I have begun a new research and thinking and writing project which bears the tentative title: Through Christ: Creation. It is intended as a step or two forward rather than a step or two toward a different goal than I’ve been pursuing in recent years: the use of modern knowledge of the world to build a new understanding of the world, a Christian worldview.
Some, including allegedly Christian leaders of Christian communities, act as if this is a world in which we can conduct our daily business as if God doesn’t exist or, at least, isn’t truly present. I think the Almighty, as Augustine told us, is deeper in us than we ourselves can reach. He is deeper in the constituents of matter than the most powerful of particle accelerators could ever reach—even with a boost to the energy levels found in the very early fractions of a second of this expansionary phase of…something we think of, sort of, as the Universe.
At the same time as we are to carry out most of our activities as if God doesn’t exist or, at least, isn’t truly present, we are also to understand God in His freely chosen role as Creator of this world as if we can just restate the understanding which grew up in the period of 1500-1800 or so, the early years of modern science. This early modern view of the world developed by Christian scholars and adopted by many Christians was partly as an effort to undo the damage caused by Galileo’s persecution by men more occultists and magicians and desperate powerholders than Christian thinkers,
Separated for two centuries or more from much of the exploration and analyses of the real world, Christians have a bit of work in front of them to make sense of reality in Christian terms. We were sometimes rescued by the strategy of “save the phenomena.” There are various ways to model reality—after all, Plato and Aristotle produced understandings of the world which were defective relative to the underlying empirical reality or “how God actually did it.” Even the great scientists, Archimedes and Galileo and Newton produced understandings of physical reality which were radically inadequate and sometimes wrong by the standards of 21st century physics and chemistry and astronomy. And, yet, they “saved the phenomenon,” their theories (call them “models” of reality, if you will) saved the appearances of macroscopic reality. The same can be said of, for example, Christian understandings of human being or of revealed knowledge. Intellectual leaders and other leaders of Christian don’t seem to even realize they sound like fools when they say they accept evolution (more generally: the idea that human beings arose in the natural world and our special relationship to God comes `after’ that) and then go to the pulpit or publish books which teach that human beings were a special creation of God who lived in Eden and…
We seem to have reached a point where Christian thought has lost most of its credibility. From my viewpoint: Christians started to rebuild their understanding of Creation based on empirical knowledge of this concrete region of Creation and then the effort halted, resulting in a reconstruction of a magnificent temple upon a foundation of sand. The tide has come in and the foundation is washing away. Yet, the strategy continues: God revealed (some of) the answers to us so we don’t have to bother learning how to reason toward the known answers based on what we now know about empirical reality and why bother reasoning toward new answers needed as human being (largely in its communal forms) grows ever more complex and complicated and as we learn much more about the matter and energy and spacetime of this universe.
Before moving on, I’ll give an example more clear than most of how an unconscious “saving of the phenomena” had allowed physicists and others to advance right up to 1900 with an understanding of matter, specifically of its stability, which was destroyed by the work of Planck and Einstein in founding a version of quantum mechanics which itself proved to be inadequate, a mere “saving of the phenomena.” And that’s it. Physicists, philosophers, theologians, engineers, and the rest of humanity had simply assumed matter was the stable and inert stuff it appears to be when you pick up a rock and examine it. When Planck and Einstein showed mathematically (with Planck and others verifying it in the lab) that energy isn’t continuous—it exists in quanta or units, pre-existing fears came out of the shadows and scientists realized that continuous energy transfers would have prevented matter or a material universe from ever stabilizing.
Now to move to the realm of human being and its sexual and moral traits. We’ve known since at least the time of the, more or less, final redaction (high-level edit) of the Hebrew scriptures adopted into the Christian Old Testament, that men are defectively monogamous—quite defectively in some cases. So, the laws of many religious communities, the kind of communities successful over time, enforced monogamy or at least a tightly regulated polygamy. See one of my earlier essays, Is Modern Atheism a Result of High Loads of Genetic Mutations?, for a discussion of the religious nature of evolved human being. For this essay, the important point is that evolutionary science, and the resulting reasoning—sometimes speculative, tells us that there are strong advantages to strong family and clan/tribe societies where the father is strongly tied to his own wife and children, but there is an advantage (in terms of fathering children) occurs through being open to the occasional opportunity, enough of an advantage for this tendency to stray to remain in the behavior repertoire of the human male.
