In The Meaning of Truth, William James makes the claim:
The pragmatist view … of the truth-relation is that it has a definite content and that everything in it is experienceable. Its whole nature can be told in positive terms. The `workableness’ which ideas must have, in order to be true means particular workings, physical or intellectual, actual or possible, which they may set up from next to next inside of concrete experience. [page xiv]
I think that William James and his followers would not have ever claimed that purely formal truth-relations aren’t valid, nor would they have more than weakened the idea that our sense of an ordered flow of events is a true part of experience. They tend to acknowledge that truth comes to us and is confirmed by way of our experiences as flesh-and-blood human beings. William James is justifiably famous for his somewhat bewildered acceptance of spiritual experiences. If we Christians are to take seriously the concept of `Creation’, we also must consider our spiritual experiences and our intellectual grasp of Christian truths to be also true experiences, those of our flesh-and-blood selves. Properly considered, the claim of William James is a slightly — but importantly — incomplete version of the claim of St. Thomas Aquinas:
[J]ust as a disciple reaches an understanding of the teacher’s wisdom by the words he hears from him, so man can reach an understanding of God’s wisdom by examining the creatures He made.. [St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on 1 Corinthians]
Contrasting these two quotes, seeing what is similar in the two and then seeing what Aquinas adds will allow a thinker with a properly flexible mind to gain a great insight. Even the physical universe, without considering its relationship to larger realms of created being, is “more than it contains” as I discussed in an essay from four years ago: A Universe is More than it Contains. Even the universe in which we live can’t be constructed from its pieces. The world, the universe seen in light of God’s moral purposes, is still more than what it contains. It can be experienced as a universe only if we detect and somehow try to understand that which is more than stars and gas clouds and electromagnetic fields.
To see a world, and to see a Creation in its still more complete existence, requires us to hypothesize that the world and Creation do in fact exist. We may form wrongful hypotheses, no, we will form wrongful hypotheses, incomplete and defective. Over time, as we come to learn more about what God actually did as Creator and as we spend time and effort thinking about it, we will form better hypotheses. We can do so only if we start out assuming a universe, a world, a Creation. We do the best we can; even a half-hearted effort works better than a serious effort to understand our environments without assuming they are part of a greater whole.
So, what can be experienced? A world can be experienced, even a still greater Creation, including the world of the Resurrected, can be experienced, every time we breath in the fresh air of a Spring breeze, every time we read an article about a new discovery regarding the human animal and its evolutionary history, every time we pray: “Our Father Who art in Heaven…”
The problem lies not with Darwinism or other scientific ideas, though they become true problems when they develop into ideologies but that happens also when parts of the Christian body of truths are pulled out of context or exaggerated so as to cast shadows upon the greater body of truths. Problems most certainly arise for religious and moral belief when patriotism becomes some sort of ideological nationalism. The experiences of ideologists, religious and educational and cultural, are necessarily limited in ways that severely distort and constrain any possible understanding, that is, the ideologist hypothesizes a world but a perverse world and then experiences all, mundane and spiritual and intellectual, within that perverse world.
We experience not only events and thoughts and feelings but also an entire world every time we smell a flower, watch a sunset, or have a thought. William James and his follwers see this but they refuse to hypothesize that world which will allow their experiences to be as rich and complex as they should be. Those followers and allies of James, including many scientists, are relatively immune to the corruptions of ideologies but at the great cost of not seeing the truth in a greater and more possible fullness. There are many morally well-ordered skeptics or non-believers in our time who have this Jamesian attitude, even if they don’t formally accept Jamesian pragmatism. This insight allows us to understand both the limitations of the thought of some modern intellectuals and scientists and also their relative sanity. When doing their research or writing about their speculations, when experiencing other aspects of the world, they don’t experience all they could but they also don’t participate in the false experiences of so many ideologically corrupted men, including many Christians infected with a variety of nationalism or some other ideological cult.