What is truth?
Where is truth to be found?
There are a few starting points for a Christian willing to consider the opinions of Thomas Aquinas and all the great thinkers before him as well as opinions derived directly from the works of the modern scientists including sometimes just their empirical or mathematical findings and sometimes their opinions as to the meanings of those findings.
- We must hold to an intelligent understanding of the Bible, including some generally agreed-upon ways of re-understanding the Bible in the event of new historical or scientific knowledge indicating a problem with our initial understanding.
- We must hold to some creed with the substance of the Apostle’s Creed or, roughly equivalent, the Nicene Creed which is a distillation of the meanings drawn from the Bible regarding some very important theological and anthropological issues.
- We must center our attention, that of historians and physicists and sculptors and musicians and many others, upon God as Creator, which means we must center our attention upon God’s acts in Creations (His effects in Medieval terms). From Einstein and Darwin, as well as from Tolstoy and Newman, we can learn how to think the thoughts of God in His role as Creator.
I haven’t put a lot of time or effort into the above list, though I’ve been writing for years about the individual items and the entirety of belief and thought which is implied by the last item, but I’m sure it provides a pretty good foundation to the claim I’ll make without being able to fully justify it for now: knowledge, including those bits of knowledge called truths, are not discovered by some sort of pre-existing mind nor do they flow into such a mind from some realm of transcendent truths. Knowledge comes as a result of a process of mind formation, a process by which neurons and networks of neurons adapt themselves to what exists by responding to it—`responding’ being an active and sometimes aggressive process.
We shape our minds to what happens in the physical and social and political realms. We learn how to do this, we take the shaping to a new level, by studying what Heisenberg and Dirac taught us about the true nature of matter for various reasons including the construction of a better understanding of the Eucharist and other Sacraments; by studying what Robert Nisbet taught us about the importance of (traditional and not `imposed’) authority in forming healthy and sustainable and non-exploitive societies that we might better form the communities which are the parts and whole of the Body of Christ; by studying what the writings of the Fathers of the American Constitution and their opponents—especially the Anti-Federalist—taught us about the nature of government that we might understand what has gone horribly wrong in the United States; and—of direct relevance to my current efforts—by studying what Riemann had to say about seeing the `shape’ of complex entities in terms of abstractions of geometry and algebra and analysis (calculus).
All the things of this world are thoughts manifested by God so that they might attain a creaturely sort of freedom. But we shouldn’t think that God just thinks of individual entities and brings them into existence as freestanding. The objects of this world are the results of active thoughts of God and those active thoughts are part of a coherent, complete, and unified group of thoughts which are this world and, in a still grander way, are part of a coherent, complete, and unified group of thoughts which are all of Creation.
Let me engage in a very preliminary case study, one I’m now working to greatly expand in a book I hope to publish before the end of 2016; the title, for now, is The Shape of Reality.
Webster’s 1913 tells us that manifold means, “Various in kind or quality; many in number; numerous; multiplied; complicated.” As the Psalmist proclaimed in praise, “O Lord, how manifold are your works.” Mathematicians along with scientists and others have to borrow words and they have borrowed `manifold’ for a well-defined technical concept:
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, each point of an n-dimensional manifold has a neighbourhood that is homeomorphic to the Euclidean space of dimension n. [See Manifold.]
Don’t worry about the mathematical details. The above quotation gives a summary of a disciplined and useful definition similar to the idea contained in the praise of the Psalmist. As an analogy to that mathematical definition, a community is a manifold and the members are the point-like regions which have certain well-defined properties of their own. More simply, the surface of the earth is that of the sphere and, for example, demands use of some elegant and difficult analyses to discover the shortest path between New York City and London. Yet, small regions, such as the town in which I sit, can be accurately represented by maps of a plane and the shortest distance from the clock tower at the Ludlow Mills to the upcountry Congregationalist church can be accurately determined from one of the maps with a simple calculation reducible to drawing a line along a straight-edge. [In fact, you can find the shortest distance of the surface of a globe by stretching a string between the two points, but this isn’t of much use in most situations.]
End of case study, sort of. Now I’ll explain how it is a case study which supports a Christian understanding of adaptation as truth discovery in Creation.
Christians believe in order though fundamentally indifferent to how that order is established. Some thinkers believe that order must be present and have always been present. It must have been explicitly created by God. Mind and moral character, maybe the human being in his entirety, must be a special creation.
The higher Pagans, as you could label the likes of Plato and Aristotle, had a similar set of beliefs though many pagans followed what is probably the natural instincts of men from the time that someone first tried to make greater or global sense of it all. The world stands on its own even in traditions where it was, for example, made from the body of the Father of gods murdered by his own children. God has to interact with the world, with all that exists in any other possible realms, in the same way as creatures, though Zeus had more power than the lesser gods, even Athena, and much more power than mortals.
Christians think of God in His relationship to the world as primarily Creator, the active source of being, and only an actor in the mortal sense by His own free will. (Of course, God could have created or not by His own free will but, having created a particular world, He was bound by His own initial acts, an insight slightly deformed by ancients as an after the fact covenant in analogy to a human agreement.)
We now know, by way of quantum physics and other physical sciences, that God created a world not fully contained in the realm of concrete being, a world in which concrete being seems to be somehow shaped from a strange and abstract form of being.
We now know, by way of evolutionary biology and related sciences, that God created a world subject to evolution and development and not fully contained in any neat scheme such as a tree of life.
We now know, by way of modern mathematics, that God created a world which is in a strange state of interaction with and of dependency upon abstractions beyond any currently conceivable human schemes.
By exploring God’s Creation in its various realms containing concrete and abstract being, by responding properly to what we find, we are shaping our minds to those thoughts of God. If we think of our minds as our relationships to God and His Creation, then we can say we are shaping our entire selves by way of shaping our minds. This process of shaping is an adaptation which has been, and may continue to be predominately, one of natural selection. He who shapes his mind best to reality has better odds of survival and successful reproduction. The claim in the prior statement is still more true of human communities, especially at the level of civilizations or proto-civilizations which are, in my opinion, largely defined by a worldview, an understanding of this world and all else which might exist.
Most modern Christians would agree with secularists that there are facts about human nature and about other parts and aspects of this world, facts which are gathered by way of active exploration leading to efforts to develop empirically grounded theories as well as more wide-ranging speculations as well as—most importantly of all—technologies to make our lives safer and easier. What Christians have not realized too clearly, at least not until recently, is that there are no clear boundaries between realms of is and ought, no clear boundaries between a shuffling ape trying to rise from his knuckles and a creature made in the image of God. In fact, the phrase “made in the image of God” should be understood in the sense of “evolved and developed into some rough approximation of an image of God in His freely chosen role of Creator and shaper of this particular world.” Not a good sound-byte, not a phrase which rolls smoothly off the tongue. More importantly, it communicates—however imperfectly—an important truth about human relationships to truths in this world of evolution and development. We find truths, empirical and abstract and—maybe—absolute by way of adaptation, of adapting our individual and communal selves to what God has created. In this way, we learn to think and act and feel along with the Creator as He goes about His work.