I’ll start with a digression to the question, “What is paganism, really?” In a simple comparison of paganism vs Christianity (in the sense of comparison and not of combat), I’ll be able to better define the “world” from the Christian viewpoint but for modern sensibilities.
I’ll write of higher paganism. To a pagan, the world is what it is.
To a believer in a Creator—most strongly Christians, the world is what it is, given that God created it to be such.
In other words, the true dividing line between Christians and pagans is that the pagan thinks of the world as given to even the God or the gods or both or neither. Divinities and lesser spirits, if they are seen as existing, are also seen as having great powers over the world, though the Platonic God didn’t even know of the existence of contingent things. He was lost in self-contemplation as His perfection was said to make Himself the only proper object of His attention.
The Christian believes the world to be contingent in the strongest way possible—it might have been different or might have not been at all. Or so should the Christian believe if he pays attention to the first verses of the Gospel of St John or to the first verses of the Book of Genesis as understood through those gospel verses. Yet, there are many Christians who think the pagan assertion, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” as spoken by Einstein, is the position consistent with Christian belief. From the human viewpoint, God first “played dice with the universe” by deciding to create it. Einstein’s position is consistent only to Christian belief as deformed by the outlook of paganism that the world necessarily exists and is necessarily what it is as is true also of any God or gods seen as existing. This pagan outlook, in this higher and self-aware set of beliefs as well as in naive sets of beliefs of pre-civilizational tribesmen, is something of a a stage of evolution towards a belief in a Creator.
Let me put matters in terms which are both spiritual and scientific.
First, we can start with my analysis in the short essays: Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality: and Quantum Mechanics and Moral Formation: Part 1.
The idea is slightly more mature terms is:
Stuff isn’t primary—hence, Einstein’s overall view of reality isn’t viable. Relationships are primary—hence, the strange view of reality held by Bohr and other `radical’ quantum theorists or philosophers is possible.
Relationships create stuff and can change stuff even in quite fundamental ways.
It’s more than reasonable, perhaps necessary, for those creatures which respond to God to pray to God and to pray for contingent matters, such as the return of their children to faith and worship. Such God-responsive creatures can include those struggling with faith, including those who claim to be atheists or even some of those who are truly atheists. Indifference, the state of lukewarmness, is the ultimate blocker for entering Heaven—though even that can be overcome if the indifferent human being is a member of a community, at least a family, which has a good relationship with God.
“What is the world?” Maybe it’s better to ask: “What is Creation?”
It is a set of relationships involving God and all He created, with all that He created being a dynamic soup of sorts in which entities form and disappear, evolving and developing, all because of relationships formed:
- by God creating and then interacting with what He created,
- by non-living entities forming and interacting to change each other or to bring more such entities into existence,
- by living entities forming and interacting with their environment, including each other, and changing each other as well as their environment and being changed by their environment,
- by ever-more complex entities, non-living and living, coming into existence through all of this dynamic interaction,
- by the ongoing formation of the Body of Christ and all He contains—I have no definitive catalog of who or what will be part of that Body or its true home in the World of the Resurrected.
[In item (3) above, I’m being redundant as each entity, non-living or living, is part of the environment. So far as item (5) goes, I tend to accept a Medieval proposition that everyone who could be happy in Heaven will be saved into Heaven though perhaps through a long period of re-formation and remedial learning in someplace we could call `purgatory’.]
If we of the geographical West could put flesh upon this bare skeleton, we would be on our way to building a new Western civilization, that is, such an enfleshed understanding could provide the complete worldview for a Christian civilization.