For more than two years, I’ve been engaged in an intense effort to explore new understandings of being and of truths which seem forced upon us by modern empirical knowledge. I was publishing the results of that effort on this blog, Acts of Being. I was also publishing a related series of entries on my other blog, To See a World in a Grain of Sand, which still exists but is currently inactive. The effort began with my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand, which has had very light sales.
I’m not sure how aware I was about where I was headed those two years ago, but I’ve worked hard to move on from this obvious shortfall in our current intellectual and spiritual situations:
Modern empirical knowledge isn’t to be fit into our traditional understandings of created being. Our minds need to be shaped to reality. Our minds as they currently exist are not some sorts of metaphysical entities which are somehow attached to us at birth but are largely shaped by our existing literature and culture which necessarily reflect the ideas of reality which seemed plausible centuries ago.* We shouldn’t be deforming our own minds or those of children by stuffing them with our favorite textbook-based systems of knowledge. Modern empirical knowledge has given us the opportunity to enlarge, deepen, enrich our understanding of created being. It has raised the possibility of richer understandings of truths knowable to human beings, in particular, melting away much of what was once believed about the nature of those seemingly most rigorous of truths — those which arise in mathematics.
*(The situation is more complex than this because we do have certain mental skills and inborn assumptions which are the result of development at the species level, biological evolution, but these form a very rudimentary, ‘apish’, mind which needs a lot of shaping to deal with either Shakespeare or Einstein.)
I speak of traditional understandings as inadequate to understanding Creation given our current empirical knowledge but I’ve also claimed that the basic assumptions and methodology of St. Thomas Aquinas (but not all his beliefs and certainly not all his conclusions) can be used to make a greater sense of Creation, of created being. For better than two years, I’ve been discussing all of this from various angles and using various components of modern empirical knowledge. More recently, I’ve slowed down my posting of new materials. Why? Partly because I felt a bit burned-out from the mental effort of the past two years, a state not helped by the relentlessly cold winter we’ve endured in New England nor by my apparent sensitivity to short days.
But there’s more to it than even those factors, as damaging as they’ve been to my efforts to remain optimistic and to work on difficult material with the necessary energy and concentration. To some extent, my burn-out and a certain desparation in my thoughts and my writing was caused by my need for a deeper and richer set of mental tools. I was reaching out blindly to see the details of the deeper levels of being which provide the stuff from which God shaped this physical world, the deeper levels which are the common ground of the various material and immaterial aspects of being as we experience it and as we ourselves are. I’ve decided to take steps to improve my vision of Creation:
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I’m studying certain subjects in modern mathematics and physics to gain those additional mental tools. This should lead to new creative efforts.
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I’m starting to write a series of short books to state my current positions in more disciplined ways even as I hope to be strengthening those positions in future years. This should provide a consolidation of my work to date.
I will be writing at least occasional short pieces, some dealing with better ways to understand the Bible in light of modern empirical knowledge and also working on novels for the first time in years, but my greater efforts will be devoted to the two main tasks listed above.