William James made a claim which should be very disturbing to those who hold mainstream views of the nature of truth:
The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying itself, its verification. Its validity is the process of its verification. [William James, The Meaning of Truth, reprint by Dover Publications, page vi]
I’m strongly endorsing the idea that truth comes to us by a dynamic process and doesn’t enter us as a set of dogmas. “The truth unfolds in time through a communal process,” but we should remember that each of us, perhaps some more than others, plays a role in that process. Moreover, truth remains true only by way of a dynamic process. While I’d say there are many timeless truths, they aren’t such to human beings, as noted by some of the modern historians of human thought, such as John Henry Newman, who’ve studied the difficulties of holding on to even the most absolute of truths as the human context changed, culture in general but especially language and concepts. Truth can be held in a dogmatic form only if that form is really a set of notes holding us steady as our language, our concepts, our surroundings change — sometimes in radical ways. The greatest of saints and philosophers and scientists can’t hold their place when a powerful river is moving against them.
As is his wont, William James writes, and leads his followers to write, in terms of what I call bottom-up environments. My question is: “What are these environments, really?” Are they what they seem to be to the explorer maturing into the naive philosopher? I would say, “Yes,” with the strong qualification that truths are dynamic entities in dynamic environments which are ultimately part of a morally ordered whole, the world which is our universe seen in light of God’s purposes.
In general, our environments aren’t freestanding as most Jamesian pragmatists assume. Those environments are themselves part of a context which might constrain human thought in some limited ways but mostly add richness and complexity not seen if we take in only what we perceive and can otherwise directly experience. If we wish to understand what lies around us, in us, under us, over us, we must subject our most concrete experiences to contemplative reviews in which we ascend to more abstract regions by various routes and descend to concrete regions. This process helps us to unfold the truth, not by some sort of magic or supernatural events but by the processes explored by philosophers and some of the saner mystics over the ages and sharpened by the Medieval Scholastics only to be sharpened still more by the likes of Einstein, despite his failure to deal properly with quantum physics — which I’ll discuss below.
Philosophers and theologians, and mystics, have a long distance to travel to catch up with modern scientists when it comes to understanding empirical reality, this important realm of Creation. But, of course, the human tendency is to stay in our comfort zones and that leads to any contemplative exercises being ever in danger of decaying into dreams of wisdom as if truth is some rabbit to be pulled out of a hat, not by a highly-skilled entertainer but by a god-like magician calling upon supra-rational forces. Wisdom is deformed from its nature as a stepping-stone to the perfect knowledge of God and becomes itself a set of strange rites which allow us to avoid the hard work which imitates by understanding the work God did and continues to do in His self-chosen and self-constrained role as Creator.
I’ll step back and take part of this line of thought a little more slowly.
Our environments can be first seen as particular settings in the greater entity we call the `universe’ which is spacetime but is also an entity in its own right. When that universe is seen as a world, a morally ordered narrative, unified and coherent and complete, then the environments and the entities which are part of those environments and all else with which they have relationships can be seen as part of that moral narrative, the world.
William James remained in those environments and never ascended to the level of the world, even in the most tentative way. Without moving into the more abstract regions which allow us to see this universe as a world, a thinker or a doer can’t descend back with a wider and deeper perspective. Think of it as Moses ascending the mountain to speak to God and then descending to speak of what he learned. In this current context, I’m saying Moses and his disciples should have begun a sustained, multi-generational process of ascending and descending, by way of a variety of paths.
There are certainly differences when we speak of an ascent and descent within the spectrum of created being rather than an ascent to receive revealed truths and then a descent. (I suspect the experiences of Moses were actually quite like the ones I describe, that he was learning how to speak and think along with God but was constrained by language and tradition in telling his story. In order to communicate what happened, Moses or his redactor working from perhaps sparse clues had to put his experiences in terms of paganistic meetings with a God as if he were one of the gods in the Iliad.)
In a sense, Moses had to speak to those who are fully entrapped in their environments, had to speak of an experience of ascent to a more abstract realm of Creation which remains in this more concrete realm but — I’ll speak in a terse manner — can be seen only by acts of reason which are imitations of God’s acts-of-being. Entry into that sort of abstract region allows certain forms of communion with the Creator which are different from the more concrete sacramental experiences of this world, as if we could experience the `spiritual’ aspects of Holy Communion without the consecrated bread and wine, the Body and Blood of Christ. This is a problematic way to view matters though it might explain why these sorts of highly spiritual states, enjoyed and suffered by the likes of Moses and St. Francis of Assisi, are unsustainable for a creature of flesh-and-blood. That spiritual level, or abstract level of created being, is with us always, in us always, ever united to our biceps and our white blood-cells but we enjoy and suffer such experiences more clearly and more explicitly in the form of consecrated bread and consecrated wine being digested in our bodies of flesh and blood. Bread and wine become saturated with true life and then enter our bodies to bring us that true life. Christian sacraments run parallel to the intellectual processes I describe with the human mind ascending to abstract regions to understand what is really present in the human being’s own physical body as well as the physical entities which surrounds him.
