[This essay is a lightly edited chapter from my upcoming book, The Shape of Reality, a book which should be posted on my weblog by the end of March and maybe the middle of March.]
What is truth? Not so ridiculous a question as some would have it, certainly those who don’t understand how difficult a struggle it has been to develop various plausible and implausible understandings of the abstract concepts of `truth’ and `knowledge’ over the past 10,000 years or so of rapid increase of human intelligence in certain Eurasian peoples—see The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending for an introduction to the genetic-historical study of the underlying events. If you wish to read of these events, or at least of snapshots of these events, from a philosophical or historical viewpoint, a viewpoint also more or less Eurocentric, you can see The Origins of European Thought About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate by R B Onians, Body, Soul, Spirit: A Survey of the Body-Mind Problem by C A van Peursen, and The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature by Bruno Snell. General searches on the Internet or in your local library system on the Axial Age will lead you to to a variety of `old-fashioned’ and `new-fangled’ historical works on the strange and glorious transformation in human culture, including the intellect, which occurred from some time in the Iron Age and ended a few centuries or so before the birth of Jesus Christ. For a historical perspective which relies on particular mathematical and statistical analyses rather than starting at the level of abstract being as I’m doing, see the website of Peter Turchin for an interesting, plausible, and powerful attempt at building applied mathematical models of events in human history; at the least, there are some good insights in the work of Turchin and allied thinkers. (At the same time, Turchin writes some good histories, such as War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations.)
The writings referenced in the above paragraph are but an entry into various sorts of literature dealing with the results of an important period of evolutionary and developmental changes in human being, changes which led to Archimedes and Augustine and Aquinas and Fra Angelico and Pascal and Newton and Mozart and on to Planck and Einstein and Picasso and Arnold Schoenberg and Eliot and Joyce and Sartre and others. A few minutes of serious thought will lead to the realization that any list of high achievers in recent centuries is remarkably short on great religious thinkers (John Henry Newman was at least a second-tier great thinker but few others reached anywhere near that) and writers or artists working in the traditionalist mode (Eliot was almost entirely modern in style though he advanced—did himself
I’m not sure how many scientists or mathematicians would share my understanding of what-is, merely the universe to many of them and Creation to some of them and certainly to me. Only a few, mostly Platonists and mostly mathematicians, would even grasp the concept of abstractions as a form of being. Probably those Platonists would make the same understandable error as Plato—thinking of abstractions in terms of Reals which seem to be pure and ideal archetypes of complex entities such as human being; this idea seems implausible after Darwin and Einstein as seen through the eyes of the Reverend Monsignor Georges Lemaitre and other founders of modern physical cosmology (in the 1920s).
After the work of evolutionary biology and quantum physics and history, we don’t even currently know what are the basic components of being, human or otherwise—where `know’ can be taken as involving the actual truth or just the most plausible speculation of an age. We don’t even know if there are basic components of the sort found in particle physics or nuclear physics. I suspect not, having found it easier to make sense of Creation in terms of abstract being and concrete being—to be sure, I think of concrete being as shaped from abstract being so that abstract being is something like an elementary form of being but it’s a bit different and more consistent with quantum physics. In other words, the wavefunctions of quantum physics aren’t like the elementary entities of particle physics, though those entities correspond to quantum wavefunctions.
We have no coherent and morally well-ordered understandings of Creation in light of evolutionary biology or quantum physics. Our moral philosophers and moral theologians and various leaders don’t know how to view our communities and individuals in terms allowing even potential moral order of a sort which once seemed so clear to our minds and eyes. Our theologians in Christian traditions don’t know how to talk about man’s meeting with God, in prayer or worship or more specifically in the Sacraments; they babble on using terms which once meant something when the Greek philosophers and Medieval Scholastics seemed to have provided solid understandings of matter and mind and even God. The Protestant Reformers disagreed, sometimes radically so, with the specific, `higher-order’ Catholic schemes for understanding Sacraments and a sacramental world and man’s moral situation and so on, but accepted the words and concepts which existed at that time for discussing these things. Neither Martin Luther nor the Catholic Counter-reformer Cardinal Robert Bellarmine even pretended to engage in creative metaphysical thought. Modern thinkers sometimes just accept schemes of words and concepts of premodern times and sometimes try to build up their own—none of those modern schemes seeming at all plausible in light of what we now know about Creation.
We are creatures embedded in a Creation arising from raw stuff which is the truths manifested by God through His Son. To our minds and hearts and hands, this Creation is quite dynamic for at least three reasons:
- Creation is so because it is inherently so, evolving and developing as it moves from its original primordial state toward greater particularity and complexity.
- Creation is so because we learn about it through our own evolving and developing minds and hearts and hands.
- Creation is so because our very efforts to understand and to exploit this Creation brings about changes in the evolution and development of our own human being and in much of the being with which we can directly form relationships of any sort.
In my updated version of Thomism, creation is not a place containing entities but rather a set of relationships which are acts-of-being. Material stuff and even abstract stuff is the result of those relationships, most of which are highly dynamic. Human knowledge isn’t settled from our viewpoint, human knowledge doesn’t encapsulate the truth, until we can reach a better, more stable viewing place. But no such place can possibly exist so long as we’re alive because we learn more about Creation and we also change what is by our active responses, as do all entities and lesser creatures, but only we humans can—in principle—encapsulate all that God has created in our own minds. Only we humans can—in principle—participate in God’s greater acts-of-being, His thoughts and feelings and actions which take place in any realm or all realms of Creation. Only we humans can—in principle—share God’s thoughts even as He creates from nothing.
Some principles can only be realized in the world of the resurrected where the friends of God share God’s life by being part of the Body of Christ, by sharing directly in the human being of the Son of God. By so sharing we might even enjoy the dizzying sight of Creation from God’s transcendental viewpoint. Then we will be able to understand.