Happy New Year. May the Good Lord bless you and yours.
It’s now 2015. Where Am I In My Mission?
Clearly, I’m not writing a blog which simply responds to cultural or political or intellectual events or states. I’m not part of an established institutional effort, not part of a mission as the term would imply in general usage inside a church or inside a modern secular institution which has acquired much of the bad which was in early modern Christianity and nothing of the good.
I’m thinking and writing my way toward an understanding of the Creation which is the work of the God of Jesus Christ, Father and Son and Holy Spirit who are one God. I’ve done much on certain fundamental topics, call them parts of a new, Christian metaphysics. I’ve put some effort into the understanding of specific aspects of the universe and time and space and matter and human nature.
St Thomas Aquinas made specific a principle underlying all rational human thought, including metaphysics; this is to say it’s a principle which shows in the history of all rational human thought though sometimes implicitly while being explicitly denied: metaphysics depends upon empirical knowledge and upon the forms of theoretical and speculative thought tied directly to such knowledge.
I’ve found my mind moving to and from different levels of abstract and concrete being, often in a fun but frustrating effort to link them. Sometimes, I’ve tried to figure out if there is a more general importance to criminal conspiracies of the sort ever and always committed by the greedy and ambitious and by dynastic families which sometimes have a bit of true nobility in their thoughts and behaviors. Sometimes, I’ve turned to an effort to understand the nature of the human mind, itself formed by our responses to our environments and founded upon a brain itself formed by our ancestors’ responses to their environment.
To me, it seems that we are dealing with being when we discuss these issues and not talking about some sort of knowledge about concrete things and other forms of concrete being. We don’t know about created being or divine Being, at least in the modern sense of `know’; our being forms a relationship with other created things and with created being in general. We come in contact with all of that created being, including even those abstract truths of mathematics which God manifested as a particular form of abstract being. We can also come into contact with God Himself but I’ll mostly leave that to the side in this discussion.
For now, I’ve done about all I can in building my worldview and I’m trying to re-focus on what might be called `applications’—take the scare quotes as merely a sign I can’t come up with a single word to accurately describe the multiple paths I see in front of me.
I hope to complete three novels which have hung around for 10 years or more, at least in the form of characters in my mind. Still one more has been alive, but asleep most of the time, for several years. Having released the first of three projected volumes of a spiritual conversion novel—of a sort which will merely confuse those with a peasant piety, I’d like to get to work on the second volume by this summer.
I hope also to continue working toward a case-study of sorts, or perhaps I should call it a case-example: developing a disciplined way to speak of human nature in its totality, individual and communal, using qualitative language or abstractions similar to what has been used in modern physics and other sciences—such as the use of tensor calculus to describe relationships by defining groups of allowable transformations. Though often powerful in well-focused analyses, quantitative analysis as used in the social sciences is deeply unconvincing as understanding or even as good pointers to understanding. I suspect that proper qualitative analyses, dealing with shapes and relationships, will lead to tensor-like `equations’, that is, to descriptions of the transformation properties which more particular equations would have to meet. More recently, I’ve come to some interest in the generalizations of the concepts of `limit’ and `continuity’ in topology.
I’m not opposed to heavy amounts of quantitative analysis in even matters of, for example, moral nature. Nor am I opposed to conventional modes of metaphysical analysis, historical analysis, theological analysis, etc. Yet, I see a problem and am surprised so many intelligent human beings seem to be blind to this problem: a human being’s thought takes place inside a mental context, almost a virtual world, which is an image of reality as understood by that human being. It is a world of being and not a world of being and minds rising above being to understand it using truths from some sort of transcendental realm.
At this level of a creature struggling to encapsulate Creation in his own mind-brain, it isn’t the case that thought is divided between global and local, rather is it the case that global and local thought takes place in a context which is more or less true to created reality, to Creation, as best understood by a particular group of thinkers. We also deal with quantitative and qualitative aspects of created being in this context. An understanding of Creation does involve moving into more abstract realms of being, ultimately reaching the truths God manifested as the raw stuff of Creation, but those abstract realms aren’t truly separate from the concrete realms of being. Concrete, thing-like, being is shaped from abstract forms of being—as we should have learned from quantum mechanics—and those abstract forms of being remain present in the most mundane of concrete things.
There is a bit of historical relativity in this. We understand by forming relationships with being, ideally an encapsulation of being in the operations of our own brains and minds, and we understand those realms and types of being with which we can form relationships. Plato and Aristotle were, in this sense, just as correct as were Aquinas and Einstein or Darwin but their context was more limited—they knew of a more limited range of created being and this means, is equivalent to the claim that, they had a more limited range of relationships with created being. They brilliantly encapsulated much truth from the realms of being they could observe or theorize about or speculate about and that truth comes out. Any effort to make sense of Creation using that more restricted part of Creation in this year of 2015 would produce results being false in a deep sense.
In terms of modern physics, cosmological studies and studies of how matter and energy and fields are built up in the small both take place within an overall understanding of the Universe, an understanding shaped from the cosmological studies (dominated by the best current gravitational theory—general relativity) and studies of the small (quantum mechanics). It’s a recursive process in which the parts form the whole which then works to shape the parts.
And yet we have to remember that element of historical relativity: we work with what we have and often the best of human thinkers have had better materials at the local level or at the global level. After making initial observations of empirical reality, the ancient Greeks engaged in speculation—“philosophy.” The way was more open for what might be labeled global or cosmological thinking, though the Greeks had accomplishments in the more empirical realms of thinking and doing. In more recent centuries, human accomplishments have been far greater in the empirical realms of being though oddly enough that led physicists to redefine space and time and matter and energy and led mathematicians to redefine infinity and to generally open up new ways of human thinking. Empirical scientists, including mathematicians and mathematical physicists, had reached the boundaries of what the Greeks would have considered to be the Cosmos, the totality, and yet created being wasn’t exhausted.
Cosmological thinking, in physics or philosophy, at the level of the physical universe and perhaps a bit more give a good model for still greater perspective—thinking at the level of Creation.
In a sense, a strong sense for Christians, such thinking at the level of all contingent being is constructing a story which makes sense of the best available knowledge of theology and astronomy and history and technology and uses the best of the arts and literature. Nowadays, even Christians don’t seem to see a need for such an effort—they are pretending to be comfortable living in a world where Christian understandings of human nature and of time and space and matter are at odds with the scientific knowledge seen in television documentaries and deployed in our medical and communications and power-production technologies. The children of those Christians are exposed to this modern empirical knowledge and and technology at young ages and throughout the periods in which their minds form and, not surprisingly, Christianity makes no sense to them and doesn’t even draw their interest as they enter adulthood.
I’m trying to remind my fellow Christians and others of our duty and our need to make sense of Creation in all realms of created being; doing so, after all, is no more and no less than an effort to share the thoughts God manifested in Creation, no more and no less than an effort to form proper relationships with various sorts and realms of created being.
And so it is that I’ll continue my work but I’ll turn, at least for now, to novels and to the studying which might make possible that case-example of using abstractions from modern mathematics and physics to understand the way in which individual humans are, so to speak, regions on a hypersurface which is communal human being. But I don’t plan on ignoring my blog; it is likely my selection of topics will be more idiosyncratic. I may also try to write some more accessible efforts and even to prepare presentations though I fully expect to go to my grave before Christian leaders and thinkers are ready to admit they don’t have all the answers they pretend to have. I most certainly don’t expect mainstream thinkers to admit that Christian beliefs should inform efforts to understand our world.