William James perceived clearly, removed his blinders as much as is possible or desirable for a man, and understood much of what he perceived but seems to have refused to move forward by taking created being in full seriousness. It’s not that James was guilty of reductionistic thinking, let alone an outright dismissal of the evidence of the universe being not merely this nor merely that. James remained in a suspended state of acceptance and disbelief, a skepticism of sort, perhaps the best stance for one who has trouble accepting faith in either created being or its Creator.
I take my Christian, sacramental beliefs in a spectrum of created being as seriously as I take my Christian, Sacramental beliefs in baptism and the Eucharist. This is just another way of stating my belief that we should be willing to at least conjecture that our environments develop within and up into a greater whole, a true universe which becomes a world when seen as the story God is telling.
Let’s return to James’ claims that knowledge is an act of sorts. This is hardly difficult for me to accept since I believe being, including the most thing-like stuff, to be truly acts-of-being — the being is one with God’s acts of creating and shaping. Some acts-of-being are the bringing into existence from nothingness and possible only to God, some acts-of-being are the shaping of being and possible to God or the various entities of Creation. If being is itself dynamic, acts-of-being, relationships bringing entities into existence or shaping entities, then it would be reasonable to consider knowledge, even knowledge of absolute truths, to be just as dynamic as the entities and relationships of which we have knowledge. How can we, as mere creatures, know being which is not yet in a particular shape or maybe not even in existence in any meaningful sense? How can we know the truths carried by that being which is still coming into a particular form or is maybe changing to a different form as the sinful man changes to a Christ-centered man. Our knowledge is itself a participation — that is, active — in the unfolding of not just that knowledge but of the being and the story which is the concern of that knowledge.
Most Christians, especially those impressed by Einstein’s side of the famous debate with Bohr about the meaning of reality, would rebel against such a way of viewing Creation, thinking — for example — that there is a human essence which makes for an easy argument for the absolute value of human life. That debate between Einstein and Bohr was interesting in itself, see Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality, but becomes fascinating under the insightful guidance of the philosopher Kurt Hubner:
Einstein was claiming that reality consists of substances which remain unaltered by their relationships with other substances while Bohr was claiming that it is the relationships which are primary and those relationships bring substances into existence. [Critique of Scientific Reason, Kurt Hubner, The University of Chicago Press, 1985]
I’ve made various claims about this issue, especially regarding the close relationship between Bohr’s supposedly radical views and the theology of St. John the Evangelist who taught us that everything that exists came to be because God loves it, because the Almighty chose to establish an active relationship of love with that thing.
Empirical reality, if Bohr be right in even the most general way, agrees with Christian beliefs about the relationships between God and all forms of created being and also the relationships between many of those forms of created being. It is that empirical reality in which we were conceived, in which we live, in which we shape our minds and learn even about God — as St. Thomas Aquinas tried to teach us in our hardness of hearts and our laziness of mind and body.
The strangeness of quantum physics shouldn’t seem so strange to a Christian nor should evolutionary biology seem so strange to a reader of the Bible. Created being first exists only potentially so far as particular, thing-like being is concerned. A primitive band of Semitic nomads can even be shaped into the chosen people, the people of God, the people into which the Son of God became incarnate.
The vaguer sort of being becomes better defined when it forms proper relationships with things which lie around it. This is true of an electron which shows a particular location when a `location-relationship’ is formed with a proton whether a conscious creature observes it or not. This is also true of a baby which has lots of potential traits constrained in various ways and begins to shape himself by responding to his mother’s breast or to the cuddly blanket she puts over him when he shows signs of sleepiness. The more particular the thing, living or not, the more its relationships are part of a narrative. Particular forms of being don’t exist as pure or ideal entities but only as participants in some narrative, an active flow of events, a context. And so we can see the importance of evolutionary biology which describes the struggle of living creatures to form proper relationships, those which allow survival and successful reproduction, at the concrete level of life on earth.
The historian Carroll Quigley told us: “Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” I quote him often but though he went a bit further than William James toward an understanding of created being, he still didn’t go far enough. I’d say: “Being is shaped from truths in time through a variety of relational processes, letting rational observers see and, perhaps, understand those underlying truths.”