At this point, it’s perhaps helpful to think of the Jesuit priest and professor of biology in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Left hand on Darwin’s Origin of Species, he claimed it to be a description of what man is; right hand on the Bible, he claimed it to be a description of what man can be if he accepts God’s offer of salvation. Western Christians never adopted any such coherent understanding of our general situation, choosing instead to assume that all individual human beings have a recent common ancestor (true enough so long as you take 100,000 or more years as recent) and that we’ve all changed or not changed as if soldiers marching on parade. This magic act of synchronization is thought by many oh-so modern thinkers to have linked together evolutionary forces in northern Eurasia and in Borneo and in the Americas and in central Africa and so on.
But even if we start to honestly accept the facts and information, sometimes processed into knowledge, of modern investigators of empirical reality, we have not enough. A universe can’t be built out of its parts. See one of my early blog entries: A Universe is More than it Contains for a discussion of the inadequacies of such an understanding even from a purely material viewpoint. And things go beyond that: only God can make a Universe, or a Creation, though it be possible we might one day gain the dangerously immoral power to `make’ a human being.
Going from embodied abstractions to that abstract we know as `understanding’: We need a greater understanding of Creation than can be assembled from the pieces of modern science and mathematics—though it should certainly use the great knowledge and powerful tools of those and other ways of thought found in modern times, including the insights and tools of Biblical exegesis, theological and philosophical thought, historical investigation and analysis, literary arts and other arts as well.
I’ve been building an understanding of that sort for the past 12 years on my websites ( Acts of Being and To See a World in a Grain of Sand). For nearly two decades before that, my efforts had been directed toward the goal of simply enriching what seemed to be an increasingly impoverished Christian civilization—the West.
I’m ready to rebel more openly and more energetically against the claim that God has died or at least gone away. He’s alive and present and, anthropomorphically speaking, He’s probably not happy with us.
I’m ready to dispute the claim that man is what he wills to be, and even the claim there is such an abstraction as `man’. Rather is it the case that human being is concrete, individual and communal, and complex types of communal human being form in an appropriate and potentially stable way, first of all, through the “collective worship of a moral God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving.” Communal human being is also real and concrete as is individual human being. [The Universe we live in can also not be seen but, like a strong human community, its effects can be observed and sometimes quantified.] To be sure, even an extended family group in the late New Stone Age would have had something of political and economic structures, but Babylon and Ur formed as small communities of human beings came together to worship in larger communities. And to build clusters of houses and shops, irrigation systems in some cases, eventually defensive walls, and then palaces and buildings for the bureaucrats.
Let us pray…
Lord God, please help us to open our hearts and our minds to you, please help us to order our hands to help You do your work. You are always with us, if you were not present to and within any creature, it would cease to exist. And, yet, we’ve shielded our hearts and our minds from Your presence, refused to order our hands to your purposes. [Both moral and religious inclinations come from our innermost being as coded in our DNA and manifested in our bodies through developmental processes which work from that DNA but with some limited options due to DNA which can respond to environmental conditions—such as lower body sizes during general periods of lower prosperity. Yet, there are other factors at work. When Western Civilization was Christian and strong, the minds and hearts and hands of even those with little inclination toward religious belief or practice could be shaped to be much like the minds and hearts and hands of those with strong inclination toward religious belief and practice.]
Yet, some were blind from birth, deaf, not inclined to bend the knee to what couldn’t be seen, to what didn’t seem to be conducive to immediate profit. A father of faith can conceive a daughter who is good in human ways but shows no signs of perceiving God. A mother regular in her private and public devotions can give birth to a son who doesn’t bend knee or lift his voice in praise and thanks.
Lord, we don’t know why you created the world in this way, but current estimates of genetic science indicate that inclination to belief in the “moral gods” is less than 50% heritable and the same is true of the inclination to engage in worship of those “moral gods”. What are we to do, Lord, if we wish to help our children to enter Heaven if they’re not so inclined to believe or practice as we are? I’ve already developed an answer based upon my expansion of Pope Benedict XVI’s explanation for the problems of the Western Christian churches and I’ll put that answer in a richer context—with the help of your grace, Lord God Almighty.
This project might go slowly at times and I plan to write occasional short pieces on other topics, but I’ll produce the rough draft of this book one essay at a time, maybe one thought at a time and maybe a rush of thoughts at a time.