I’ve claimed that “Created Being is Created Being is Created Being” some number of times, but there it’s a little more complicated than that. Those who’ve read some of my metaphysical writings might have some ideas on the topic. “Some ideas” is really all that I have.
The basic situation is this:
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As a Christian, I believe God created what is not Him from nothingness, absolute nil and not empty space. In addition, and consistent with the Christian Testament and most of the great Christian thinkers, I believe Creation is some sort of embodiment of the Word, that is the Son of God. In my way of speaking and writing about this, I consider that God embodied some fundamental truths as the raw stuff of Creation. This raw stuff, embodied truths, is the source of all created being, abstract and concrete, qualitative and quantitative.
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Our world of concrete things is actually a mixture of various sorts of created being, abstract and concrete, qualitative and quantitative, though dominated—in some ways—by thing-like being.
How does the raw stuff of creation, embodied truths, get to this concrete world? How does item #1 above get to item #2?
I don’t really know. The first item is my way of stating the Christian belief that only God necessarily exists and that He is the Creator and Sustainer of contingent being, all that is not God. The second item is a straightforward statement of the nature of this world in which we find ourselves, a world of pretty little girls and rattlesnakes and interstellar gas clouds and mathematical truths and love and honor and all sorts of concrete things, abstract relationships between concrete things and between a concrete thing and an abstract thing and so on. I’m far from sure what the pathways are from #1 to #2.
It does seem clear that many modern thinkers, based upon an unreachable and undesirable goal of many physicists, think that there is only one sort of being in this world and that some single, quantitative theory of mathematics will cover everything. This is particle physics mutated into unconscious, superstitious metaphysics. It ignores all sorts of issues, including that of qualitative being vs quantitative being and abstract being vs concrete being. (It’s conceivable that they are the same issue.)
This universe is such that it seems very implausible that there could be a complex soul-like entity entering this concrete (but not only) world. The Old Testament covenants of God seem to be better stated given modern knowledge as something like this: God in His freely chosen role of Creator has constrained Himself in that role to act according to His acts-of-being. In other words, He doesn’t act in one way when He had determined the nature of created being and then take on the role of a magician to perform miracles. This doesn’t deny miracles but rather redefines them as acts of the Creator within the rules He Himself set; those miracles might be highly unlikely but possible within the laws He set up to govern thing-like being and other forms of created being.
We can now say, with something approaching certainty, that thing-like being, matter, comes into this world by way of some process which shapes some more abstract form of being, quantum wavefunctions, into that more concrete form. Various sorts of particles combine to form ordinary matter along with the leptons, most famously the electron. There are also force carriers such as the gluons which hold together quarks in protons and neutrons, the photons which carry electromagnetic force, the graviton which carries gravitational force. There are also many strange beasts in this zoo of particles. In any case, all of this stuff forms the matter, the ordinary stuff, of our world of thing-like being.
It would be reasonable to think that qualitative being would have a similar, though not quantitatively expressible, system—truly elementary qualitative bits of being, probably mostly relationships, which combine to composite forms of qualitative being. At the same time that qualitative being is not likely to be at all quantitatively expressible until events occur and, say, love leaves behind its tracks, it would seem to me that it’s time for philosophers and theologians to move to use of what might be called qualitative tools of modern mathematics. These would add a large amount of disciplined analytic power to our efforts to understand, most importantly, human communities in their full-blown modern complexity. For some reason, social scientists and the occasional physicist who tries to analyze human political structures or the like are inclined to try quantitative modeling, which has a place in any overall understanding but can’t provide the basic framework for analysis and understanding.
I’ve argued that moral order is built upon more fundamental forms of order, such as that of primitive colonies or herds of animals. Love itself might be a higher-level, non-quantitative relationship of a complex and sophisticated kind, but—again—even love leaves behind evidence at least somewhat quantifiable in its effects upon human events.
We need to address these issues to understand forms of created being other than physical stuff and its constituents. We need to begin exploring use of forms of mathematics which are used already for qualitative analyses of abstract spaces or abstract properties of geometric entities and the like—topology and category theory and various forms of exotic geometric studies and others.
This will result in a more profound understanding of being but might well leave the radical empiricists and quantitative analysts standing tall in one way—the past, what has happened and left a record of structures and relationships and events might well be subject to quantitative analysis. It might be only the slippery present and the future which holds qualitative being.
[As a very relevant side-comment, I’m working on a book which will present a very basic look at the use of qualitative mathematics to discuss human being, individual and communal. In effect, I’ll be trying to proved a way of discussing communal human being as real, not just a nominal way of talking about a gathering of individual human beings.]