Acts of Being

I’ll be writing articles on some aspects of politics and the history of government which interest me and doing so in terms of my concepts of created being. I’ll concentrate on American politics and will cover some interesting phenomena often seen as indicative of conspiracies. These articles will reflect both some of my reading of authoritative histories and also my take on ongoing events. I’m not putting myself forward as an expert in these fields but I’m trying to develop ways of describing and analyzing complex real-world entities which have both concrete and abstract aspects and I’m looking for interesting aspects of human moral life to provide specific descriptive problems. There seem to be a variety of such aspects to be had in studying and contemplating what seems to be an ongoing political breakdown in the modern West, and, in particular, a somewhat florid development of problems present in American politics from the founding of the United States. These problems often present themselves in the guise of conspiracies to many concerned people, because of a lack of understanding of what was possible and what actually happened in American history. To anticipate a little: when the world grows increasingly complex and most human beings insist on seeing that world in simple terms which were probably wrong to start with, very strange things can happen. This is a problem for our understanding of politics and history as well as for our overall understanding of Creation.

Again will I remind my readers that I consider concrete being to be shaped from more abstract forms of being but I also consider concrete entities, such as a human animal, to contain yet the various forms of abstract being which come together to form a man. A man is, in a manner of speaking, frozen soul and the soul remains in all its phases even if the dominant phase of a human animal at birth is ice. It takes the proper circumstances and the proper responses by a man to develop the fullness of human nature. But I don’t like that way of talking about the abstractions which remain with even the most concrete forms of being and this is one reason to start a discussion of specific problems which involve the abstract aspects of human nature, particularly the ways in which human beings form relationships with each other, with our non-human fellow-creatures, with the world as our complex set of environments, and with our Maker.

If created being comes from one set of truths manifested by God on the other side of the Big Bang — so to speak — then we can enrich our understanding of man, even in his moral and political aspects, by applying to our study of human nature what’s been learned in modern physics and mathematics, as well as other fields of empirical study. But the previous sentence will produce a distorted view of my intentions in most minds just because we have the false idea that there are different, incompatible sorts of (vaguely defined) being and, separately, some forms of abstract truths which correspond to human fields of study. And so it is that I’m struggling to find good ways to talk about these issues. This struggle has quietly and contemplatively increased in recent months as I’ve been trying to find the time to write a summary work (possibly multiple volumes) on my worldview and also have been reformatting two ten year-old novels which deal with many of these issues. I plan to publish these novels on the Internet, perhaps one within a month or so. In fact, I’ve been thinking I might turn my dwindling, middle-aged energies towards works of fiction because rereading these older novels has convinced me that I worked out many of my ideas by writing the sorts of moral narratives I wish to deal with in these writings on politics.

Moral narratives are appropriately for exploring the nature of man, who is, after all, a physical creature. To my way of understanding Creation, physical creatures are (ultimately) shaped from the truths God manifested for His Creation and still ‘carry’ those truths in their very flesh and blood. Consequently, we can come to better understand man, and other creatures, by coming to better understand some mathematically describable aspects of created being, including that fundamental creature: spacetime. Human experience indicates that mathematics, while not capable of describing the totality of created being, is sometimes capable of leading the way towards new ways of describing that totality.

However we get to a more complete description, the various ways in which we understand men and stars have to come together in some sort of narrative of Creation and that narrative has sub-stories such as that of man responding to God’s revelation as carried in the Bible and also God’s revelations as carried in the workings and stuff of His Creation as accessible to the human senses and mind. If I succeed in any substantial way in this task, that success will be found in the entirety of my writings, novels as well as books and articles on philosophical or theological matters.

What we need to provide intellectual foundations for a new phase of human civilization is to re-imagine, from the bottom-up, the meaning of Creation and the role played by human beings in Creation. I can point to a philosophical/theological work with a similar goal: Summa Contra Gentiles by St. Thomas Aquinas. That work was likely intended to present the beliefs of Christians to Muslim and Jewish scholars in such a way that they could see that Christian thought is consistent with the rationality of Creation as seen by the human eye and understood by the human mind. The goal of Aquinas was to show that Christian revelation could be reached in that bottom-up way, not as a lock-tight logical proof, but as a ‘proof’ in the older sense: a testing of coherence and consistency. He seems to have set out to work in the other direction, from an understanding of God developed from the Bible, in his other major compendium, Summa Theologicae.

Man is part of that Creation which is a particular work of God and reflects decisions which could have been otherwise. God could have brought into being not only a different Creation but even a different intelligent, God-seeking race in a Creation and a universe much like ours. The human race might have been an apish race with somewhat different characteristics. Speaking of just one characteristic: human beings have different tendencies towards being individuals vs. social beings. We could have had more of a leaning towards individualism or more towards social bonding. The particular range we occupy in this individual-social spectrum and the particular statistical spread of individuals over that spectrum are empirical matters. Men could have been different, in this aspect and others, but we are what we are, largely as a result of the hundreds of millions of years of evolution of living creatures on earth. More than that, we are what we are because of the characteristics of spacetime in our world, because of the properties of matter and fields, because of abstract mathematical truths, and so forth. We are creatures shaped from and shaped in response to the various sorts of being, abstract and concrete, in Creation.

There are two extremes that most thinkers fall into when they have stumbled into some vague understanding of the nature of being. Some, you might call them reductionists, think that all properties of more complex beings can be derived, in principle, by accumulating layers of more complex and complicated assemblages of the basic things — whatever they might be. Some, usually they take the form of dualists or more extreme preachers of multiple forms of incompatible being, think that a man is so different from a puddle of the chemicals that compose his body that surely he becomes a man because something thoroughly different from physical being is accidentally attached to his flesh and blood.

Can a man be explained by understanding the various ways of assembling that puddle of chemicals? Can a man be explained by separating his bodily responses from his spiritual or moral responses?

Is there another way? Let me propose that we can build another way of viewing created being, including human nature, by borrowing three major insights from modern empirical science:

1. Concrete stuff, by which I presently mean matter and energy and fields and spacetime, seems to have been shaped from some more abstract stuff. So far as quantitative aspects of concrete being goes, this implies some serious truth in the radical version of Pythagoras’ claim that stuff is made of number. Not describable by number, but made of. For now, I’ll only say there are more aspects to concrete being than those which can be measured or even described by qualitative mathematical methods and I’m contemplatively playing around with ways of describing the multiple ‘flows’ of abstract being into concrete forms but I’m not yet ready to describe a good way of viewing this ‘flow’.

