Acts of Being

I’m proposing this principle:

A Creation meeting the plausible criteria of unity, coherence, and completeness, would most likely behave in a manner consistent with the manner in which it was created.

In other words, if the evidence strongly tells us that the world and the entities within it develop at the level of individuals and evolve (a different sort of ‘develop’ in this context) at the level of classes of individuals (stars or homo sapiens) is likely the work of a Creator who can be plausibly regarded in this context as a story-teller and not an engineer with bureaucratic inclinations. Modern empirical knowledge indicates strongly we live in a world in which developmental processes dominate and few, if any entities, come to existence in their final state. The specific conversations and acts of God recorded in the Bible also show that He is a story-teller, even a coach for His characters.

I’ve addressed some of the underlying issues in my writings on this blog and in my first book To See a World in a Grain of Sand as well as a book on the nature of knowledge which can be downloaded from this website, Four Kinds of Knowledge. For now, I’ll avoid further discussion and simply note that, in this world, types of entities, such as species of living creatures, evolve and individual entities develop by way of internally developed responses to their environments. Even stars develop by processes more closely analogous to character development in a human novel than to the design of a bridge. In the Bible, the Israelites were shaped and molded by God over a period of centuries and the pilgrim Church on earth, however defined, is also being shaped and molded in similar ways.

The erector-set paradigm of engineering design is breaking down even when applied to technology, but that paradigm was never fully accepted by the best of engineers nor by talented tinkerers such as Ford who was aware in his eccentric way of the social effects of not only automobiles and roads but also of the factory system. Electronic circuitry, and certainly such facilities as particle accelerators, have become so complex that no one human being could have much more than a superficial understanding of the totality of the structure. We’ve come far. In ancient times, trial-and-error construction techniques resulted in unstable pyramids that killed workers and supervisors. A king or one of his officials could more or less organize an entire kingdom, as Joseph the Hebrew did for Pharaoh, but that was also a trial-and-error process that didn’t produce results that allowed for both freedom and a well-ordered society.

A movement towards design techniques solved some of those problems, on relatively ’small’ or ’simple’ projects but now has started to fail when applied to complex technology and certainly fails spectacularly when applied to any society more complex than a simple feudal society.

Recently, we’ve heard of ‘design’ processes, such as those for the Boeing 787, so complex that no one could even know if the darned thing could even be assembled properly until the major sections were flown in from the factories in various parts of the world. Apparently, the engineers at Boeing headquarters demanded that they be allowed to assemble one plane by hand before moving on to regular production. It’s perhaps more interesting to consider the social aspects of the construction of a bridge. The best bridge in the world can destroy nearby communities, perhaps because of a conscious concern on the part of designers with larger communities or perhaps because engineers haven’t always been aware of the consequences of building ramps and entrances in established residential neighborhoods or in commercial neighborhoods frequented by those who would find repugnant even occasional visits to regions dominated by masses of concrete and steel. In general, those sorts of depopulated areas tend to also be crime-ridden or at least frequented by drug-addicts, alcoholics, and others who give at least some sign of being dangerous. If bridge construction projects can be so destructive of human communities, then imagine what havoc can be wreaked when such limited engineering design techniques are applied directly to human communities.

We should act in ways consistent with the underlying processes of our world. This world is one of developmental processes where each entity has to respond properly to what its environment offers it, or throws at it. Moreover, as biochemical stews became cells of some sort which then absorbed self-replicating chemicals (DNA, etc.) to become cells as we know them and as cells combined into mold slimes and then into more advanced and specialized colonies such as jellyfishes and…

The responses which an entity makes, shaping itself in the process, must come from inside that entity, animal or family-line of animals or religious community or nation. This isn’t a pessimistic claim that “The world is too complex to anticipate all possibilities,” though there are such concerns allied to my main point which is simply:

The world operates in the way of a developing story and nearly all entities in this world also develop or evolve as if characters in a narrative rather than being raw stuff to be machined.

I’m making a positive claim we should operate according to reality as best described by our historians and physicists and many others.

We don’t know where the world is heading. We don’t even know what will happen to our families or countries, though we who are Christians are bound to believe that the end result will be the incorporation of those who belong to Christ in the Body of Christ without loss of individuality. In fact, that individuality will be enhanced so that we can be truly Christ-like. Before I can further explore this idea of the Body of Christ — not to be done in this article, I have to say what should be obvious from the Bible, especially the letters of St. Paul. Individuals are unique and don’t even all fit in the same general categories. The same is true of nations and other natural groupings of human beings. We won’t fill the same role in the Body of Christ and we don’t fill the same role in this mortal realm. Not every human being is suited for life as a rocket engineer at NASA and not every human community is suited to be a part of a high-tech society that sends rockets to the moon. Moreover, some individuals capable of living such a life, some communities capable of so forming themselves, have no desire to do so.

Why can’t we just help the Haitians after their natural disaster without trying to rebuild Haiti so that it has an American-style or European-style infrastructure? Why don’t we let them find their own way by responding to their own environment? Why don’t we let them develop according to what they can find inside themselves and in their relationships to each other and to those who go to help them without the goal of turning them into Americans or Spaniards? We like to burden others with American or European technology which leaves them confused at best and certainly unable to respond to their environments in their own ways. We like to burden other countries by educating some of the natives to be Western-style bureaucrats and academics of a sort who are no longer ‘natives’ and, because of that, aren’t capable of developing native responses to the new possibilities they learned about when they were at MIT or Oxford or Heidelberg. We in the West have also erred against the individual, trying to channel our children into paths of development suited for forming more bureaucrats. Nor have we respected local cultures.

I’ll pass on to make one last point, though it’s not something I can yet write about with any clarity. Development of an organism, or the evolution of a family-line of organisms, isn’t really something that works bottom-up. The development of complex organisms is ongoing at multiple levels and perhaps at all levels of development currently available to that organism. One of the best examples involves only two levels — individual organisms develop over their lifetimes even as species evolve over longer periods of time. But individual development and special evolution overlap. As we develop as individuals reflecting one temporal stage of evolution of the human species, we remain part of the greater evolutionary flow, though there is reason to believe evolution might itself have evolved over time and has now changed dramatically with the appearance of a rational and self-aware race. Moreover, we have other forms of evolution or development which overlap with biological evolution and the development of an organism. Life on earth engages in complex and recursive relationships with the atmosphere of the earth. There is also interaction at the level of DNA and soma between different species — such as that between viruses and their hosts. Viruses can implant their genetic coding inside the genetic code of other species. Viruses can also transport pieces of genetic coding from one species to another. Bacteria form a superorganism of sorts, being able to shed some genes and pick up others from a pool of bacterial genes flowing through the earth’s biosphere and including genes for resistance to various antibiotics. An interested reader can download my dark comedy, A Man for Every Purpose, which plays off some of these confusions caused by our willful misunderstandings of our human selves and our situation in this world.

A human communities is one very complex entity. We should fear those who try to guide this development because they will deform the organism, just as if a child were to be fitted at birth with a brace to straighten the natural and necessary curve in his spine or to force his skull into the shape found in a different ethnic group.

We should help those who are in need of food, shelter, medical care, and clothing but we should think long and hard before imposing Western style infrastructure upon the peoples of Africa or Haiti or other regions. Centuries ago, the Japanese and Chinese had already developed to a level where they could adapt Western technology and even some social forms to their own needs and desires. The Chinese needed only to get back on their feet after a period of weakness which was the result of Western dominance established during the later stages of political decay of a particular imperial government. The Haitians aren’t in that sort of a position. They’re descendants of Africans torn out of their tribal environments and thrown into a brutal system of slavery where they didn’t really have even the limited opportunities to learn the skills and forms of self-discipline which were necessary to slaves on a tobacco plantation. The Haitians have no part in the West other than as victims of brutal exploitation and then as welfare dependents of various Western states and charitable organizations. They don’t need the U.S. Marine Corps building roads and modern housing for them. They probably need help in increasing the output of their many small farms and crafts shops and they need that help in the form of simple technology they can sustain while moving into the future their own way, even if their way turns out to be a recreation of African tribal life in the middle of the western hemisphere.

