God has shaped a thing-like world out of more basic stuff. I’ve discussed this in various ways, especially in the category: Christian in the Universe of Einstein. We human beings form our minds by responding actively to that world and by penetrating to understandings of that more basic stuff. A particular thing is a manifestation of a particular thought of God though all things in Creation are intertwined in the most complex and complicated way as William Blake told us in his efforts to see a world in a grain of sand. Each grain of sand is made of various particles made of sub-particles, each of which has peculiar properties and ways of relating to other particles or sub-particles or even other things. The particular things also have their forms of behavior and of relating to other things.
The world is not a dualistic mish-mash of various sorts of substances, mind-soul and body in many traditions. The world is a story God is telling with a universe He shaped out of some strangely abstract stuff which, so to speak, lies on the other side of the Big Bang. There might actually be many complex stages or even a series of expansions and collapses before we could get ‘closer’ to God’s original act-of-being by which He created from nothingness. Those details aren’t important for now.
Human beings aren’t born with minds or souls attached to their bodies by some mysterious glue. Human beings are born with brains which have major regions which have the potential for abstract thinking — such as that form of thinking which we might describe as future-oriented. Those regions are not preset to function in highly specific ways as, for example, the hippocampus is preset to form long-term memories out of short-term ones according to certain criteria. Cells in the regions of the human brain devoted to abstract thinking shape their connections to other cells in the same regions and to cells in other regions according to criteria which have been investigated by modern brain-scientists. (See the various writings of Gerald Edelman for a powerful and coherent understanding of the brain’s ‘shaping’ processes.)
Mozart wasn’t born a great musician, though he clearly was born with a brain that could be shaped into that of a composer who could see a piece of music in its entirety the way that we more ordinary folk can see a tree in its entirety — so long as we stand back from the tree but not too far back. Our brains can encompass only so much, too much detail can destroy the understanding as easily as can a sweeping landscape view. But even the ability to see a tree truly, in its concrete or abstract nature, comes from our active response to trees when we see them as children, perhaps under the guidance of an adult interested in nature.
God made that tree, as a poet once reminded us. The Creator made that tree by manifesting certain abstract ideas from which He shaped the basic stuff of this universe and then by manifesting the idea of certain sorts of developmental processes which formed first protons, then atoms of hydrogen and helium, then atoms of carbon and oxygen, then stars and planets, then organic chemicals, then slime-molds, then apes, and so forth.
Brilliant men of the pre-modern era somewhat wrongly shaped their minds and taught us to wrongly shape our minds because they saw that tree as a manifestation of an ideal object (to play a little loose with metaphysical language for the sake of conciseness) rather than seeing it as a dynamic object, even a character of sorts, in a stream of events. And, yet, there were also those who saw that tree as arising out of some sort of chaos and they formed an anti-metaphysics of sorts.
It would seem that God doesn’t feel bound to operate by the rules of either Plato or Heraclitus. We should honor them and see the insightfulness in their thoughts, for they were also characters in a sub-narrative of human history, a small but important story we could title: The Development of the Human Mind at the Racial Level. We now know enough to move on to a higher level of understanding, however inadequate it might eventually prove to be.
From the metaphysics of the Greeks, based upon very simple physics, to Augustine of Hippo who provided a substantial appreciation of the importance of time and the flow of events, through Aquinas who provided a deeper understanding of both the mind and also of being, through various modern philosopher-scientists who gave us brilliant understandings of the interaction of matter and of abstract mathematics — including Einstein and Planck and Dirac who enriched our understanding of time and space and matter and relationships, we come to us with our minds not so well shaped as they should be to these modern understandings of Creation at its concrete and abstract levels.
But some of us are trying and many seem at least willing to admit their confusion at trying to fit evolutionary concepts into brains shaped to consider species as ideal categories or to fit the theories of relativity into brains shaped to regard time as uniformly flowing in a way fully separable from space which is itself absolute or trying to make sense of traditional moral rules when geneticists have found strong correlations, as one example, between mutations and strong feelings of ‘transsexualism’ in some who are otherwise fully male in their genetic make-up. Where is this ‘free-will’ that can overcome a creature’s own fundamental being?
Ah, the world be far more complex than the most convoluted of the sentences I’ve constructed in this article. We do need, in fact, new ways to speak of complex facts which overwhelm our language. We need musicians to compose in new ways consistent with Einstein’s insights into space-time and poets to speak of Turing’s insights into the nature of algorithmic thought.
The human mind, in its abstract aspects, is the human understanding of Creation, in all perceivable and conceivable aspects. The contents of knowledge are the container of the mind and it is shaped by the quite active responses human beings make to Creation. But the very language of ‘contents’ and ‘container’ needs to be at least refreshed and maybe replaced entirely. We also have to remember the communal foundation of the human mind, but I’ll pass over that in this short article.
Let me summarize:
God created things as manifestations of some of His thoughts. By learning to shape his brain in response to those things, man brings into being certain states of that brain which can be truly called a human mind.
And so man’s mind and the being created by God are not so readily separable. Bishop Berkeley was onto something with his insight that created things can be regarded as thoughts of God but he made the mistake of thinking human beings can directly penetrate to the thoughts manifested as substantial entities. He also seemed to think that abstractions had some sort of absolute existence independent of the thoughts of God. To Berkeley, and others, there are abstract truths which form a common language for God and man, while I’m proposing that God has a language and man learns it by responding to God’s work as Creator.