2. Relationships are primary and bring substances into existence. See A Christian view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality for a short discussion of the issue. This insight might well prove to be the same as the first.

3. At the top-level, the universe can be seen as a narrative, morally well-ordered in my opinion. Moving downward, classes or species of complex entities evolve, perhaps over time-spans which are immense by human standards, and individual complex entities develop over their lifetimes. This points to the possibility that human moral relationships, including political relationships, are products of evolution and are not derivable from metaphysical systems of thought — unless those systems are constructed to include the evolutionary aspects of human relationships.

What is…is. Our job is not to define what we think is but rather to accept what is, as we can determine from the best of human knowledge, and understand it by creating proper words and concepts and molding them into proper structures of thought. We can then follow our Creator by using those words and concepts and intellectual structures to tell proper stories in imitation of His acts-of-being or acts of creation.

Specifically, if we are to understand human moral nature, human political activities, etc., we need to take account of the three characteristics of created being I listed above — and maybe some more — and to start shaping our minds to created being as it is and not as Hobbes or Plato thought it to be, or Hamilton or Jefferson or Lincoln for that matter. (The greatest of these thinkers, certainly Plato, understood much about the metaphysical problems I’m tackling though pre-modern thinkers were missing the very interesting insights to be gained from modern empirical knowledge.)

This will involve a great deal of work over more than one lifetime and will, in fact, produce along the way the possibility of educated men and women in future generations who possess wide learning and deep culture in such a self-shaping way that they will be very similar to the liberal thinkers of traditional Western civilization though having a library including Einstein, Cantor, Pelikan, Kafka, and other modern thinkers who’ve contributed to a great, but still largely potential, enrichment of our understanding of Creation.

We should also realize that the very process of creating a greater system of knowledge from the totality of human traditional and modern knowledge will itself open up new possibilities for human moral life, including our lives as members of societies and as citizens of political communities.

I’ve come to the position that created being exists across a spectrum going from abstract to concrete or particular. A thing, a particularized form of being, still has its abstract being in it the way that a vase has still the raw materials of its clay and glazing. In fact, as you penetrate the stuff of that vase, you’ll ‘go down’ to molecules and then atoms and then electrons and protons and neutrons and then various sorts of entities which behave very much like ‘collapse points’ of fields. Fields are very abstract already though, for all we know, there might be many levels of abstraction to go before we reach the stuff of God’s initial acts of creating from nothingness. Even if you find physics and mathematics to be an alien form of thought, go and browse through a serious book on modern gravity theory or quantum mechanics or a mixed field of study such as the early seconds of this expansionary phase of the universe. All those equations are not descriptions of objects we can touch so much as they are the objects themselves, abstract and beyond direct sensing by eyes or ears or fingertips.

The thing is shaped from more abstract forms of being, just as the vase is shaped from its raw materials, and the abstract forms remain part of the thing just as the clay remains part of the vase. There are multiple levels of thing-like being within a human being — cells and then DNA and various minerals and biochemicals and then oxygen and carbon and then protons and electrons and then electroweak fields and quarks and so on to some very hypothetical levels of being of the sort studied by theoretical physicists. Once again, we explore more deeply into the stuff of a man and find fields which seem more akin to mathematical ideas than to earth and fire and wind and air. This sort of talk becomes recursively silly at times only because I’m trying to talk about abstract levels of being in terms of concrete levels of being which are shaped from abstract levels of being and still contain abstract being.

My contention is that we should take this seriously, this spectrum of being ranging from highly abstract to highly particular. At the same time, I’d like to expand this idea beyond the aspects of being studied by mathematicians and physicists and all sorts of physical scientists and engineers.

Modern men, including Christians who are bound to pay attention to God in His acts as Creator, have been quite reluctant to do much with these richer ideas of being. We accept the medical and other technological benefits of these enriched ideas but we refuse to restate our understanding of Creation in terms which make sense in light of modern empirical knowledge. At the very least, we need to construct new narratives of Creation, of the human race, of ourselves as members of various peoples and as members of the Body of Christ, of ourselves as individuals. Many can and should play a role in this building of such narratives, including scientists outside of their 9-5 roles as reductionists, but historians and fiction-writers and poets and musicians and movie-makers and visual artists can play a special role. They can speak the truth, a truth which merges particular and concrete things which are true with abstract truths which are thing-like.

More generally, we need to move into a new phase of Western Civilization or into the start of one or more successor civilizations. There have been some who have dared to head off into regions opened up by the modern and richer understandings of created being, but it’s remarkable, at least to me, how little respect that effort has received in general. True it is that both the works of genius and also the obscene jokes played on collectors by Picasso are worth sometimes tens of millions of dollars at auctions, as are the works of van Gogh with his better-defined, seemingly sophisticated experiments in perception, especially color perception. Mahler and Stravinsky wrote various experimental works, often despised when first played but now part of the standard repertoire of symphonic music. The same was true of Beethoven — we forget how much he redefined music beyond the standard understandings and we know only from sparse comments in his journals that he was engaged in a radical expansion of music at the time of his death. Literature? Well, traditional story-tellers, such as Tolstoy and George Eliot have produced great works and the best of those have used traditional narrative techniques to deal with the modern world. There were also those who tried to expand the boundaries of human perception and understanding, creating narratives which take a substantial intellectual effort to follow because those narratives follow events — at least sometimes — at the abstract levels of being, perhaps by such ‘simple’ tricks as treating pieces of a concrete narration as words in a more abstract narrative. I can certainly mention in this context Cervantes (way back), Sterne, Melville, and numerous poets such as Pound and cummings and T.S. Eliot.

Visual artists of the 19th and early 20th century seemed to be ahead of brain scientists in realizing that human vision isn’t unitary. As it turns out, we see an object’s shape, movement, and color separately and our brains put together the more complete view of that object in a way that still baffles scientists so far as I know. (The interested reader can pursue this topic beginning with the scientific discussion in A Vision of the Brain by Semir Zeki or the discussion by the same author from the viewpoint of a scientist interested in art found in Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain.) To cut to the point of this particular line of insight from modern empirical knowledge:

Reality is real but human perceptions of that reality are constructed.

This doesn’t mean our perceptions are false in any way. After all, our eyes and ears have been shaped to some piece of reality, however small, by responses of our ancestors over billions of years and by our own responses to our world, however small or large. We err, perhaps greatly, when we think as if our eyes were merely transparent panes of glass, letting some direct image of reality into our heads where resides a mind formed independently of the world around it.