Of all human beings, those who call themselves Christians should realize that not all parts of the Body of Christ are the same. The heart should not be trying to force the liver to pump blood. The power-plant engineer should not be trying to help the Amish blacksmith who’d suffered a fire by installing a modern, factory-built natural-gas forge and erecting a steel-framed building around it.

I write not so much to criticize Haiti aid efforts as to make the general point that we modern human beings haven’t yet come close to integrating modern understandings of our world into our ways of thinking. Now that we’re learning, or should be learning, about the complexities of evolution and development in this world, we have some who expand a critique against centralized, or top-down, control into an argument that we’re just so many social atoms and will never be anything different but at the loss of our individuality and we have others who plow forward to stimulate economies or to rebuild foreign countries as if they were constructing a 1880 textile-mill according to a blueprint which can be drawn on a single, large sheet of paper.

There is no such book as Civilization for Dummies though it’s what a modern man might hope to find if, that is, he were aware of the nature or even existence of such a complex entity as a ‘civilization’. In fact, modern man has decayed into that barbarian child foreseen by Jose Ortega Y Gasset, a barbaric child living in the midst of a great city from which his parents and other adults have disappeared. The city is simply his natural environment rather than a great work of past generations. Until recently, it has seemed as if there were plenty of material goods for having a good time and generally living well, but we can fear what the rapidly approaching future might hold for us. I wouldn’t predict an apocalypse but I might predict a century of darkness, ignorance, and poverty such as that which followed the High Middle Ages, fooling Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers into believing that the entire Middle Ages had so dark.

I believe it likely that Western Civilization will eventually revive for it has been quite resilient, surviving not only internal economic and political crises but also barbarian invasions and near-conquest by the Turkish or North African empires. Moreover, major changes in human views of their world were adopted and integrated into an enlarged and enriched Western intellectual structure. This resiliency and adaptability was largely provided by a balanced respect for the abstract and the concrete, for speculative and empirical knowledge, which was grounded upon the the Christian philosophy of moderate realism summarized by the American historian Carrol Quigley in these words: “The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” (See Ways of Thought in the Modern West.)

I’ll cut through a lot of complicated historical analysis and simply make the claim that books have played an essential role in Western Civilization because they allow us to take empirical data which is beyond the reach of any one mind and to abstract it into knowledge which can then be used in speculative efforts to attain greater understanding. Books allow the construction of complex networks of understanding of Creation which can then be disciplined to God’s revelations of His purposes as Creator. Books allow us to better explore and understand and properly use our world.

Nowadays, we of the West are increasingly illiterate. Even many of those in the shrinking pool of highly skilled readers don’t always have the attitudes of the literate. All things considered, many of our most highly educated citizens would no more choose to read a difficult book than would our citizens with only rudimentary reading skills. To be truly literate, you must have a great deal of respect for books and for bookish forms of knowledge. You must desire to entertain yourself and teach yourself in bookish ways. You must be as willing to exercise your visual and mental literary skills as a swimmer is to work his lungs and skeletal muscles. It’s not sufficient to have good reading skills to be deployed when necessary for immediate purposes. Those reading skills will have been lost just as a swimmer who doesn’t work out daily will soon lose his speed and endurance.

Real books, not books written for self-proclaimed dummies, are an ideal form for human beings to engage in a conversation over the centuries. That sort of sustained conversation is a running commentary upon human events, a commentary which forms a narrative too complex for any individual human mind to actually understand, though it’s understandable in principle to a human with a well-formed mind. Empirical knowledge from various sources can be bound together by speculation and the entire mess can be abstracted to a higher level which may well cut across cultures or even across phases of Creation.

It was the City of God and not some St. Augustine for Dummies which helped found Western Civilization. It was Shakespeare’s Henry V which gave voice to the English nation as truly such. A Cliff Notes version might be a useful study aid but it’s hard to imagine such stuff giving a strong sense of nationhood to a mob of Anglo-Normans and Saxons and Welshmen and Gaels and various and sundry other tribesmen.

The more complex a nation, and certainly a civilization enfolding multiple nations, the more complex the stories which bind the parts and the whole together. Inhabitants of a complex, well-ordered civilization need a correspondingly complex literacy that a correspondingly complex and well-ordered story, or set of stories, may be told and heard. We have particular problems in our age because our newer and richer understanding of the stuff of this world and how it acts and relates to other stuff is not going to be so easy to integrate into our thoughts as it was to integrate Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian physics nor is our current understanding of the origins and nature of the Bible going to be so easy to integrate as it was to integrate simpler views about Moses being literally the author of the Pentateuch which was seen as speaking literalistic truth about a variety of issues. It will also not be so easy to integrate our modern understanding of man as it was to integrate a simple view that man was created as a creature somehow endowed with something called a ‘mind’.

I’m oversimplifying, but, my point is that so many human beings, including many proclaimed as great thinkers, are convinced that man was given access to absolute truths about Creation and intellectual history was to be no more than filling in some details. We are instead confronted with a world which must be understood by shaping our own ways of thought to match with that sometimes disedifying reality, a reality which can’t be described by books which fit on the shelves of any one library.

The narrative of Creation I’m working on — though no one man or even generation could finish it — would consider our inherited knowledge from Jerusalem and Athens, our immense mountains of empirical knowledge, and plausible speculations which tie it all together so that it makes sense as stuff created by God and a story being told by God using that stuff. As I said above, this would be a very complex narrative, one certainly not reducible to any sort of Civilization for Dummies.

We had a vibrant civilization in the West when we had a substantial number of human beings in the West who had faith in the Biblical stories and some faith in the appropriate and tentative narratives told by their poets and philosophers and — more recently — their physicists and biologists and mathematicians. We have no such faith in the Bible, no narratives worthy of the vast accumulations of knowledge in our libraries and computers. Not surprisingly, we also have a decaying civilization. Despite the belief of some that science and other empirical fields of knowledge have somehow come to dominance over revealed knowledge and faith, I don’t even see evidence there are many scientists or historians who have a coherent view of science beyond the horizons of their own highly specialized fields. Not only has the center not held, the pieces have themselves fragmented.

I’ve claimed that the human mind is the sort of entity capable of encapsulating the world though an individual mind isn’t capable of fully understanding so much as a gnat. I’ve also quoted the historian Carroll Quigley about the nature of the traditional Christian philosophy of methodical realism:

The truth unfolds in time through a communal process,

or, equivalently,

The human mind forms in time through a communal process,

The individual human being who responds properly to God’s Creation has started to travel a path which leads to a state of Christ-like perfection, but he travels that path as a member of a greater organism, a community. We won’t reach perfection in this mortal life and it may be still more disturbing to some that we travel toward perfection as members of a rather unruly herd with some members having traits and behaviors which invite stronger descriptions than ‘imperfect’. And I’m not preaching any sort of salvation-for-all creed. So far as I can see, many traveling with this herd aren’t truly part of it and some stubbornly refuse to change, remaining what they were at the beginning of the journey. It’s hard for me to believe that those who refuse to respond in a courageous and faith-filled manner to God’s Creation could ever be happy in Heaven and I suspect that such human beings, many or few, having refused to allow God to lift them out of their natural state as human animals will simply die a final death appropriate to animals.

The others will change at most a tiny bit in this mortal realm. Perhaps we gain a little moral and spiritual maturity as we age but some of that, and maybe most, is the result of losing the youthful energy to misbehave. Perhaps we learn a little but it’s awfully hard to apply the lessons of experience during our lives and even major nations have trouble digesting the results of their own history. Few there are who can see the human condition in its greater scope as human nature develops somewhat, and our powers of narrating that development is blended in. Becoming moral individuals and moral communities is largely a matter of learning how to honestly narrate our past and to produce some sort of speculative narrative for our futures and to try to follow that narrative.

There are various Christian narratives but all have to see the same end to this mortal chapter of our story, a transition to the individual perfection of a Christ-like man and an entry into the community perfection which is the Body of Christ.

This is all well and good, at least as good as the typical Christian talk about some Heaven that remains beyond investigation, but why do I speak of the reality of any sort of perfection? Perfection seems not to be possible in this world except as a manner of speaking. This also doesn’t matter to Christians because analysis of modern empirical knowledge under the assumption that we inherit a Creation, a work of an all-powerful God, points to a more reasonable view of created being as multi-leveled. The dominant pagan view was that this world was shaped from some vague sort of being they could only describe as ‘chaos’ or something similar. They were far from entirely wrong.

