All reason is from God and of God. There is no immaterial reasoning agency part of or attached to the human creature. There is no mind or soul as many imagine, nor can we directly access even the manifested truths underlying Creation, let alone any transcendental truths which exist beyond this particular Creation. All reason is from God and of God and the more abstract forms of reason are part of the abstract being from which the matter of this world was shaped. When the mathematical laws of physics operate, or the narrative laws of biological evolution or those of human history, we see reason at work and we shape our brain’s operations to correspond to this reason. Even perception of our environments requires us to actively engage the objects and deal with the relationships in those environments. This active engagement is part of the shaping of what we call our minds.
We can state one of the ‘laws’ of biological evolution in this rough way: “Those lines of creatures better succeed in reproduction which can better adapt their bodies and actions to what lies around them.” Human beings have moved to a higher level of adaptation — that of mind-formation, though still remaining creatures in all senses, having more refined skills of abstract reasoning than found in chimpanzees and other creatures, but not different sorts of skills than those elicited from chimpanzees under laboratory conditions and sometimes found in chimpanzees in the wild. Chimpanzees have some of the brain structures for forming a mind but I’d be reluctant to say that mind-formation rises above a hint in our apish cousins.
We can abstract from the physical bodies and the actions of living and non-living creatures to the more abstract sorts of mental events. I’m not speaking only of academic philosophers or even mostly of them. I’m speaking of German and Japanese farmers who carry their habits and general knowledge about soil and weather to new lands and take just a few years to become better farmers than the natives. I’m speaking of poets responding to new things or new regions of earth or new experiences. I’m speaking of hackers on a computer trying to find new ways to solve problems and sometimes working by writing code which doesn’t correspond directly to preplanned or even known methods. I’m speaking of inventors trying to build internal combustion engines where the entire engine is basically one piston-chamber or other inventors working towards some goal they can’t even state.
We trap ourselves when we try to limit our activities to those which can be planned or to any foreseeable activities because those, by definition, can only correspond to known forms of reason. We can learn new forms of reason if we’re willing to explore our world courageously and without too many preconceptions, even when we tinker with things or ideas in a seemingly arbitrary way. If our tinkering produces something worthwhile, then we should sit back and contemplate our actions and their results, whether we’re dealing with a new way of picking a banjo or a new way to sort records on a computer. From these contemplations we might derive new and richer understandings of Creation. We can even be said at times to have entered into more abstract realms of being.
In fact, it seems quite possible to read the history of human thought in a manner quite consistent with this. We have to try to temporarily set aside our modern viewpoint formed during centuries when a certain type of rationality allowed for extraordinary progress in understanding many aspects of Creation, gathering mountains of knowledge of this concrete world and abstracting from that knowledge to derive various sorts of physical laws and theories as well as less rigid ways to understand history and to understand living creatures in general. Seen in proper historical context, the earlier form of reasoning developed by the Greeks, ‘rationalistic’ or ‘Euclidean’ but not tied tightly enough to empirical reality, also had a good run of allowing progress in understanding Creation in its concrete and abstract realms. Similar statements can be made of the mythical reasoning developed in the centuries before the early Greek scientists and poets prepared the ground for the philosophers.
Will we move on from here? Is the reason of the modern world the end-all of human thought? I doubt it. Our children will not only know things about reality which would amaze us — they will reason with power that might frighten us.
We could ask, “What form of reasoning might someone discover?” I can’t even make a guess though I think there are hints in my writings and in the writings of other modern thinkers, especially mathematical physicists, mathematicians, brain-scientists, and theorists in evolutionary biology. Undoubtedly, there are historians, novelists, poets, musicians, visual artists, and some of those tinkerers in mechanical matters who are also developing new forms of thinking about Creation by active exploration of that same Creation. They are learning how to think about Creation from Creation.
Even as creative thinkers, at least truly creative thinkers, we don’t always know what we’re thinking until we’re thinking it. We don’t always know where the story is going until it gets there. A good tinkerer doesn’t always know what the danged thing is until he builds it.
We can’t respond with a pure freedom to Creation because of our creaturely natures. Even the wildest and most open of creative efforts needs to work within some forms, some disciplined structures, but those called to work at the frontiers of human thought or art or technological innovation should be willing to step outside of the forms of reasoning or acting which they inherited. In some periods of history, the call to this sort of creative work is a beckoning to step outside of their own minds formed to established ways of reasoning.
Speculating, telling stories, or tinkering, we respond to God’s Creation, thereby sharing in God’s own thinking and acting — though the two aren’t really separable for God. We share also in God’s freedom, the freedom He exercises as Creator and Narrator. In these ways of sharing, we mold our minds, souls if you prefer, to the shape God wishes for us, the shape He wished when He manifested a certain body of thoughts as the stuff of a story, this world, and then brought into being a race of creatures capable of responding to Creation in this general way.
The human mind is an entity which can, in a strong sense, be all created being. It isn’t just an entity which can understand created being in the traditional way where he who would understand brings with him tools which are independent of created being. We do create such tools by shaping our minds to deal with, even encapsulate, parts of created being, but those tools should be seen as that — images of parts of created being rather than truly independent tools for analyzing or explaining from outside. You could even say that one generation’s mental tools will melt into the lower levels of understanding of the next generation where I speak of intellectual generations, such as pre-Socratics and classical Greeks and so forth up to the broader spectrum of modern thinkers.