Over time, men have moved to ever richer and more complete understandings of created being and of what I would call narrative realms in Creation, but not everyone has yet gotten the message. Every electron, every grain of sand or sand-flea, every human being or galaxy, has many components — use this term cautiously, each of those components as well as the entity in its entirety have abstract aspects as well as concrete aspects. The things of this world are not objects separable from but describable by mathematical truths nor are they imperfect images of things existing in some realm of the Real. A thing is the node in a complex network of various sorts of abstract being joining in a particular thing. And those nodes in their turn join to form more complex and more concrete things.

At the very least, we need artistic visions which deal, perhaps playfully, with the full spectrum of aspects of created being, including those we call ‘abstract’. We need van Goghs to give us new insights into human color vision, Picassos to question the way we see shapes and to even question the dimensions in which those shapes are set. I’ve already gone past my knowledge of painting and I want my words to be taken as suggestions optimistic as to what we can learn from those who somehow access the raw components of human vision and those who can consciously think through their own perception of colors or shapes or movements. I’m sure similar statements can be made about modern music, but I’ll pass by that topic for now as my formal knowledge of music is also as slender as one would expect from a product of the American educational system. But I also believe that the greatest need we have is for poets and writers and philosophers who can speak of the entirety of being, in its more abstract and more concrete aspects.

That’s the thrust of my efforts in writing creative fiction, efforts which began well before I tried my hand at theology or philosophy and, in fact, well before I could have stated my worldview in explicit terms or was even aware I’d developed such a strange beast. The world has been for me something of a marvelous mystery containing a multitude of mysteries. I had neither a reductionist nor an occult attitude towards these mysteries. I think that, by behavior if not by conscious thought, I had always an attitude of acceptance of reality, to the point where I wasn’t aggressive enough in querying that reality in a way proper for someone with some intellectual talent and a small bent towards mathematics and physics. Yet, if I’ve followed a strange and slow path of intellectual development, in this country where development of the mind has not much been encouraged, I did seem to implicitly realize from a fairly young age that the problem with mysteries is not that they need to be reduced, though some mysteries can be reduced in a useful and truthful way. Nor are those mysteries to be simply accepted as occult or as supernatural in the sense of beyond man’s reach. I’m speaking here of mysteries which involve created beings and not of of the revealed mysteries of God’s own Being and His transcendental life. Mysteries of Creation are, in principle, within the reach of the human mind though actual, individual human minds are too weak to grasp all of Creation and likely too weak to deal with some of the more profound mysteries of our world and the other realms of Creation.

And, yet, there’s something to be done with mysteries, at least by those called to ponder them as interesting objects of study as well as sources of wonder, the more serious sorts of poets and novelists and various artists as well as philosophers and scientists of a philosophical bent. We can do what the human being has to do, well or badly, just to survive in this life: we can respond by shaping our minds to the reality which confronts us. We explore and we test and we try to find ways to speak about what we find, or think we find. In doing so, we better shape our minds that they might be able to form statements about Creation and its various processes and relationships — in ordinary words or the words or formalisms of mathematics and other specialized sciences. We tune our minds to correspond more closely to the world, to all of Creation, as we can know it during our age and within our culture.

This is to say we accept reality and shape our thoughts correspondingly rather than trying to reduce reality to rules which allegedly are given to the human mind independently of the mundane reality around us, independently of the experience which shaped the human race over the eons and individuals humans over their lifetimes. We don’t live in our heads, inhabiting some sort of mental space equipped with all the tools to understand whatever it encounters. Our minds are our encapsulation of the environments around us, or the entire world, or even the entirety of Creation.

Mathematicians deal with the mystery of infinity by shaping their minds so that different sizes of infinity are part of those minds and the tools to deal with various sorts of numbers, including transfinite numbers larger than ordinary infinity, are part of the furnishings of those minds. Physicists deal with quantum mechanics not by thinking in terms of the common sense developed in our apish ancestors as they hunted mammoths or tamed wild ox; rather do they reshape their minds to correspond with the reality they confront when they explore different regions or levels of being than those our pre-modern ancestors knew about. The paradoxes of modern mathematics and physics aren’t the result of conflicts between reality and some sort of pure reasoning but rather a conflict between reality and a mind shaped to an inadequate understanding of reality, an understanding not sufficiently large and rich.

The truths of art are certainly more fuzzy than those of mathematics and the physical sciences, often more fuzzy than even the truths of history, but they are truths. The truths of art overlap with those of mathematics. After all, art speaks of created being though not necessarily of perceptible, concrete being. Then again, the same is true of mathematics and physics. We don’t see by way of our eyes those abstract objects bundled with relationships which mathematicians call ‘groups’, but a trained mind can see them in an intellectual sense in some of the behavior of atomic particles and of the entities described by quantum mechanics, and by many other entities in Creation. I’ve never seen even ordinary infinity let alone any of the still larger infinities. I’ve never run my hands along a curvature in spacetime and can’t even separate, by touch, space from the objects it holds. I can’t separate my perception of colors from that of shapes and movements and hope I never can in this life — it’s the sign of something going very wrong in a human visual system. It’s hard to say if he had a mild problem with his visual system or simply had remarkable insight into the ways of his own eyes, optic nerves, and brain, but van Gogh showed us hints of color vision without shape and without movement and he also had some emotional and mental problems at various times of his life. His unique insights and his problems might have been tied together — problems with his brain might have allowed him to be both a great artist and also a Christian with a deep devotion bearing some resemblance to that of some of the disturbed saints of Christian history. In any case, van Gogh and Einstein both had to use well-developed imaginations to do their work. Those imaginations strayed from the beliefs of the men of their time, but strayed so that they had a richer view of created being.

The main point I’d like to drive towards is that abstractions in art are not only allowable but actually necessary if men are to explore and understand truth. I don’t know enough to judge Picasso’s works, but I can say this:

If there is any truth in modern theories of infinity and randomness, any in quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories of relativity, then something like Picasso’s approach is necessary for artists to speak truth to modern man, though there’s a sense in which there are as yet few modern men. If there is any truth to modern discoveries of the workings of the human visual system, then van Gogh saw certain truths about the fragmentation of what is seen into color and shape and movement before scientists generally did.

I don’t wish to claim van Gogh was a prophet of brain science but I do wish to claim he was speaking a truth not perceived by most other men even when he presented his work to men sure they saw the world about them in its truth and completeness. That crazy and charitable genius somehow knew we construct our color-vision of the world.

This isn’t to say that all abstractions in art are true, just as it’s certainly not that case that all abstractions in mathematics and physics are true. Some abstractions are so false from the beginning as to be beyond consideration by rational men and others prove to be inconsistent with what’s known or becomes known about Creation in all the realms and levels accessible to the human mind.