Philo was an Alexandrian Jew born perhaps in the same year as Jesus of Nazareth. Philo read the book of Genesis in light of Plato’s speculative claim that the world was created from nothing by the God and Father of all — see Plato’s dialog, Timaeus. Christians accepted Philo’s reading at a time when Christian thought was being born. Since then, the tradition has been to read the first chapters of Genesis as if it were a story of a creation from nothingness. In fact, the word translated as ‘create’ has a meaning akin to cleave in the sense of separate. The interested reader can look up Genesis 1 Through the Ages by Stanley Jaki, the Benedictine priest and polymath scholar who died in 2009.

The pagan idea wasn’t wrong so much as it was incomplete. This world was shaped from some form of created being which is strange to our thing-based ways of thought. I’m not speaking of mystical ideas but rather those of modern mathematical physics, specifically the narratives of the birth of this universe in the events inaccurately labeled the ‘Big Bang’. As we move backwards in time towards those early fractions of a second of this expanding universe, our best scientific theories speak of particular forms of matter and energy melting into a more general form of matter-energy which is a more abstract level or phase of created being. The God of Jesus Christ did create contingent being from nothing but we can’t see that creation. There might be multiple phases of being on the other side of that so-called Big Bang.

In my proposed narrative of Creation, to be filled in a little better in an upcoming series of books, the level of created being “just on the other side of the Big Bang” is the space of states of being which Roger Penrose and other mathematicians or physicists have described in terms of ‘possible universes’. Our universe is a highly particular one, a universe which seems to have nearly 0 probability of existing relative to all the set of possibilities which is that space.

As I see matters, that space of possible universes contains also that which is the world of the resurrected, the perfect and non-decaying universe from that space of possible universes which God chose to create. I could be wrong and we might have to go back several phases of God’s shaping of the raw stuff of Creation before we get to the level where He ‘restarts’ in His creation of that perfect world of the resurrected. For now, the main point I wish to make is that it’s possible for Christian thinkers to integrate modern empirical knowledge into our views of this world as being a part or phase or level or whatever of a Creation, a work of an all-powerful God who alone can create from nothingness. He created some strange stuff from nothingness, shaped this world from it, and shaped us inside this world as characters in a story He’s telling. There is every reason to believe that a Creator can create a perfect world and resurrect us, re-create us, inside that world as perfected men.

I’ve not yet completed the development of the worldview which presents perfected men (resurrected into a Christ-like or ’spiritual’ state of embodiment) and a perfected world (Heaven) as events in the entirety of the same Creation in which this moral realm exists. If I had, it would prove eventually to be as tentative and as contextually bound as the worldviews produced by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. It’s also true that the very richness of modern empirical knowledge will force an equally rich understanding of God’s Creation and I don’t know that it will be possible to create a philosophical or theological system of the traditional sort. We may need to produce an open-ended narrative understanding that grows with new developments in God’s story — and some sorts of developments seem to be happening awfully fast now that man is doing so much to invent powerful technologies and to explore physical and abstract levels of created being.

I’ve written about most of these ideas before but I have two reasons for writing again about this general issue and at this time. First of all, I’m trying to keep working on better statements and enrichments of my thoughts as already developed. I might well discover I have to reformulate some of my thoughts or might even hit on a new insight or two. In addition, I’d like to point towards a great error in the thought of modern historians and political scientists, an error which is most culpable in Christian thinkers and those non-Christians who should understand the Christian viewpoint.

So-called traditionalists and conservatives will often deny that real progress can occur in this world. This is a valid viewpoint for a pagan thinker but not a Christian. A Christian has to believe that progress is possible, at least in principle. The individual man can, at least in principle, develop towards a Christ-like state. The entire race, even including those men who will not be resurrected into Heaven, can develop towards the state we call the Body of Christ. We can’t achieve such a state of perfection, even in principle, in a world where decay is a fact. This is the place to point out that decay, increasing entropy, isn’t a law but rather a direct world of God’s choice to produce a world particular in certain ways — the world has been advancing towards a more probable state since then. This particular advance results in an increase of entropy. In other words, ‘increasing entropy’ isn’t a fundamental property of matter and energy but rather a result of the universe starting out in a very specific state, specific in a sense still being explored by scientists.

As a summary of sorts, I’ll note it remains true to a Christian thinker that:

Grace completes nature and doesn’t destroy it to replace it with something else.

If what we are is the rough beginnings of a completed man — that is, one perfected to a Christ-like state, then a healthy moral imagination can imagine moving towards that perfected state. The principle is established that what we are can be perfected into a Christ-like state. A similar though more convoluted statement can be made about human communities, families and political communities and economic communities and the Church, being rough — in fact, fragmented — beginnings of the Body of Christ.

Those who’ve read some of the writings on my blogs, Acts of Being and To See a World in a Grain of Sand, will likely realize I’ve been dealing with this project of creating a worldview on a somewhat disorganized basis, that is, I was writing as ideas came to me, sometimes addressing a few moral issues, than a theological belief, then a modern understanding of a basic mathematical or physical entity — such as ‘random number’ or ‘universe’. My store of ideas is now large enough to move on to an effort to write a more systematic work which will start with a summary volume and then will move on to a more detailed discussion of created being in its various levels along the spectrum from abstractness to concreteness. Along that path, I’ll deal with some theological issues since divine being, God who is His own Act-of-being, is the source of created being in both its abstract phases or levels and its concrete phases or levels. As Aquinas pointed out, we learn God’s wisdom by studying His creatures. (I understand ‘wisdom’ in this context as something like perfect knowledge, but that’s another issue.)

For now, I’m playing around with some ideas about created reality at the narrative level, the level where created being is shaped to fulfill some purposes — need I write “moral purposes”? — of the Creator. Within that narrative, men form political communities. Remembering that human nature evolved at the species level over billions of years and that a particular human nature (human being) develops over the course of his life, we have to ask how human relationships could be any different. Human relationships must also evolve at some ’species’ level and develop in their individual instances, including those often complex and multi-layered relationships which are ‘political’.

How is it that Plato or Aristotle or Hobbes or Rousseau or Marx could tell us how we should organize our political relationships when those are actions and aspects of human beings who are creature of a developing world of empirical processes? I don’t wish to attack either pre-modern thinkers nor even those who did their work when the modern enterprises of gathering empirical knowledge were well under way. I do wish to encourage a different attitude towards our efforts to understand political or other aspects of human nature. Likely it is that the evolutionary tree of political species is highly complex if less so than the evolutionary tree of life on earth. Likely it is that there are more such political species than there are recognized nations. Likely it is that new species will come into existence as we move forward. Likely it is that species of political systems are parts of complex environments and can’t even be understood apart from those environments. Likely it is that the work has hardly begun on understanding the branches and nodes on that tree of political species.

Let me be true to character. I’ll digress…

The human mind as we know it seems to have come into being in relatively recent times. In the creation of Judaism as a coherent monotheism, the creation of Hinduism as a coherent philosophical polytheism, and the creation of Greek philosophical/scientific thought — all in the sixth century BC or so, we see the first clear signs of human abstract reasoning. As the human mind developed, human civilization became more complex. Prior to the development of higher-level abstract reasoning, the technologies of earlier civilizations, such as the development of building techniques in Egypt, seem to have followed ad-hoc experimental pathways and weren’t organized by theory. Apparently, the pyramids were built to proportions corresponding to ‘mystical’ numbers because earlier pyramids were built to greater heights relative to the lengths of the bases and those pyramids collapsed, killing workers and supervisors alike. As biological evolution is said to operate by blind experimentation of a sort, so early human technology operated by experimentation with poor vision. Now, we can see more clearly, but I’ll note that truly new technology — such as quantum computing devices — still must be developed in part by clear-sighted analysis of half-blind experimentation. The world is not a tinker toy device and we must acquire empirical knowledge by experience of some sort.

