This is a rather broad field but I should qualify my discussion at the very beginning. I’ll talk mostly about an error which has never been purged from Christian and Jewish thought: the tendency to tie God to the universe as we know it so that the Lord Almighty becomes a super-creature.
This error comes from a mostly common-sense appreciation of substance, but one which becomes exaggerated. This is the same error Einstein made in attacking Bohr’s radical interpretation of quantum mechanics. As the philosopher Kurt Hubner pointed out in “Critique of Scientific Reason”, Einstein was saying that substances exist independently of any relationships and substances are unaltered by any relationships in which they are involved.
From the Christian viewpoint, it seems much more reasonable to assume substances exist as a result of the relationships God establishes, that is, we exist just because God loves us. From there, all of Creation, even the things of this universe, begin to shape themselves and other things by forming relationships.
Substance comes to exist when God wishes to have a certain sort of relationship with contingent being. It is shaped if He wishes to see a story, even to participate in that story. It exists because God wishes something to exist outside of Himself, for His pleasure, that He might have a relationship with gifted being.
In existentialistic terms, substance follows existence. Existence is not a property of substance but rather, speaking very roughly, its source. God is His own Act-of-being as I stated in “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”. All else, the abstract substance of the Primordial Universe and the thing-stuff of this universe come into being as a result of ongoing, story-like acts-of-being which only God can perform though we can play a minor role. These story-like acts-of-being are largely a shaping of the abstract stuff of the Primordial Universe, the abstract stuff created from nothing.
But those who see substance as primary, as a container of various aspects of which one is existence, are blind to the deeper results of these secondary acts-of-being, these acts of shaping what already exists — the stuff of the Primordial universe shaped into the basic stuff, matter and energy and fields, of this Particularized Universe, the universe. As I noted in “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, we are not autonomous agents who do things and then move on, unchanged but for some memories and maybe some bad habits which can be purged or a renewed energy for life from doing good. We are actually shaped by what we do and what we think and what we allow ourselves to feel.
We make ourselves into virtuous pagans or Christians suited for life as companions to God or undisciplined human animals who are suited for nothing but the final and eternal grave. And I mean not superficial changes that leave intact the human animal who existed before any specific experiences.
We are not talking about a human judicial system that assumes the defendent is an autonomous agent who commits acts which can be differentiated from that defendent. Rather are we talking about a world in which we become what we do and what we think. We play a role in helping God to shape ourselves and others around us. We also play a role in helping God to shape our environments, the small pieces of the universe in which we live our lives.
As St. Augustine of Hippo said:
We do not sin, we are sin.
We do not murder; we are murderers. We do not commit random acts of adultery or perversion; we are adulterers and perverts. We do fill our environments with filth and poisons; we are ourselves that filth and those poisons.
We do not relieve the sufferings of the sick and distress; we are that relief. We do not commit random acts of love; we are that love. We do not live in peace with our Creator and the environments which are our small part of His world; we are that peace.
We need to be clear about the separation of metaphysical stuff and thing-like stuff. And we need to be clear about the limitations of the human mind: we are physical creatures and any truths — however abstract in appearance — must be embedded in some sort of concrete stuff.
I seem to be proposing a radical view of metaphysics, in which absolute truths are reduced to concrete stuff. In fact, I came to this view partly by contemplating the contradictions in reductionistic views of the human mind and also the contradictions in the criticisms of such views. The question is:
How could abstractions affect physical material so that we can perceive directly a thing, living or not, as being a member of an abstract class? I’ve used ‘dog’ consistently as my example. How can a child’s mind develop so that she sees wolf-like dogs during her early months and then is able to recognize a dachshund as a doggie? Aristotle, for all his physicalist tendencies, had doubts about this matter and Aquinas took those doubts seriously enough that he posited a very limited immaterial mind. This mind could only draw abstractions from particular instances; it had no other human qualities.
This might have been an unusual case of Aquinas being inconsistent with his own great insights. An essentialist, one who believes in the primacy and stability of substance, has to go looking for something extra to be added to this substance that soul-like and mind-like aspects can appear in living creatures, most prominently human beings. Aquinas had little reason to go looking for something of the sort since he taught a form of Christian Creationism in which existence is primary and stuff comes into existence as a result of acts-of-being which only God can perform. This very nature of stuff as being itself secondary, dependent upon acts-of-being, even to the point of instability, gives the stuff of this universe a fluidity which was not imaginable to Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas, or to Galileo or Newton or Einstein. That is, Einstein never adapted his own worldview to the more radical implications of his own insights into physical reality. While Einstein realized quite well that his theories of relativity had destroyed Newton’s artificial construction of absolute time and absolute space (while replacing them with more empirically based absolutes), he could never admit that his pioneering work in quantum physics had destroyed the illusion of the stability and primacy of substance, of stuff.
And few there are who see this. Until recently, I believed that Einstein was truly defending a common-sense view of reality when he was really defending the absolute stability and primacy of physical stuff. It was my re-reading of Kurt Hubner’s “Critique of Scientific Reason” that led me to realize that a consistent existentialism, at least one based upon Christian Creationism, would reject not only the primacy but also the stability of stuff. In a radical way. Not just to say that concrete being, things, do not necessarily exist but to say that they are fluid in their form while they exist.
An understanding of the radical instability, or fluidity, of stuff leads on to the seemingly irrational idea that abstract truths might be thing-like in their true natures. They might be creatures of the Almighty. In fact, some thinkers in mathematics have been playing around with the idea that mathematical patterns, truths, are fact-like and not truly given in the sense assumed for the past 2500 years or so, at least in the tradition going back to Pythagoras as interpreted by later Greek thinkers including his own followers.
More on this to follow as I try to work out the implications of a consistent Christian existentialism in the light of God’s self-revelations but also in the light of modern empirical knowledge and modern speculative knowledge.