But the arts speak the truth about Creation and created being only when they deal with the completeness of that Creation and created being. This doesn’t mean that all works of art, including literature, have to be exotic and difficult to understand. It does mean that modern man has a greatly expanded and enriched knowledge of Creation and created being and that knowledge is not well-contained in the forms of art and literature we’ve received from our ancestors. Modern empirical knowledge has added substance to our knowledge. The modern fields of empirical knowledge-gathering and analysis aren’t just collections of recipes that allow pre-existing human minds to simply absorb knowledge as if it were marks on a ledger. The fact that human beings are a unique species of ape, descended from apes rather than a special creation of God or the gods, most certainly has some bearing upon our understanding of Creation and of human nature. The disconcerting facts being amassed by modern brain scientists give strong testimony that human thoughts and feelings are so tightly tied to physical events in the human body — mostly the brain — as to make talk of immaterial minds and souls a bit questionable. This certainly has a bearing on our ways of speaking about human beings.

I’m going to end by referring to my novel, A Man for Every Purpose, which is the story of a man, well-educated and intelligent, who fails to properly shape his mind to his knowledge of both traditional truths and modern empirical knowledge. This novel was written five years or so before my philosophical beliefs took an explicit form but it deals with the problems of a world where the fragmentation of knowledge of Creation into realms has resulted in human beings acting as if realms of knowledge correspond to different realms of created being.

While thinking of the suffering endured by patients in the modern medical quest for miracles, I grew depressed and sought to cheer myself up by thoughts of hospices which allow human beings a bit of dignity as they approach death. And so it was that I turned to Flannery O’Connor’s insightful and Thomistically funny introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann, a book which told the story of a young girl with a face-deforming cancer who went to live in a hospice run by sisters from the Dominican sub-order founded by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Mother Alphonsa after she had donned the habit. She was the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Near the end of this short essay, Miss O’Connor tells us:

After an afternoon with [the sisters], I decided that they had had about everything [in their hospice work with cancer victims] and flinched before nothing, even though one of them asked me during the course of the visit why I wrote about such grotesque characters, why the grotesque (of all things) was my vocation. They had in the meantime inspected some of my writing. I was struggling to get off the hook she had me on when another of our guests supplied the one answer that would make it immediately plain to all of them. “It’s your vocation too,” he said to her.

This opened up for me also a new perspective on the grotesque. Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept the fact that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look. When we look into the face of good, we are liable to see a face like Mary Ann’s, full of promise.

Full of promise? How can a face distorted by disease be full of promise? How can the founder of the Church of Christ without Christ be funny, especially after blinding himself and then killing himself by prolonged, horrible penances? How about a self-named Misfit who went to prison for a crime he no longer remembers, certain though that the punishment was out of proportion to the crime, be full of promise? Was it his promise that was realized when he killed a family, mother and father, two children, and a grandmother, after finding them stuck on a dirt road? How about a smart 12 year-old girl who loses her nasty attitude only when she’s immersed in prayer? Full of promise to be a nun but that’s a pretty limited sort of promise in this modern world where God-centered people do good by finding careers with social service corporations (nonprofit, of course). As for the 14 year-old cousins of that 12 year-old nun-to-be, in a convent school but itching to be loose women…

Strange promises indeed in a world where we’ve decided our best goal isn’t the pursuit of what is truly good but rather the avoidance of pain and suffering. We wish to inhabit a world in which pain and suffering can be eliminated, a world in which the Creator brings us to prosperity and an easy death so long as we obey our understanding of His commandments. And, so, we Americans — but probably many modern peoples — do inhabit such a world, if only in our own minds. And we’ve been able to pretend this is the world since our spiritual ancestors, epitomized by Emerson and Thoreau, first discovered that God had botched His Creation and seems deaf to our advice on how to fix matters. If God won’t listen to us, we’ll create our own world… For a remarkably long time, good luck in geography and natural resources and the self-destructive tendencies of our enemies allowed us Americans to pull off this rebellion against God and to even present ourselves, even to ourselves, as a Christian, God-centered people. This is a complicated subject and I’ve written about it in various contexts, including that of the war of the European peoples of New England against the native peoples. See The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding for a discussion of my understanding of the basic weakness in the moral characters and moral reasoning of the Puritan leaders of New England, weaknesses I believe to have been magnified into virtues, partly through the work of Emerson and Thoreau but also through the idealistic deformations of American politics by Abraham Lincoln, deformations upon a system already deeply corrupted by Aaron Burr’s founding of Tammany Hall and Thomas Jefferson’s willingness to ally himself with this early political machine when he thought he could use Burr and his followers to his own purposes. This combination of idealism and fundamental corruption has created a political system that’s quite beyond any true reform.

We need to keep our political and social situation in mind, but I’m mostly concerned in this situation about the clear fact that people classify any grotesque creature, man or beast, and any grotesque situation as evil. Why do we not see the possibilities of good arising through the sorts of evolutionary and developmental processes which have produced the human race and also the Christian Church? Cowardice has much to do with it but there’s something still deeper involved, a revulsion to human nature as we see it when we look at a human being eaten by a cancer that grew from his own bodily stuff or a human being entering a dementia that leaves him there in body but strips him of memory and then reason and then other human characteristics or behaviors. There can be little left of our grandfather or friend, little left but a shell that even seems a mockery of human nature as the eyes grow vacant and the skeletal muscles lose their tone.

I confess to being a coward myself, not so much about death but a lot when it comes to pain and suffering, I try to be honest with myself and with the fact that this too is a part of the world as God created it. But I struggle to toughen up my backbone. I look in the mirror and see not an actively evil man but one who has to paint himself into a corner to be somewhat certain he’ll do what is right when the real trouble begins (maybe before many months pass). I feel strongly that we live in a world where there are undesirable moral implications to our dedication to avoiding pain and suffering. And we court various moral ambiguities, and even moral degradation, when we raise the avoidance of pain and suffering to such a high priority. When we also make it a priority to avoid death as long as medically possible, we begin to turn away from Creation and from our Maker. Yet, even more than death do we avoid pain and suffering though we do our best to avoid all unpleasantries. We don’t seek the good but merely seek to avoid that which fits in our pitifully inadequate understanding of evil.