We’re told by some great thinkers of earlier centuries that governments are monarchies or oligarchies or aristocracies or democracies. Those thinkers lived early in the development of the human mind and also early in the exploration of possible forms of political organization. Why would we think that men barely in the childhood of human abstract thought, such as Aristotle, could provide us with a complete catalog of political possibilities? Why would we think such a catalog could exist since many human social and economic possibilities had not yet appeared. Why would we think that our belief in such an existing catalog would do aught but trap us in ruts? It seems to me that any effort to discuss the current political mess of the United States in those terms of monarchies and oligarchies and aristocracies and democracies is akin to discussing the nature of elephants in terms of tree-trunks and snakes and ropes.

But preliminary and simplistic ideas were necessary in physics and in political thought as well. Physicists moved on to shape their theories to understandings of created being which were themselves shaped by established theories or known holes in established theories, all founded ultimately upon various sorts of empirical knowledge including the so-called intuitions encoded in our brains by evolutionary processes. Political scientists and philosophers, those who deal with human nature in any of its aspects, need to pull off a more difficult project since human political organizations aren’t mathematical objects but rather real-world entities which come into being by the actions of the same creatures who study them.

Most political thinkers of past centuries wrote as if they had some sort of mystical access to a realm of absolute truth. On the other hand, some political thinkers of recent centuries, have seen the dangers of systematizing done badly or too early and seem to have rejected — perhaps implicitly — the possibility that theory can be properly shaped to the empirical reality of even a narrative of morally ordered or disordered events. I say this acknowledging that a proper political theory or historical theory may not look to be such if one thinks in terms of ideal structures inhabited by men and women who follow faithfully the rules set down by political philosophers. A more proper theory might have a narrative structure abstracted from the particular narratives of human history. Is that a theory as we currently understand it? Was the story of Adam and Eve perhaps an early version of this sort of narrative theory? In my opinion, that story speaks of an awakening of moral self-awareness, but in a highly abstract way that is sometimes classified as mythical, perhaps because we can only classify early attempts to produce abstract narratives as standard myths. In other words, the story of Adam and Eve might well have been a very conscious literary construction similar to the narratives found in the writings of Plato or even Nietzsche.

In my way of looking at things, traditional thinkers were struggling to develop more powerful conceptual tools but their thought wasn’t rich enough to handle the real world for a simple reason I’ll be mentioning often as I move on to various writings: God, our Creator and Lord, has a richer imagination than men, certainly a richer imagination than the apish men who were our ancestors. We have to learn the results of God’s thought by studying His Creation. Even when the implications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity were played out by both mathematical development and empirical discoveries, the human mind had to stretch greatly to encapsulate those aspects of this universe. When quantum theory was being first developed, the most open-minded and creative of physicists could hardly believe what they were discovering. Could the greatest of ancient historians or poets have believed that mankind would one day number in the billions, that a man would step on the moon, that old age would be pushed back to the eigth or ninth decade of life?

Let me repeat a speculation I’ve developed over the past few years and stated in my most recent posting, Theology, Physics, Philosophy, and Politics as follows:

1. The components of thing-like being arise by local processes which allow the possibility of some substantial freedom.

2. In this world, certain patterns exist at a global level, including the fundamental structure of space-time. Local entities will respond to those global aspects of this world as they — so to speak — grow up into the world. The local entities will change themselves to somewhat encapsulate what they respond to. Over time, some entities will achieve some sort of success by a combination of proper responses and luck. Other entities will fail. Over time, complex environments will also develop.

It seems to me that all forms of thing-like being in its various and sundry aspects should follow this abstraction. We should be able to develop in political thought (social and moral thought in general) conceptual tools which follow this model as do some of the conceptual tools of physics. We should be able to develop a set of theories and discover a body of empirical knowledge (or reorganize existing knowledge) so to make use of this model of thing-like being in this universe. As quantum mechanics deals with the domain of things arising from processes with substantial freedom and general relativity deals with the domain of larger-scale structures, so we need to be clearer about theories of human nature, including theories dealing with man’s political activities (the realm of freedom) and his political organizations (the realm of contraints imposed by large-scale structures). The unity of this world comes from those larger-scale structures, the shape given to space and time by gravity, just as unity of the human race comes from the larger-scale structure of the Body of Christ shaped to conform to its Head, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Political science and political philosophy should follow physics not in adopting specific types of mathematical analysis but in engaging in both exploration of empirical reality at the emerging thing-like level and at the structure level to which the things must form themselves by response. That formation by response will take place over generations in a way analogous to biological evolution. We should not assume that we have a catalog of either individual human actions or human political organizations (or more generally — any human community). We must act and we must study and contemplate our own actions if we are to understand human nature. We must have hope in the future and faith in God while still realizing that we can’t achieve a perfect polity, or any other sort of perfect human community, because new forms of community do arise in history and these give rise to new possibilities which might well be proper parts of the Body of Christ which is the perfect human community.

Once the thought of Plato and Aristotle had a home — the Greek city-state. Once the thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas had a home — Western Civilization. The two situations were different because the Greek philosophers struggled to find the best way to inhabit a home built by their predecessors while the Christian Fathers and their successors built a home for Western Christianity. In both cases, there was a rooting of philosophical form in the social and political context and a weaker tie between philosophical substance and that same context — this is to say that all human thought has such a context but may also contain truths from a level of abstraction above that context. We understand Creation as best we can in each generation and such general understandings affect the way we perceive and think about the most human of efforts which are, after all, directed to some purpose in our world as we understand it.

In recent centuries, in the United States in particular, we’ve lived in the house while treating it as the most natural and most permanent of structures. As if we were children not knowing what our grandparents and parents had done to make our home and to put bread on the table, we accepted a warm bed as something natural and to be expected, we came to the dinner-table with no real understanding of our need to be grateful for what had been done for us, we had no need to focus our thoughts and our playtime upon our duty to someday take care of the house and to fill the pantry. Lord knows we had little reason to believe that the electrical wires and water pipes were anything but part of the natural world. When homeowners think and act this way, they’ll awake ten years into their ownership to find themselves with inadequate wiring, badly corroded water-pipes, siding that needs a lot of repairs at once, and so forth. In an extreme case, the house might need to be torn down and rebuilt from foundation up. And suppose the foundation itself has decayed? And what to do when the breadwinner realizes he has not the skills or the tools to do any such thing — the bank accounts inherited from Daddy and Grandma are emptied and that nice, soft office-job has disappeared.

To a Christian, that metaphoric house is a mixed mess of sorts, containing the altars attended by the priests who serve the imperfect Body of Christ — the Church however defined — and also containing the workrooms and kitchens attended by farmers and merchants and politicians who serve the imperfect Body of Christ — the secular kingdoms and marketplaces of mankind. I’ll not even try to develop that metaphor properly at this time because a muddle is likely to result, but the point is that, to a Christian, the ecclesiastical and political realms are both part of the Body of Christ and neither has complete dominance over the other though they each have some rightful authority over the other. I’ll skip those problems for now and maybe for the entirety of my life.

The home built by much earlier generations of Western Christians and left to us has decayed so badly that substantial new construction is necessary. Christians, who failed to enrich and maintain their culture, have only themselves to blame but they’re plenty ready to blame others. Far too many Christians have taken to berating the pagans for not maintaining the Christian Civilization of the West. If your plumbing started to leak in the shower, under the kitchen sink, at the outdoor spigot, would you blame your neighbor for not taking proper care of your house? Yet, when our children talk in barbaric jargon or blast out rap music, we do blame schools and movie producers and all the others who perhaps were most guilty of filling a vacuum left by the sorry descendants of Dante and Fra Angelica and Rembrandt and Milton, the vacuum sustained against the occasional efforts of a Graham Greene or a Flannery O’Connor to bring a sophisticated Christian sensibility to the modern world. Jacques Barzun said it truly in the title to a collection of his essays: The Culture We Deserve. I could add: The Politics We Deserve, The Science We Deserve, The Sports We Deserve, and so forth, but I’m sure Professor Barzun was considering all of those in his more general title.

