inherently and dangerously dualistic. If truths are not in the things of this universe, where do we get them? Our very thinking organs are things. If we can have thoughts which are true, especially thoughts about very abstract mathematical objects, then we are all forced to be dualists or to fall into a state of mute stupidity before a universe which has no contact with truth.

More modern, pseudo-scientific philosophies which see intelligence in purely computational terms do no better than the traditional dualistic theories. In fact, they are pretty much the same theories dressed in lab-coats instead of the robes of a Neoplatonic mystic. They have merely replaced a brain/mind duality with a brain/software duality. The mind and the software have to somehow live in an immaterial realm of truth while being able to show up in the brain or computer or sunspots as I vaguely recall from my days of reading science-fiction. The unanswerable question, one known to the supposedly muddle-headed Medieval Scholastics is:

How does the brain interact with mind or software if they are truly different sorts of stuff? Or non-stuff?

Computer software should be viewed as states of a certain type of organized matter — ‘circuits’ which are electronic or optical or other sorts of devices. The same is true of human thoughts being states of a certain type of organized matter — the human brain.

This is not to propose a reductionistic form of materialism. Quite the opposite. I’m saying that all the truths which humans can perceive or conceive are embodied in some deep sense in the very matter and organization of the human brain. As a Thomistic existentialist, I am willing to have the courage of my Christian convictions:

Matter is not ‘mere’ matter, it is sacramental stuff, manifestations of thoughts of God. As such, this universe in its totality somehow embodies all those truths which God wishes us to have, all those truths manifested in this universe, this world when seen in its proper moral ordering.

And that raises the question: What is human thought? I’ll address that soon in another entry.