Adam Smith famously took a new approach to the ancient problem: how to describe and understand the mysterious workings of created being in which ordered forms exist or even can be seen coming into existence. Those ordered forms can be forms imposed upon concrete matter—concrete entities such as stars or human beings, the latter being Smith’s primary interest. Those ordered forms can also be relationships between concrete entities.
As I see it, the above problem is pretty much the problem of understanding the formation of complex entities, human beings are of particular interest to we who are human beings, in this particular world as shaped by the Creator from more abstract forms of being. The evolutionary and development processes which have shaped human beings on a species level and an individual level have produced actual creatures which have the characteristics of persons in analogy to the three Persons, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, who are the one God. There is much for Christians to do in developing a new, richer and more complex, understanding of Creation—including a specially focused understanding of human being. There are many who are fighting battles to defend tradition because of what is clearly good and true in it and many fighting to take down tradition because of the many outmoded speculations—often masquerading as theorems of a sort. Few there are who are willing to pay attention to God’s revelations as they emerge in this age when men have developed remarkable skills and technologies for the exploration of certain realms of created being. Fewer still there are who can even realize we are watching new forms of created being emerge as human communities grow to tremendous sizes and to surprising degrees of complexity. This is partly because nearly all men, especially those who are highly educated, misunderstand the nature of the human mind and mis-understand the nature of created being and of human knowledge and of the relationships between created being and human knowledge.
Men of the West were disturbed greatly by the discoveries of Galileo and his successors that matter and energy don’t behave the way that contemplation upon experience would indicate. They would be still more disturbed by relatively recent discoveries that matter and energy are something different from what even Galileo and Newton thought them to be. The same can be said of the more recent discoveries about the nature of space, time, infinity, and mathematics as a whole.
It will be still more disturbing when men, especially Christian men, face up to the discoveries by Darwin and his successors that God’s ways of shaping human being are strange and indirect, not so amenable to the forms of analysis preferred by traditional philosophers and theologians and historians and politicians and so forth.
Adam Smith was active during a period when physics stood about halfway between Newton and Einstein; Erasmus Darwin was writing a poem about an emergent form of evolution but his more hardheaded grandson, Charles, wasn’t yet born. Within the limits of Smith’s possible understandings of this concrete world, human communities as well as the physical stuff increasingly important in the Industrial Revolution, Smith managed to come up with vague language about the nature of forms and how they come into existence. It wasn’t so much Smith’s terminology which was good as was his prophetic success at capturing the spiritual essence of the formation and operation of free markets as they were in the second half of the 18th century in Scotland and England. He also saw into the future to some extent, predicting that the British colonies on the east coast of North America would become so powerful and wealthy as to likely overshadow Great Britain herself in the next century or so. (In line with some of my recent writings, Smith had not a clue that his specific theories about markets were mostly relevant when discussing a small sub-population of the human race—Europeans and especially those of the northwestern regions, a people very much skewed to individualistic traits.)
We should honor Smith for being a courageous and insightful pioneer of the modern world—his insights can be seen as prophesies of more exact forms of thought not only in the social sciences but also in the physical sciences. See this short introduction to the thought of Ilya Prigogine, a physical chemist and Nobel laureate who was a pioneer of concepts we can loosely describe as those of self-organizing systems. We should bear in mind that qualitative reasoning which can point toward more exact forms of thought are also important in physical science and are not just a fuzzy-minded child growing up into a tough-minded adult—qualitative reasoning remains important even in quantum mechanics and gravitational theories but has to always adjust to the results of explorations amenable to quantitative exactness. The global, often qualitative, aspects of a complex entity remain as important as its local, largely quantitative, aspects. Abstract being continues to exist even in the most concrete of things.
Though I’ve made some attempts to move toward a more exact understanding of created being on the “local” level and Creation on the “global” level, I’ve often worked on a higher level of abstraction than did Adam Smith. I usually work at a level which is necessarily qualitative because it is above the level of the more particular forms of being, including those of quantitative mathematics and the sciences which study concrete and `mostly’ particular being. (I put the scare quotes on “mostly” because quantum mechanics explores forms of being, energy-matter in this concrete world, which range from the very concrete to the not so nearly concrete; something similar could be said about other modern theories of physics with respect to spacetime.)
The type of analysis made by Adam Smith is still necessary for making greater sense of the discoveries of geneticists and anthropologists and historians and mathematicians and others, but Smith didn’t get it quite right. He couldn’t have gotten it right and needed to courageously do it the best he could, though it is also true that the better understandings of human being I’ve used as a starting point can be found in the ancient traditions of both Jewish and Christian thinkers. Men are hearts and minds and hands and yet one—defectively but truly. Men are born as communal beings as well as individual beings, or, as I prefer to put it, we have both individual and communal being. Smith, the radical individualist of northwestern Europe, was perhaps blind to knowledge emphasizing communal human being too strongly.
At the same time, we are a multitude of individuals, who remain such, and each of us is also, incompletely and defectively, our communities. We are told by the Bible and commentators from Judaic and Christian sources that we are images of God. Christians believe God to be Father and Son and Holy Spirit in one God—three individuals, who retain their individual Selves, but each is also fully and perfectly the one God.
Those who wish to explore these lines of thought can start with my freely downloadable books: Four Kinds of Knowledge and A More Exact Understanding of Human Being. From there you can explore other books, including my large collection of writings from my weblogs: Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2014. Other writings, essays and books, are available at my website, Acts of Being, including novels.