I’ll move on and produce at least some general ideas about a plausible Christian civilization which we could build using the vast resources available in the modern world, resources that Christian thinkers seem to think part only of some anti-Christian realm. For example, as I noted a number of times, those bones dug out of the sands of Africa weren’t planted there by demons from Hell, they were left by creatures who were part of a complex story. A later part of that story involves chapters on Babylon and Egypt, the Roman Empire and the succeeding Germanic empires, the accidental development of somewhat universal suffrage in the Anglo-American territories and the ongoing loss of much that was gained by those accidental developments as mediated by the best sorts of opportunists (such as George Washington and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson). Is it possible the West has decayed so badly because our human world became more complex in synch with our more complex understanding of our greater world and we didn’t learn the requisite lessons?

There are a number of aspects to this situation we and our ancestors have allowed to develop by our passiveness caused by lack of courage and by lack of faith in God as Creator. This is the sin of sloth in Medieval Christian thought. More than just pointing this out, I wish to raise a larger point: at each stage of history, serious thinkers can make interesting and important contributions to our understanding of Creation, but a failure to move on will leave even the valid insights intertwined with errors. In the case of moral nature, spectrums of behaviors were split into categories of vices and virtues which were themselves treated as the basic building blocks of human moral nature. The insights of Medieval thinkers can be lost because it’s not so easy to reconcile systems of vices and virtues to the realities of the embodied human being as described by modern biology.

I’ll propose a model of important aspects of this world, a model which is far from original in its pieces, but I’m aiming at a more complete worldview which covers human politics as well as theology, physics, and philosophy. At some level of abstraction, being is unified, so I can claim:

1. The components of thing-like being arise by local processes which allow the possibility of some substantial freedom.

2. In this world, certain patterns exist at a global level, including the fundamental structure of space-time. Local entities will respond to those global aspects of this world as they — so to speak — grow up into the world. The local entities will change themselves to somewhat encapsulate what they respond to. Over time, some entities will achieve some sort of success by a combination of proper responses and luck. Other entities will fail. Over time, complex environments will also develop.

I’m trying to reach a proper level of abstraction so that I can speak of the evolution of both galaxies and gorillas and I’m trying to do it in a way that allows a coherent discussion of moral freedom — which of course leads to social and political issues. My preferred, and admittedly sparse — for now — understanding of the aspects of reality described by modern physics is a slight variation on the view expressed above:

1. Locally, we have the components of things coming into being by processes described by quantum mechanics (speaking simply for summary purposes).

2. Globally, we have the structures, space-time at the least, which force those components to respond in ways that produce simple and complex things.

As creatures of a world which is the free-will creation of an all-powerful God (theology), a world which has some fundamental aspects explorable and describable by empirical knowledge-gathering efforts of men, a world which is understandable in a quite contingent and time-bound manner by speculative thought, we would be doing well to shape our minds to encompass what we know of the Creator and His Creation and we would be doing well to also shape our ways of organizing our communities to those same two bodies of knowledge, of God in His transcendent and necessary Being and of His freely chosen acts as Creator — to see my understanding of human knowledge, download Four Kinds of Knowledge where I explain why there are really only two kinds of knowledge.

How can I make such a claim about politics, a realm of human moral action, of human freedom? How can I claim that politics is somehow deeply tied to astrophysics? What is the sort of politics implied by my understanding of Creation?

Let me first state my claim in the form of a description of biological evolution:

1. Organisms arise by way of somatic and genetic inheritance and, in a manner of speaking propose responses to the demands of their environments. Failures occur due to luck or inadequacy of the proposal. The form of success which counts most in biological terms is to have lots of descendants, that is, those who carry your genes and not necessarily those who resulted from your own acts of reproduction.

2. Over time, family lines of organisms are shaped to the realities of a particular locality and also to the larger-scale realities of the world . Social mammals have added new levels of complexity by developing what might be called cultures, so that new responses to environments arise through community behaviors. Human beings have developed very complex cultures supplemented by technology. These advances also lead to new ways to fail.

We speak of self-organizing systems in the modern world but we should remember that a system developing from below will reach some sort of stability only by properly responding to the local environments, including the locally manifested structures of space-time in our world. Christians can place this sort of understanding in a greater context by way of an explicit recognition that we, our minds and our social relationships, are best shaped in response to the Creator’s will as given in Holy Scripture and in Creation itself including our own bodies and our natural forms of interacting with our fellow humans, with other creatures, and with the non-living parts of Creation.

Such a general principle gives us little help in structuring a government, or a way of choosing leaders, but perhaps at least helps us to filter out wrongful forms of government and might help us to eliminate leaders who fail to properly respond to Creator and Creation. This is what we should expect if the world is as I claim it to be, at least from the viewpoint of a developing creature. We freely seek what is proper but we know if it truly is proper only when we test it in our environments or against what we know of the world. All existing complex entities or communities in an evolutionary world are the result of a number of generations of experience and responses, indicating the need for a proper conservatism recognizing the value of that embodied experience. At the same time, a system which is the product of any sort of historical development, Anglo-American court systems or the great white shark, needs to be open to further development when its responses are no longer proper to its situation. Experimentation can be as important as adherence to tradition. I speak known truths, but my goal is to speak them in a way that allows human politics, in fact, all of human social and moral interaction to be discussed in terms of the created being as we know it from the best of modern knowledge.

Let me raise the political question which is primary from a Christian viewpoint: Why did the Lord Jesus Christ accept humiliation, torture, and death rather than use His divine power to conquer those who opposed Him? The first general answer I’ll propose is that God’s ultimate power is that of the supreme Act-of-being, He who is His own Act-of-being. This is to say, He is the source of all being, His own Being as well as that of every creature. He worked to create in the beginning and He’s working still. He’s not a Jovian god who conquers a creation which is possibly co-eternal with him, but rather the God of Jesus Christ who creates and sustains from a fundamental level of being which we can’t even directly perceive though 2500 years of intellectual struggle from the pre-Socratics to now have allowed us to deal with such abstractions.

I’ll return to the question:

Why did the Lord Jesus Christ accept humiliation, torture, and death rather than use His divine power to conquer those who opposed Him?

Rather than using His power to conquer the Romans, the Lord Jesus laid down His life and then picked it up again. Having learned obedience through His suffering in human flesh, Christ reached perfection in His resurrected human body by responding freely to Creation and Creator. This is a bit strange to human perceptions since He was responding to His own Creation. He was creature, recipient of the divine gift of existence, and also Creator, giver of existence. He had created the possibility of creaturely perfection and then He achieved it.

The ultimate power is the power over being, a power denied to creatures. We must accept the world as God gives it to us but we have some freedom to participate in the creation of new things — that is, things that can be made from components already created by God. We have a little bit more freedom to shape ourselves and the things around us in response to the world as it truly is. If we fail to do so, those new things will fall out of existence or else revert to some form more consistent with this world. If we try to bring into being some things or some new relationships between men which can’t be generated from the basic stuff of this world, then those things or relationships will fail to come into being for even the shortest of times. If we fail to shape new things to the higher structures of this world, then they will fall out of existence. This will be true also of things that need to change in response to our dynamic world or to man’s deeper understanding of this world. If we fail to change our social or political structures, or even our own thoughts, then alienation sets in and can work to destroy what exists without being true to the world.

The view of politics I’ve advanced in a very tentative form in this article is but a baby-step towards that important goal of achieving a unified understanding of created being, a goal I’ve argued for in various writings including that book I’ve made available for free download: Four Kinds of Knowledge.

In 2008, I put samples of three novels on this website for free download. I’ve now made the entire manuscript of The Hermit of Turkey Hill available for personal use. This novel is based loosely upon events that happened when my grandfather, Charlie Milroy, was Chief of Police in Ludlow, MA. Those events closed out around 1938 or so.

This book is under a somewhat restrictive Creative Commons license which is included with the manuscript. See Unpublished Novels for a description and for the link.

We do need to pass by those limitations of scientific materialism and to do it without falling into the temptation of dualisms which invoke hand-waving to explain immaterial phenomena. My very working method, as well as my respect for the totality of human experience and human knowledge, rejects any possibility of scientific materialism or reductionistic materialism as I’ve sometimes referred to that attitude. Dualism of created being fragments Creation while scientific materialism or reductionistic materialism denies meaning, and even ulimate reality, to our experiences.