Pain and suffering, and death, are often enough by-products of the historical or developmental or evolutionary processes which can produce not the good directly but the stuff from which God will make the good, mostly on the other side of death in the world of the resurrected, but this world can be quite good in its own way. In any case, when we try too hard to avoid the unpleasant aspects of the story God is telling, we risk placing ourselves outside of the story, we risk placing ourselves outside the sometimes horrifying processes by which we move forward towards the good. Then we babble on about carrying our crosses when we develop cancer or have to endure economic hardship, after devoting our lives to imposing our standards upon God’s world rather than working within God’s world, this story He’s still telling. It’s been 20 centuries since our spiritual fathers murdered the Son of God, 20 centuries since we were shown the purpose of Creation: to allow the Son of God to learn obedience as a creature and to sacrifice Himself to His Father in an act of pure, self-giving love. And still we insist that God is supposed to give us a pleasant comfortable life so long as we follow a set of rules acceptable to us. And still we insist that the purpose of this all is to save us human beings. You see, this all-powerful God created a world in which human beings were to have been god-like creatures who led peaceful and prosperous lives… Somehow, events escaped the control of God and here we are, but we’ll do our best to be those god-like creatures and to demand the peace and prosperity which is rightfully ours.

The underlying problem we have is with developmental and evolutionary processes that stretch beyond very short periods of time. When we look at days or years or even the lifespan of mortal man, the easiest way of understanding is to assume entities of a permanent nature which act in events that don’t change the entities in a fundamental way. And we fail to make the transition to thinking in terms of the eons over which God shaped us and continues to shape His Creation. Even Einstein thought in this way during his famous attacks upon any understandings of quantum physics which allowed the reality of the strange processes when very small transitions in energy or small regions of space or time are involved. See A Christian’s View of Einstein’s and Bohr’s Debate on the Meaning of Reality for my short summary of a position stated in Critique of Scientific Reason by the German philosopher Kurt Hubner. See The Falsehoods Which are in All Forms of Paganism for a bit more discussion about the issues from the viewpoint of an updated Thomistic existentialism.

We can’t accept the idea that human nature is the result of a freely moving narrative process, a process factual to the extent it is free. We would be free to behave according to our desires and to be already fully-formed persons. Not necessarily do we desire to be God or even gods, but we have our own opinions about matters and will pretend that we can have opinions in clear conflict with reality so long as we have the power and wealth and circumstances to ignore that reality. We would rather live in Disneyworld than Darwinworld or Einsteinworld.

I can understand why we modern men wish to be “persons frozen into some sort of immutable being.” If individual human natures are shaped by responses to environments — as I’ve claimed — then we would be the sorts of creatures who’ve been shaped as mostly passive participants in a rather despicable sort of life, watching violent sports and mindless situation comedies or reality shows. We would be the sorts of creatures who are passive victims of amusement park personnel. But we would like to believe that we are truly men and women who value freedom and have strong moral characters that we exercise when called for. We like to believe that we are the types of creatures who value intelligence rather than the stupidity and bestial passions which dominate our favorite entertainment. But we go on watching and listening to that which teaches values and attitudes which disgust us when embodied in a teenager who actually kills with the abandon of our heroes and anti-heroes or a young woman who aborts her baby so she can enjoy the free life of those modern women in the movies.

And, yet, the Body of Christ continues to form even if many of its organs turn into predatory parasites and many of the individuals, cells in a manner of speaking, will not likely be part of that Body when it is fully formed in the world of the resurrected. But who can tell? Didn’t Christ forgive the sins of passionate sinners with surprising ease? Who can be more morally grotesque than those deformed by greed or sexual lust? There are other vices which also damage us badly but greed and sexual lust are pretty bad in their effects on us. While Christ seemed to often forgive the sins of those who were passionate, He offered up little or no hope for the lukewarm, those with smooth skin and regular features. The lukewarm are never grotesque in appearance. Often quite attractive the lukewarm. In a bland sort of way.

God is shaping the entirety of created being, especially the stuff of human nature and He seems willing to pound us to a bloody pulp at times, to bury us under streams of molten rock, to pour moral-carcinogens down our throats with the drugs and alcohol which our bodies can come to so crave, to trick us into eating dangerous foods — at least dangerous in high amounts — by the desires for high-calorie substances which kept our apish ancestors alive during hard times, to twist the facial features of a young girl into sheer ugliness — at least by the standards of the lukewarm with their smooth faces and their regular features.

It would seem that Darwin, despite losing his poorly founded and Biblically literalistic faith, at least faced up to God’s acts as Creator better than the vast majority of those who claim to be Christians, better than the vast majority of Christian clergymen. Yet, in the end, Darwin’s honesty about the workings of Creation led him away from his Christian faith just because he couldn’t accept a Creator who would work His wonders by such grotesque and distorted paths, paths through realms of ugliness and pain and sorrow. Any God acceptable to Charles Darwin had to be distant and uninvolved with such a world. He had to be a God who retreated after Creating. If He existed at all. Or maybe the pagans were right and matter co-exists with God. Most modern Christians seem to keep their pain by denying God would have created such a world and so they adopt a sort of semi-paganism which allows them to think that evil, from Satan or multiple sources, has somehow invaded the work of an — otherwise — all-powerful Creator. Christians who can’t deal with the grotesque aspects of God’s Creation have to act and talk as if the world doesn’t quite belong to God. And so it is that these bad things happen against the will of this all-powerful and all-knowing God, who is then reduced to vengeful acts such as aiming a hurricane at New Orleans or unleashing a volcano on the gentle inhabitants of Montserrat. And then there’s AIDS the most famous victim of which was the gentlemanly and morally well-ordered Arthur Ashe who got his HIV from a blood transfusion. I guess God sometimes has poor aim. Or else maybe these terrible aspects of Creation are a basic part of the story He’s telling, a story in which good in formation looks as grotesque as evil in its maturity?

I would suggest that Christians should grow up and accept the fact that God, while interested in our ultimate good, is clearly not interested in guaranteeing an easy and comfortable life to even His most faithful followers. In fact, He seems to sometimes hit those faithful followers all the harder and to twist them and their paths through life with all the greater force. If you eliminate all that is grotesque in your life, and your children’s lives, be aware that you might be trying to eliminate all that brings about the ultimate good that our Maker intends for those of His children who accept His will.

