Over the past few centuries or more, Western Christians have retreated from a proper engagement with God’s Creation. Many modern scientists and philosophers now work actively to sequester religious beliefs in the most general sense. Sometimes this is as crude and as juvenile as claiming that the success of the equations of modern physics prove that there is no Creator of this universe, despite the fact that there were some strong, sometimes unconventional, believers among the true geniuses who created modern physics. At least some of the non-believers, such as Einstein who seems to me at times an atheist and at other times a pantheist, didn’t claim any categorical knowledge that the God of the Bible didn’t exist.
It is the very weaknesses in thought of most of the modern skeptics and non-believers in science that led them to offer battle on the wrong field; unfortunately, far too many theists have accepted the challenge on that field. Not me. I’m not bothering to accept challenges from anyone who thinks that God’s existence and power rise or fall with the Big Bang or with Schrodinger’s Equation. See the demanding but richly rewarding Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes by the philosopher John Earman for a much deeper discussion of this matter—at the end of the book which is mainly concerned with a technical philosophical analyses of the meaning of possible `defects’ in the spacetime of our universe.
What we need to do, and what I’m doing, is to step back and take a more global view—as Newton and Einstein did—from various directions, Christian or pantheistic. Mostly, this stepping back is into realms of abstract being as captured in certain mathematical fields which have been well-developed in the past two centuries or so. I’ll conjecture that it’s not just coincidence that those fields were so well explored by mathematicians and scientists—human thought is moving with the problems and opportunities raised by our responses and lack of responses to the increasing richness and complexity of human being and the increasing richness and complexity of created being in general.
Why has there been no adequate response in the form of a richer and more complex understanding of Creation by philosophers and poets and historians? There have been good responses—especially by those artists and writers and musicians willing to explore abstract regions of reality. other responses were off-target, and still others were more in the nature of non-responses. On the whole, we live in a collage where the assembled scraps represent different realms and types of created being. Even the most scientistic of thinkers love but have no way of understanding in even the most speculative of ways what it is that loves or what it is that is loved. Of all the men of history, we modern men know the most but understand the least because we enjoy various types of created being but struggle hard to drive out of our intellects any form of being which is not quantitative.
Let me be more specific to the failures and weaknesses of those who share my Christian faith: Why has there been no adequate response in the form of a richer and more complex understanding of Creation by Christians?
In The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, the historian Brad Gregory tells us truly that Christians need to return to Christian practices, ways of life and habits and attitudes and thoughts. Even the most academic of Christian studies will stay on course only when those who study are praying and participating in the other liturgies, reading the Bible and participating in good works as Christians. Professor Gregory also tells us a return to Christian practice and to a stronger faith will be possible only if someone is able to deal with the wide range of modern knowledge to show how we can see our world as a Creation and talk and write about it as a Creation.
Gregory claims, as do I, that many Christians know the attacks upon theistic beliefs have been propagandistic and have not proven, for example, that the very concept of God is meaningless. He knows that pointing this out is no longer sufficient. Too many ignored the danger or even voluntarily took the challenge on the wrong field of battle and the atheists and their allies have won and then moved into the City of Man to take control of schools and mass-media and cultural institutions and political institutions and others.
I would say… We need to re-engage on the right battlefield—the entirety of Creation. To do so, we need to ratchet up our thought to a higher level of abstraction that we might consider all being, abstract and concrete, which is within the empirical or speculative reach of the human mind. And, to do so, we need to develop new tools of thought; I’m proposing that we can start by borrowing from certain fields of abstract mathematics. We should back off from the battle on the grounds of physics and biology, recognizing that non-believers have gained control of what might be called the background assumptions and methods of analysis which are used to understand all this modern knowledge of spacetime and matter and biological evolution and the genetic history of the human race.
Once we have the proper tools, we can treat this world as part of a far greater Creation, one which includes various levels of created being, abstract and concrete, going back to the fundamental truths which God manifested as the raw stuff of all of created being, the abstract and concrete stuff of Creation. Creation also includes the world of the resurrected, those who will be raised from the grave to share the life of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
To be sure, the two tasks need to be done at the same time, as I’m doing in my thinking and writing. In fact, my writings, including this book, constitute a plausible program of the sort Professor Gregory recommends. My program, as it has been developed publicly on this blog, Acts Of Being, has not drawn much attention—I do have readers in various countries, mostly the United States and China though I’ve had surges of downloads in France, Ukraine, and Israel as well as steady downloads of one book, Four Kinds of Knowledge, in the Philippines and India and various African countries. But I don’t know who these people really are—many of my readers around the world might well be ethnically Chinese, either citizens of the People’s Republic of China or members of the Chinese diaspora.
It’s possible I’m building a foundation which is slowly being accepted as a plausible base for a revived or even new Christian civilization. It’s possible my writings are simply seen as some sort of eccentric but interesting reaction to Western post-Christian ideology. It’s also possible my writings are at least inspiring to someone who will build a different, maybe better, foundation for a new Christian civilization—perhaps in a way more to the liking of those from a region not part of the West.
We need to make the world once again safe for Christians and their beliefs, to make the world one in which Christians can pass on their faith to the children of their communities without public schools and publishers and entertainment companies and others interfering to, very effectively, uproot that faith in the minds and hearts and hands of children.