I’ve started reading Alfred North Whiteheads Science and the Modern World, a copy of which I bought 20 years ago or so in a used-book store. I’m nearly a century late in seeing the need to pass beyond scientific materialism. Whitehead seems to have taught that the greatest philosophical need of our era is a metaphysics to replace the irrational metaphysics of scientific materialism. He considered the irrationality of this mostly implicit metaphysics of the modern era to be tied to the belief that matter has a permanence and simple location, largely the view defended by Einstein in his debate with Niels Bohr — see Einstein and Bohr: Don’t Tell God what to do. for a short discussion of Bohrs insightful (but possibly apocryphal) response to Einstein’s claim: “God does not play dice”. The prior article on Acts of Being, The Metaphysics of Position, Momentum, and Missed Field-goals is a short discussion more directly in line with Whitehead’s criticism of a physics based upon the permanence and simple location of matter. The interested reader can also read A Christian’s view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s Debate on the meaning of reality for my discussion, and acceptance, of the understanding of that debate reached by the German philosopher Kurt Hubner.

I don’t claim to fully understand Whitehead’s proposal but it’s similar in some ways to my metaphysics, Thomistic existentialism which recognizes explicitly the primacy of relationships over matter and which is updated to consider modern empirical knowledge. To the extent I understand Whitehead’s tentative sketch of a more rational metaphysics than scientific materialism, I can say he was proposing an organistic view of all physical reality, proposing that evolution is a real and fundamental part of reality. Its not just a process occurring in life-forms which are just an accident occurring in a scientifically materialistic world. Whitehead proposed a metaphysics which was not only organistic but also event-based, resulting in what I would call a “smearing over time and space.” It seems to be a proposal that our world is something like a narrative, as I’ve proposed, but my metaphysics is multi-layered, allowing for the contingency of space-time itself. This world is a narrative but is shaped from the abstract being of what I call the Primordial Universe, allowing for a great freedom in the sorts of universes which could have come into being and also somewhat forcing the need for decisions in such matters. That is, my metaphysics works best when we admit the existence of a personal God and also gives Him the absolute freedom which only the Almighty could possess or use.

Whitehead strongly desired to protect the independence of metaphysics from theology:

What is the status of the enduring stability of the order of nature? There is the summary answer, which refers nature to some greater reality standing behind it. This reality occurs in the history of thought under many names, The Absolute, Brahma, The Order of Heaven, God. The delineation of final metaphysical inputs is no part of this lecture. My point is that any summary conclusion jumping from our conviction of the existence of such an order of nature to the easy assumption that there is an ultimate reality which, in some unexplained way, is to be appealed to for the removal of perplexity, constitutes the great refusal of rationality to assert its rights. We have to search whether nature does not in its very being show itself as self-explanatory. [page 92 of Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead, The Free Press, 1967.]

I have more than a little sympathy for a program to explore and try to understand the world accessible to human perceptions or human thought before invoking a faith in a transcendent Being, but even the most rational of atheists must honestly confront a very difficult question: How do we explain the aspects of our world which can be described as contingent, particular, or random? That is, how do we explain the factual nature of created being, at least of concrete being? See Randomness as a Sign of God’s Presence for my take on the meaning of randomness and the reasons I can claim:

There’s a simple summary of the situation:

Only God can make a truly random number.

And again:

Only God can act in a truly random way.

Whitehead doesn’t seem so concerned with dualisms as I am, perhaps because of his desire to keep theology and metaphysics apart — though I don’t know if he even considered theology to be a legitimate field of study. He certainly had respect for the Medieval Scholastics who didn’t always differentiate so clearly between theology and metaphysics. I share that respect, as well as his belief that those Medieval thinkers were overly rationalistic. Whitehead also gave the Lowell Lectures which are the matter of Science and the Modern World in 1925 before Godel and Kolmogorov and Chaitin and others, such as Stephen Toulmin, anticipated the factual nature of randomness. In a critique of evolutionary theory, early 1960s, the philosopher Toulmin noted that whenever an evolutionary thinker speaks of randomness you could substitute some complicated phrase about the interaction of 2 or more fully deterministic and independent systems, such as the genes of a family line and the environment(s) of that line. I think that modern science, mathematics and the evolutionary work in various physical sciences, forces us to deal with the factual nature of the universe, the particularistic or random nature. And it leads me to speculate that a proper metaphysical analysis of modern empirical knowledge, including abstract mathematics, forces us to conjecture that “ultimate reality” which Whitehead preferred to avoid in his program for a new metaphysics.

Still, Whitehead seems to have had the same general program in mind as I have, with that major difference about the relationship between theology and metaphysics and, in fact, I would put all human knowledge into a single worldview in which metaphysics plays the role of glue, along with abstract mathematics. He shared my concerns about scientific materialism but also shares my respect for science. I find it interesting that, nearly a century ago, he saw a need to move beyond scientific materialism and, so far as I can see, little has been done to carry out such a program.

It seems to be hard to say in what sense a truth can exist apart from a context, even one so seemingly clear as “1 + 1 = 2″ or “Two contradictory statements cannot both be true.” Think of it in terms of works such as Whitehead and Russell’s “Principia Mathematica” which attempted to ground our ‘intuitions’ about arithmetic upon an elaborate formal apparatus. In order to build that apparatus a large amount of sophisticated mathematical thought is already assumed. This doesn’t mean that such works are useless — they can be at least consistency checks — but it does mean such works don’t provide a foundation for our belief that “1 + 1 = 2.” One way to see this is to think about a point raised by, I believe, Wittgenstein — The logical structures that was first believed to justify our beliefs in arithmetic are indexed by numbers and the indexing process assumes the very truths meant to be justified.

It seems more likely that our mathematical systems are the result of bootstrapping operations which have sometimes moved slowly and have sometimes involved jumps to new plateaus especially during the explosion of mathematical thought which began with Leibniz and Newton and, maybe, hasn’t yet ended. After some digestion of the these major jumps, and perhaps at times when smaller jumps have accumulated, mathematicians have reformulated human understanding of what mathematics is and what formal truths are. This is not to deny the large amount of exploration which can be done on each plateau once a formal understanding has been accepted, but I’m not setting out to produce a serious work of the history of mathematical thought. I’m raising a very large claim:

Individual truths, as creatures can know them, are true only in context of the entirety of Creation, though our view of that entirety is necessarily time-bound and contingent.

Or at least: those individual truths need a context, but the context has to be greater the greater or more abstract the individual truth. Absolute truths have to be a plausible part of a narrative understanding of Creation. Plato and Aristotle produced a narrative of sorts for higher pagan thought but they didn’t do it in a self-conscious manner as did Augustine when he produced, in The Confessions and The City of God, a well-organized narrative for a system combining Christian theological beliefs and Neoplatonic metaphysics. St. Thomas Aquinas also produced such a narrative in which the metaphysical aspects were dogmatically deformed by his alleged followers despite his clear teaching of the need to shape our minds in response to our environments. This will force us into intellectual developmental processes which involve bootstrapping.

I’m trying to produce a very explicit, but very sketchy, narrative of Creation. I’m a child of an age of some substantial historical awareness, an awareness that cuts across true (human) history, our understandings of the evolution of life, our understandings of the development of this expansionary phase of our universe, etc.

As our understanding of all these narratives has become more sophisticated, we’ve found ourselves facing a conundrum of sorts. Under my claim that truths are contextual, we can say the ancient Greeks could understand the elementary truths of arithmetic in light of arithmetic itself along with their understanding of geometry, physics, and some sort of Platonic-Aristotelian understanding of the human mind. Now arithmetic can only be truly understood as part of a whole that includes transfinite set theory, modern logic, quantum physics and all that, more modern understandings of the human mind, etc. We can now see the world as a far more complex story, more complex in its plot but also in its material stuff and its characters. Even simple truths are part of a not so simple whole.

I believe that Wittgenstein said something of this sort: the search for the foundations of our universe may well reveal that the foundations are supported by the superstructure. This is in the same spirit as my claim.

Human knowledge is embodied knowledge, embodied in the relationships of brain-cells to one another and groups of brain-cells to one another as well as being embodied in the habits of our muscles and peripheral nerves and also in our clothing and our houses and our tools and machines, in our ways of making our livings and of governing ourselves or being governed, in our ways of worshiping God and paying respect to human excellence. A fuller description would take a large book without even attempting to speak of particular realizations in concrete human beings and their communities, though it’s actually a multitude of particular realizations which allow us to abstract properly to a wider view of human possibilities. Even when it comes to our own efforts to improve our practices and artifacts, we don’t know much about human possibilities until we study what we’ve done and what others have done.