What could be more grotesque than a tortured Christ, a source of the true light of goodness overwhelmed by a rather sadistic darkness which is part of His Father’s Creation? What could be more grotesque than the Son of God humiliated and whipped? What could be more grotesque than Jesus Christ, His body bloody and battered and His features distorted by pain and wounds? What could be more grotesque than a God who taught us to conquer evil by watching His own true Son submitting to such horrors? What could be more grotesque than a saved world, a world after the resurrection of Christ, where children can be more often healed — for a while — of face-deforming cancers of the sort endured by Mary Ann, but increasingly our miraculous medical cures depend upon techniques and methods and extend-life-at-all-cost attitudes which are sometimes morally bothersome even when not directly immoral, at least bothersome to those of us who value the good over the elimination of what is considered evil or grotesque by men of the modern West, as dainty in their sensibilities as they are obliviously brutal in inflicting so-called collateral damage upon children and others in far-away regions of the globe.

I’m going to propose a full-blooded organic understanding of the Body of Christ. This is intended as an expansion of the teachings of St. Paul rather than a new way of thought about that Body. It would seem appropriate to expand those teachings now that we have a deep and wide knowledge of organisms, including the ways in which complex multi-celled or multi-organ organisms evolved from simple cellular organisms.

An interesting question along these lines is:

Is the Christian Church Herself but one organ in the Body of Christ?

It’s better for now to be a little vague about the definition of the Church, but it’s clear the Church is the center of worship and communion with Christ and, through Him, with the Father and the Holy Spirit as well. The Church is the organ in which and through which the community of Christ’s chosen brethren can share the life of God. Yet, there are other human needs met by other forms of human community which overlap with the Church but are most certainly not fully subordinate to Her though subordinate in terms of moral and spiritual guidance. Those other needs, economic and artistic and political, are lesser than our need for communion with God, the very Source of our being, but they are true needs and noble in their own lesser way. In terms which might seem to contradict some of my prior discussions, there are many human needs which can be met only by entering the marketplaces, the regions in which individuals can interact with many of the organs of which they are members.

I’ve spoken against the marketplaces in the modern world, especially in my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand, but I’ve also spoken against the Church Herself in acting strongly outside of the region of Her competence in the Galileo affair and many other cases. But the problem doesn’t come so much from one organ of the Body of Christ intruding into the regions of other organs but rather from one organ not recognizing the proper functions of other organs. In fact, a Christian should be able to realize, once the idea is broached, that the Body of Christ will be like the Holy Trinity, but with far more individuals and — at least in my current proposal — with some intermediary organs. That possibility is raised by the very presence of Jesus Christ in the Body of Christ. He’s with us, but He’s also above us and outside of us. While the Body of Christ might be much like the Holy Trinity, three Persons in one God, it can’t be exactly like it because the Son of God, Himself God, will be in that Body.

To diverge for just a single idea: we need geometric descriptions of individual entities which inhabit ‘spaces’ which have no surfaces as such. Those spaces overlap completely and yet the individual entities would retain their own identity. In the view I’m now exploring, those entities would also form organs of multiple individuals but those organs would be part of an entity which might well be the entirety of the world in which they exist.

I’m forced to speculate far ahead of more specific and better-formed theories just because Western Christians and all others with responsibilities for Western Civilization have failed to respond properly to the enterprises of gathering modern empirical knowledge. Those enterprises have opened fantastic possibilities for understanding God’s Creation and have also demolished old ways of understanding the nature of man, the possibilities of resurrection, and other aspects of Creation and relationships between God and His creatures. My way of looking at created being as multi-leveled, going from abstract truths to concrete being, gives ways for human thinkers to ascend to higher abstractions for both more general understanding but also for a descent towards particular, or concrete, being which might exist. To reach some speculative understanding of the world of the resurrected, a human thinker ascends from this realm of growth and decay to high levels of abstraction and then tries to find a path down towards a world made of the same stuff as this one but a world in which growth might be possible but decay doesn’t occur.

In any case, Christian thinkers are behind two centuries or more in their understanding of God’s Creation. We have a lot of ground to make up.

Let me return to a more limited line of thought for now… I’ve spoken in the past of Western Civilization as being a home which the Christian Church (in the West) built for Herself. This is a metaphor used by Joseph Ratzinger (currently Pope Benedict XVI). Cardinal Ratzinger went on to note that Christians of the West hadn’t properly maintained their home. From there, I went on to claim that Western Civilization isn’t in trouble because of invasions by pagans or Satanic agents but rather because Western Christians were morally irresponsible in their duties towards their own civilization. Pagans and others didn’t invade the West. They wandered into vacated public spaces.

With that as background, I’ll move to the possibility that Western Civilization wasn’t so much a house as a unstable colony of human communities which could be viewed as a first try at developing the Body of Christ. Some of those organisms, individual or communal, grew into parasites or cancers prospering for a while at the expense of the earthly Body of Christ as a whole. The functions of those organs, such as governments which destroy their own underlying communities, are important but have their proper limits. The evolutionary pathways of multi-cellular organisms, such as bipedal apes, passed through similar rough spots. I imagine there were paths which dead-ended when parts of organisms began to prey on other parts. A family line of creatures which develop fatal cancers near the onset of the age of reproduction will disappear pretty quickly.

If we believe there is a forward thrust in this development of the Body of Christ, then the organism as a whole — however primitive it might be at this stage — will eliminate the diseased organs and new organs might grow in its place but maybe different sorts of organs will grow. Let’s consider this a process of a presentation and selection sort — natural selection is a specific such process.

And I return to my speculative claim that the Body of Christ is made of multiple organs and the Church is the most important of those organs because it is by way of the Church that we are united with the Lord Jesus Christ and, through Him, with the Holy Trinity. Given this hypothetical understanding of the Body of Christ, history doesn’t speak of a struggle of a righteous Church against worldly powers which serve un-Godly purposes. It tells us of a struggle in which the various organs of the Body of Christ are developing in themselves even as the greater Body also develops. The Church Herself has at times begun to take on the functions of other organs, threatening to turn cancerous, but She was returned to Her proper functions and proper boundaries, as if God truly does act to discipline Her but also to save Her. There is some reason to believe she’s now the most mature of the organs in the Body of Christ — at a time when her worldly power has shrunk greatly relative to that of cancerous and parasitical political and economic organs. Yet, those organs, no matter how diseased at present, also fill important roles in the Body of Christ — they meet human needs. The question is: are those merely needs in this human realm or are they needs of any being truly human, even a human being living in the world of the resurrected? I’m betting that human beings have political and economic needs and those will be met in the world of the resurrected.

We have to keep in mind that individuals are also developing, as individuals, as members of various organs, and as members of the entire Body of Christ. This is one of the reasons for my current speculations. If we are to be truly saved, as our own selves, then it must be true that grace completes and perfects nature rather than overriding it in any way. Our political and economic needs are to be completed and perfected when we rise from the grave to live for time without end with the Lord Jesus Christ. We human beings naturally form communities and institutions for several of our major categories of needs. I don’t see the Church as being capable of satisfying all these needs. And — to repeat — I don’t see those needs as disappearing in the world of the resurrected, not if we’re to remain human beings.

If viable in light of Christian revelations and what is known of Creation and human creatures in particular, my current speculations make it possible to discuss the Body of Christ coherently. We can speak of life after death and still sound sane but we have to adjust to speak in terms consistent with those realms of Creation we can directly perceive or can reach by the proper exercise of our all-too human minds.

This program of thought would force us Christians to work hard to grasp difficult lines of thought, to be capable of thinking of the Body of Christ as a fantastically complex organism, not the simple choir in heaven of Amazing Grace but rather the embodiment and realization of an awful lot that’s good about human life including many things we can’t quite realize in this mortal realm. Political relationships would remain as would cultural traditions — all brought to their fullness but remaining alive and growing. The implied developmental processes and the resulting complex structures might be describable by tools similar to those used by Einstein to develop his general theory of relativity — differential geometry and the closely related tensor calculus. Or those processes might be similar to those of quantum mechanics. In any case, they don’t seem likely to be well described in any meaningful sense by existing modes of theological or mystical discourse. This doesn’t mean that mysticism would disappear, only that a valid mysticism would point to realities beyond perceptible realities as we best understand them. This is to say that reality defines certain frontiers and the lands beyond those frontiers. Mysticism that speaks of what lies byond the frontiers of the empirical world as understood by ancient and Medieval thinkers becomes no better than nostalgia at best, the babbling of a lunatic at worst.

The question I raised to start is:

Is the Church Herself but one organ in the Body of Christ?

My best speculations right now indicate this to almost certainly be the case. Moreover, the Church Herself has acted in recent centuries, especially through the Papacy, as if She is to play the role of moral and spiritual guide for the economic and political and social powers, in addition to playing Her primary role in directly communicating with God through worship and praise. The Church in recent centuries, through the Popes and through the bishops sitting in council, hasn’t claimed any right to rule directly, only to play the role of conscience, a role not yet acceptable to most of the other organs of the Body of Christ.

If the Body of Christ is forming now in this mortal realm, though the process might not get close to the final result in the world of the resurrected, then it becomes possible to explore that process and to come to some significant understanding of the Body of Christ and how it develops. More than that, the effort to understand the Body would seem to be the duty of those who claim to be Christian thinkers, theologians or philosophers or historians or creative writers. Pursuing this line of thought would seem the best way forward (in fact, out of the ghetto built by Christian thinkers over the past 200 years or more) for Christian theology and would provide a solid foundation for those very important topics in Christian theology: the nature of the union of God and man and the Eucharist.

Nearly all human beings, nearly all the time, think only thoughts which have been thought already within their sphere of knowledge, typically some level and region of a particular culture. Few and far between are the identifiable creative thinkers, though we must remember that creative thinkers are also members of specific communities which provide the raw materials of Platonic metaphysics or Shakespearian comedies. We must also remember that ideas, however vague, emerge in time without any specific originator, but often a poet or philosopher will step forward to bring such ideas into focus. I’ll be ignoring those communal aspects of human thought, conformist and creative, in this article. I’ll also ignore the little creative acts and thoughts which can lead to, for example, changes in the ways in which children are raised. Those sorts of changes can bring about new cultural epochs but such major changes are at least announced by those poets or philosophers, musicians or sometimes a great statesman. Because our age has problems in the foundations of our understandings of individual human natures, the purposes — if any — of Western Civilization, the relationship — if any — between God and man, we have a need for Plato-size thinkers, creative as well as profound.

There are many more good thinkers than creative thinkers. In saying this, I’m referring to those who can apply existing thoughts or even reuse existing thoughts in new ways as being good thinkers. A very crude analogy would be to an erector set where occasionally there is a need for a new structural element or a new sort of connecting device, but that need might be unmet, even strangely unnoticed, until — maybe — the right thinker looks at the problem in a fresh way. Meanwhile, intricate and interesting structures are being built from existing components in that erector set. It seems strange at first to read a history of modern physics and to learn that even so creative and powerful a thinker as Henri Poincare can be looking at something so important as the basic insights that we know as the special theory of relativity, and he doesn’t see what he should see. Creative he was, but not creative enough. An Einstein was needed to do ‘no more’ than make sense of what physicists already knew.

Let me put this in the context of my updated and expanded version of the Thomistic theory on the formation of the mind. Our minds form as we respond to our environments. Men can respond to multiple environments at once because of their abilities to reason abstractly, plan into the future, etc. Some men can even form their minds in response to some current and plausible understanding of the cosmos or universe. A very few, by percentage, might have minds capable of responding in some substantial sense to the entirety of God’s Creation, that is, to God’s Creation as we can currently understand it. Pioneers seem to be relatively few, that is, those who have minds reliable enough to come to coherent understandings but flexible enough to respond to new knowledge or new perceptions.

A literate society can make it possible for some to develop their minds to high levels and some of those with good minds will follow the paths blazed by the creative few and make far more of newly discovered regions of God’s Creation than the creative thinker could have done. Yet, a good mind isn’t always a creative mind. A good mind might move, more or less, in the realm of the known — with a typical mixture of truth and errors, richness and barrenness.

I’m claiming that creativity is a result of the human being moving, intellectually or morally or spiritually, in realms already created by God, realms which remain invisible to most thinkers even when we’ve accumulated a good body of knowledge about those realms. But there are some who are prepared, by nurture or nature or both, to move around in realms not explored or not fully explored. Those movements might be into regions new to the human race, such as the movements of mathematical physicists in recent centuries or the truncated efforts of Beethoven to compose new forms of music near the end of his life. Those movements might be movements that allow a new look at known regions. In any case, the movements should lead to further responses to certain thoughts God has manifested in Creation, responses which change the shape of our minds, of our entire human beings, making God’s thoughts our thoughts to some extent.

Our basic mental skills are variations on the ability to respond to our environments, abstracting to more general levels of understanding at times and nearly always using the abstractions which are built into our words and the contents of our minds. I speak of ‘contents of our minds’ here rather than concepts to make it clear that those contents come from God’s Creation, from the thoughts manifested in Creation by our Maker. Those contents aren’t perfect images of the Creator’s thoughts, perhaps they’re fuzzy or distorted in various ways, but they are some sort of images of those divine thoughts. But those contents change the mind which initially held them uncomfortably. This process leads to the development of more refined mental skills, sometimes erasing our inborn mental skills. In the end, there is no real separation of Einstein’s mind from his mathematical physics. Lest I seem to be dehumanizing the man, I’ll add his love of music and his very high levels of skill on the violin and piano were just as much a part of his being as was his physics.