Much of our knowledge is embodied in the form of communities and their practices and attitudes, within political or economic marketplaces and within the parts of our lives we live in our smaller and more private communities. Our community relationships include the ways in which we entertain ourselves, the ways in which we sing or tell stories. They include our ways of raising children or caring for the elderly in our families or in our larger-scale communities. Certainly, a human being or a human community can be the very embodiment of falsehoods which can even be held strongly in the face of conflicting evidence from reality. A human being or a human community will necessarily be an incomplete or insufficiently rich embodiment of Creation since we’re finite beings exploring God’s manifested thoughts, but even the simplest of human beings is a character in a complex group of overlapping and overlaying stories.

I’ve rejected the modern separation of the knowledge of concrete and abstract realms and I’m trying to follow some of the implications. In a sense, I’ve returned to the ancient view in which “to know your wife” is to be physically intimate with her. Knowledge of your wife is inseparable from marital relationships. Take this not as an argument that marital, or other human relationships, are purely physical in a reductionistic sense but rather a denial that there is a dualism between concrete being and abstractions. The purest of loves is driven by hormonal flows, even maternal love is painfully intensified by the flows of hormones as a newborn is put to the breast of her mother. Concrete being is particularized but is shaped from abstract being which I regard as manifested truths. Concrete and abstract stuff is a manifestation of thoughts of God. Much of concrete being can be understood, at a first shot, as the thoughts of God as story-teller while the abstract being can be understood as the thoughts of God as mathematician and physicist, as chemist and biologist, but as a Creator not as a student of what already exists.

Human knowledge is the result of human explorations of being in its concrete and abstract forms and the struggles to make sense of it. It is our approximations to the thoughts of God. We human beings were given the gift of a freedom to shape our thoughts to encapsulate God’s revelations, those which He manifested in Creation and also the few revelations about His transcendent Being. That freedom also extends to the shaping of the human parts of the world, the parts of the world which can be labeled ‘non-human’ over which we exercise proper and improper forms of stewardship as well as the ‘human’ parts such as human political and economic structures. We can embody not only tentative knowledge which will eventually be proven wrong or prove to be in need of enrichment of some sort, we can even embody inconsistent knowledge. It might be an effort to combine two incompatible ways of thought or to justify an incompatibility between a way of thought and a way of living. An example which has elements of all of the above might be seen in the case of those Christians who claim to accept some form of evolutionary theory, man evolved from a more primitive sort of ape, and then also claim to accept an interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve as being a fall from a state of grace — presumably something like a state of spiritual and moral purity. We rise as physical beings but started high and fell as spiritual and moral beings — not very plausible.

Currently, the political and social and moral discourse of modern Americans and most other human beings — in fact, discourse in all matters important, is at the level of sulking 8 year-olds speaking, and often yelling, at each other from the safety of their own poorly formed minds. This is partly a reflection of the low moral and intellectual caliber of those who dominate the public marketplaces of ideas in an age of decadent barbarism but it’s also a reflection of the state of human knowledge at the level of our entire race. If we try to see human knowledge as some sort of coherent whole, we are most likely to fail, for we’ve fragmented our knowledge, composing a discordant polyphony made up in many of its parts of screeches and howls and the random noises of mechanized human communities without a moral purpose and without a sense of beauty or truth, without a sense of the truth and beauty embodied in God’s Creation, in the stars and mountains, in the equations which describe certain aspects of those stars and mountains and the interrelationships of those creatures with the rest of Creation, in a Bach cantata or a Gaelic air, in a two year-old girl who’s such a remarkable mix of grace and clumsiness. We see the clumsiness and the incompleteness often enough ugly in a brutal way and we interpret it as a variety of oppositions between mere matter and higher entities, between the practical and the ideal, between God and Satan, failing to see the world as a story being told by an all-powerful and all-loving God.

Knowledge is embodied because we are creatures of a particular and concrete universe. What we can know truly is embodied, even the most abstract of mathematical truths are drawn from particular relationships within this world of embodiment. The processes of human knowledge-making involve eyes and hands, feet and hearts, brains most of all. Human knowledge isn’t true knowledge as much as it’s a dynamic movement towards true knowledge so long as we respond honestly and courageously to God’s Creation. Truth is embodied and so is beauty, however much they are also incomplete and dynamically developing towards the truths and beauties which are the end result of the story which God is telling in this concrete world. (Progress within this mortal world is clearly not guaranteed but seems to be real on a large enough scale.) If there was a fall, it came as God Himself shaped unblemished abstraction into concrete and bleeding forms of being which He uses to tell a story in which we play a part, as do the stars and flu viruses and giant squids, but this is a fall with a moral purpose of creating a world which is really a story in which the main event is the self-sacrifice of the Son of God as an act of pure love for His Father, an event in which we play a subsidiary role but one in which we gain a chance for a share in divinity.

If there’s a fall in which man played a direct role, it’s an ongoing fall consisting of man’s indulgence in the human temptation to separate being into components which are at odds with each other. Matter vs. spirit. Brain vs. mind. Body vs. soul. The practical vs. the ideal.

We’re at a crisis point now, where the dominant country, the United States, seems to be actively opposed to reality, despising the embodied beauty and truth of God’s Creation as not being good enough for us Americans and any others decent enough to be like us. It’s been said that the United States is the first country to move directly from barbarism to decadence without passing through a state of civilization. I’d claim that Americans bypassed the state of civilization because, led by those such as Emerson who thought to create ideals more wonderful than what is embodied in this Creation, we decided to try to implement our so-called ideals rather than to study reality and to try to do better within that reality. Hermann Melville thought Emersonian thought to be a spiritualized materialism and feared many, perhaps most, Americans shared this morally diseased outlook of Emerson and Thoreau. Melville was close. Far too many Americans are deeply diseased in this way including nearly all of our political and intellectual and religious leaders going back to at least the leaders of the New England Colonies during the King Phillip’s War — see The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding for a discussion of the need to properly deal with particular and concrete realizations of human ways of life to be able to form abstract ideas of better possibilities. I would suggest one change to Melville’s formulation: this Emersonian-American way of thought is not so much a spiritualized materialism as a nightmarish replacement for all that is embodied in a material world. If the world won’t be what we Americans want it to be, we’ll still act as if it were truly what we want it to be. That strategy was remarkably successful in many ways for more than three centuries, but reality is now biting back.

We can see the American disrespect for reality in the claim made by that anonymous figure in the Bush II government that they would make reality rather than study it. We can see this disrespect for reality in the words and actions of the Kennedy and Johnson government figures in their waging of the Vietnam war where it was most important to get on board, to sign on to the dream that the United States could shape South Vietnam into a real country, an exotic outpost of the United States. We can see it in the more recent wars against Iraq where the fact that American soldiers were in place, in a far-away country, killing Iraqis and being killed by Iraqis means that those Iraqis — at least some — are evil men intent on destroying us because we’re so wonderful. Start a war by invading a country on false pretenses and then convince yourself that the fact you’re killing citizens of that country means they’re evil and deserved to be killed. This is actually another symptom of the same disease that leads us to declare that a movie that’s esthetic and moral trash must be good if Americans like it. By such paths, we traveled from a barbarism with at least some respect for the works of Western civilization imported from Europe to a decadence that respects only transactions in public marketplaces, transactions that typically represent only the satisfaction of cheap and uneducated desires. We admire the athletes of football and boxing and make fun of the athletes of ballet and opera. We admire what would have been admired by the proletariat who filled the Colosseum of ancient Rome and despise what satisfied the tastes of the 18th and 19th century men who put the final touches upon this civilization we’ve dismantled that we might build whorehouses from the stones of grand cathedrals and make bombs that destroy cathedrals and the surrounding cities from the knowledge gathered by great men of science.

It’s hard to imagine that a large population of a seemingly sophisticated country could be so detached from reality, so convinced that truth is found in their imaginations shaped to mirror their desires and even their career plans. Decades ago, some thinkers had predicted collapse of the Soviet Union because the all-important apparatchiks wouldn’t be able to function because of the strain caused by the conflict between reality and official Soviet views of reality — this is more plausible than the view that Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall by planting the seeds that grew into the military bean-stalk currently reaching for the stars. Americans seem to be oblivious to this conflict between reality and their thoughts and feelings. The United States is collapsing, the West is falling at least partly because the United States failed in its role as a new and energetic region which could have created a new phase of Western Civilization. After all, civilizations don’t survive as truly stable entities, they evolve in place or re-develop in formerly marginal regions. It was our turn here in the United States and we had better things to do than to nurture a new civilization.

As the ruins crumble around the globe, we Americans remain oblivious to reality, choosing to believe we can solve a problem of excessive debt by creating more debt, that we can make the world love us once again by waging wars on all continents and building hundreds of military bases around the world, even in regions where we’ve not yet started shooting. We think to encourage creativity by setting children and young adults in front of sheets of paper or — still worse — in front of computers when those children have little knowledge of reality and few skills for responding to reality.

I’m offering a way forward, a worldview which explicitly recognizes the unity and coherence and completion of this world and can be used to embody a plausible human knowledge of that world in a civilization not yet born and in the human beings who will inhabit that civilization. We can hope the next civilization will be an embodiment of the best of modern empirical knowledge, that is, that it will be an embodiment of that knowledge in tools and political practices, in forms of music and in goals for scientific research, disciplined to a morally responsible view of God’s Creation and man’s proper place in it. (Of course, it might be multiple civilizations in different parts of the earth or it might be that mankind will sink into a permanent barbarism.)

We’re a long way, lots of long days of work away, from such a civilization, but it seems to me that it’s time for men and women of moral integrity to recognize how much has been lost and to start the various tasks of building a better future, one that will likely be seen by no one currently alive.

Truth unfolds in time through communal processes.

I’ve realized there is possibly a very clear example of what this means in an area where I’ve perhaps misspoken a little. Maybe I’ve simply been in error. In any case, I’m also willing to claim that new truths might emerge in time through various processes, new truths not emerging from some mystical source but rather emerging as a result of the decisions God makes as He tells this story I call a world — the universe seen in light of God’s purposes or, equivalently, in light of moral order.

The issue I’ll consider now is human rights. (See Natural and Inalienable Rights.) I’ve never felt good about denying we have some sort of absolute rights in this mortal life, though I’ve never been comfortable with those who treat those rights as if they were absolute in the sense of a metaphysical truth such as the law of non-contradiction. It’d be nice in some sense to argue that we have all those supposedly inalienable rights declared by Jefferson (though the original Lockean trio of life, liberty, and property makes more sense).

In that earlier article, Natural and Inalienable Rights, I also spoke in somewhat apocalyptic terms. When the Son of God took on a human nature, being born as Jesus of Nazareth, we were adopted as His brethren, gaining some of His divine privileges, though men and their institutions remain what they are and don’t have all that much respect for these privileges. Of course, that’s not an argument against human rights of the Lockean sort just as large-scale, modern disobedience of the Fifth Commandment is no argument against that prohibition of murder.

So, we go from apish men with inborn moral behaviors and attitudes to mannish apes with some awareness of themselves to…?

When and how do we become creatures with some sort of inalienable rights appropriate for the sort of morally responsible and self-aware creatures that few seem to be? Is there some magical moment when the human brain or perhaps human social relationships reached some threshold level of complexity? As a Christian, I’d certainly advocate the idea that something was sealed when the Son of God became man and adopted us as His brethren. In fact, I’d suggested that was the only solid basis for this inalienable rights business in my article, Natural and Inalienable Rights, and perhaps in other places. I now consider the divine privileges that Jesus Christ gave us when He adopted us as His brethren to be separate from human rights as defined by modern thinkers. Those human rights seem to involve empirical matters and can be discussed in the same way that formal political relationships have been discussed by Aristotle and Hobbes and others.

If human rights exist, they’re something that first appeared at a perhaps vague or even “smeared-out” time during the evolution of the human species and the development of civilization. It’s hard for creatures who live for such a small span of years to truly imagine new entities or even truly new aspects of existing entities arising in Creation, but we can at least move in the direction of imagining, for example, living cells arising out of a chemical soup or creatures with true abstract reasoning talents arising from clever apes. We can try to find a way to talk intelligently about the coming of new things or new aspects of thing-like beings. I view Creation as being made of stuff created, in a manner of speaking, before the so-called Big Bang (try to think in ontological or even logical terms rather than strict chronological terms) and I also view a world of things and thing-like beings which develop in the way of a story. God is telling a story in which He, with the help of creatures enjoying or suffering from a certain freedom, can move in unexpected ways or even bring into existence some truly new and creative possibility.

While officially accepting the evidence that man has evolved from a more primitive apish creature, most modern Christians have tended to prefer the pagan myth of a Golden Age which has decayed into the current Fallen Age and they have also preferred to think as if the Creator has the same relationship with His Creation as would a pagan God or gods who use great power against recalcitrant matter which maybe has existed eternally along with them (and is maybe the same as them). St. Thomas Aquinas taught an existentialist view of God — He is His own Act-of-being, the Supreme Act-of-being — but few have yet joined the effort to purge our Christian minds of the view of God as some sort of super-creature, acting upon matter as if literally a potter working clay. God is transcendent, for sure, but He is Creator and not Olympian King of the Gods. By creating, from nothing and in the way of a shaper and story-teller, God works more from inside. I’ve tended recently to speak of being in terms of levels, where thing-like being is a very particularized being which is shaped from more general forms of being. In this way of thinking, God works from the deepest and most abstract levels where He manifests truths out to the particular and thing-like levels of being such as our universe.

The very fact that human beings at some time could claim to have inalienable rights might well tell us that the claim has some validity, but what’s of immediate interest is this idea that something like inalienable rights could arise in history. Then again, how could it be otherwise? We can’t posit our apish ancestors to have always had rights. Inalienable rights would be like the opposable thumb in that they appeared as the result of evolutionary development.

This seems a bit strange, but I’ve been struggling hard for nearly 20 years to reshape my mind to correspond to reality and I’ve perhaps had to deal with stranger and more radical ideas than this:

Can it be true that a human being of higher moral awareness and self-awareness might have those inalienable rights though a human creature from the Old Stone Age didn’t have any such rights, though the two be almost genetically twins?

Let’s see if we can apply a particular and plausible meaning to the allegory of Adam and Eve:

Did all human beings gain a supra-animal status when Buddha and Jeremiah and Socrates had first walked the earth?

Physicists like to explore extreme conditions of high-energy (or equivalently — high density) because they’d like to discover ‘new physics’. As they view matters, the universe is a boring place, frozen into a certain condition soon after the expansion had begun from an extremely dense state. A different realm of thing-like being had come into shape and it was very cool and stable and a story could begin, a story of galaxies and even huge clusters of galaxies coming to be from small concentrations in a remarkably homogeneous observable universe, a story of first generation stars which burned fast and exploded to produce waste products such as oxygen and iron and magnesium, a story of organic chemicals coming to exist in many regions and of life coming to exist on at least one planet made of many of those waste products of first-generation stars.

We live in that world of apparently stable physics — though we certainly don’t have anything like a complete understanding of that physics. We have a tendency to see this world of rocks and flesh and blood as being “the way it has to be.” Over the period of years allotted to individual men or even to tightly bound generations of men, the world certainly seems pretty stable in some fundamental ways. Nothing new appears under the sun — during the periods of time easily handled by the human mind and imagination. Men are what they are, rocks are what they are, and ocean and sky are pretty much eternal.

In fact, things — including living creatures — have stories. They develop over time. The more thing-like, the more empirical, the entity or its aspects, the more we can assume it to be the result of a story. A story also introduces the possibility of new entities or new aspects of old entities appearing, perhaps as a result of new relationships between an old environment and an existing line of creatures or new relationships between existing entities when changes (such as the growth of technology and the consequent growth and interconnection of human communities) raise new possibilities.

God didn’t create this universe all at once at the “time” of the so-called Big Bang. He still has the freedom to introduce new things under the sun. Moreover, we can participate in this ongoing creation, helping to raise at least the possibility of a better world.