I’m claiming that our creativity is a response, perhaps inappropriate, to God’s manifested thoughts. Ultimately, our thoughts are imitations of thoughts of God, or perhaps our twisted understanding of those thoughts of God as found in our environments. Am I attempting to eliminate or at least greatly restrict the freedom of a creative man? If such men can only imitate God in His thoughts as manifested in Creation, how can there be freedom for a person living by way of established routines? Am I proposing a form of predestination that reduces mankind to a fraudulently creative race?

No, but I don’t have a definitive explanation. I am motivated to find an optimistic answer by my own experiences and those experiences provide a partial self-understanding of my creative efforts as well as something of an uplifting feeling about my freedom when I try to respond honestly and without fear to Creation and its Creator. Creativity and freedom come from God and we can share in the divine freedom by responding to Creation, or in a more personal way to God, in the way of an apprentice who perhaps does nothing more that sweep his master’s workshop but is, at least in principle, sharing in the experience of being a master craftsman as he watches and tries to learn. I can also say, perhaps at the risk of boasting, that I consider myself to be a creative thinker, one deliberately trying to shape his mind and activities as responses to Creation and the Creator and I don’t feel imprisoned or enchained. I feel as if I am sharing in God’s own freedom during my bursts of creative thoughts, bursts which often follow only after months of frustrations and hard work. I’ll add that my self-understanding indicates that I start proposing answers to a problem, working up a little narrative of sorts and then judge if it seems to be moving with the grain of the universe, to borrow a metaphor from Stanley Hauerwas. I don’t like moving against the grain or even across the grain, perhaps because I suffered too often from slivers when I was young. And so it is that I keep revising my proposed answers or narrative until I detect an okay from my Maker, not necessarily enthusiastic applause. I often get a feeling that God shrugs a little and says, “Well, that’s not too awfully bad, so we can go with it for now.” My feelings aren’t hurt as I realize Creation is an awfully complex place for a bipedal ape and, anyway, God’s standards can be pretty high though He accepts lesser achievements as we’re learning.

We have a desperate need in the West, indeed in all regions of the earth, for creative thought, by parents trying to raise their children in a world where so many seek to deform the minds of the young ones to make them better targets for profitable activities, by local political leaders who don’t yet seem to realize that town and city governments have been enslaved by the central governments, and by novelists and philosophers who might put our entire mess in a good perspective. The last group, my own group, is usually my direct concern but many of my claims are intended for more general application.

The West is living off the gains of past successes and is, more or less, under the control of bureaucrats allied with motley crews of greedy and ambitious men whose major talent is simply grasping and holding on tight to what they seized from others. The West badly needs creative responses rather than simply more gadgets or more wars or more regulation by already bloated government agencies. Most certainly, we have no need for more corporate welfare programs. Unfortunately, such societies as ours has decayed into are the least likely to welcome creativity. Such societies are likely to actively suppress creativity, seeking to make the minds of their youths as rigid as those of the teachers and other bureaucrats. This is to say that a mind formed in response to textbooks and to the methods of modern educators will be about as flexible as a steel cog formed for a specific role in a particular machine.

We should be responding to God’s Creation, not just to our raw perceptions of nature but to the best available past responses and the open-ended responses of the modern research programs. With proper modifications, this statement will be as true of future mothers and future carpenters as it is of future poets or metaphysicians, but I’ll repeat that my current interest is in the realms of creativity in abstract thought.

If my tentative answer is right, then Creation itself must be a manifestation of God’s acts which are somewhat open-ended from any viewpoint inside of Creation, bringing forth possibilities and not always certainties, but they are God’s possibilities and we have to find those possibilities and then respond to them. Then we can share in the creativity and freedom of God.

As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger noted years ago, western Christians built Western Civilization as a home for the churches united to Rome. St. Augustine and St. Benedict and St. Gregory the Great laid the foundations and many others built upon those foundations. For centuries, Western Civilization was a home for the Catholic Church and then for Protestants and others as well. Etienne Gilson, the Thomistic scholar, and Ratzinger have both noted that it was Christians who failed to maintain the Church’s home. Gilson gave a specific reason for this failure: Catholic intellectuals had no good answers to the modern questions raised during the Enlightenment and the bad answers given by others led to the slaughters of the French Revolution and gave men of little imagination and rigid faith an excuse to retreat into an intellectual ghetto. Christian intellectuals have generally remained in self-confinement since then.

It was new discoveries in God’s Creation and the consequent changes in human societies which had created new opportunities and raised new problems, violent men and scoundrels did no more than take advantage of the confusion caused by the failure of Western leaders and intellectuals to respond properly. If Western men were being tested by God, they seem to have flunked the tests pretty consistently, except perhaps for the scientists. Or, did we men of the West really do so badly? In a series of upcoming articles, I’ll try to raise a new perspective that might be more optimistic about the general development of human civilization and the necessarily parallel development of the human mind.

In any case, it would seem we need to build anew and to aim at constructing something like Western Civilization. There are many treasures in the rubble and many more feeding bookworms and silverfish in those libraries which haven’t yet replaced Austen by King or even eliminated most books in favor of video recordings of some sort. And then there are the old folk-songs and ditties of which I learned only a smattering in my childhood in the 1960s. I doubt if many born in the past three decades know so much as a song from their Scottish or Polish or French-Canadian ancestors. Even popular American folk-music, such as that of Stephan Foster or that performed by Burl Ives or Pete Seeger in the 1950s onward, isn’t heard often nowadays.

I don’t speak in terms of a political or military decay but rather in more general terms of the decay of concrete aspects of human life, musical and culinary and literary. A civilization is formed from the ground up, the foundation coming from folk-music along with sophisticated liturgical music, nursery rhymes along with odes which celebrate concrete reality and what lies behind it, stories from the old country told by Grandpa as well as those great books we were taught to hate during our high school years. We are surrounded by art and entertainment that does more damage by its lack of intelligence and lack of historical roots than by its sometime despicable moral messages. But most of the art and entertainment which seems to preach moral truths is just as despicable. The seeming moral decency of Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver was unfounded, smoke and mirrors under the control of wizards who just wanted to sell us products and ways of life that would replace traditional ways of life to the profit of the greedy and the ambitious.

I’ve consistently argued the human mind forms as we respond to our environments, a claim which may explain my observation that there are intelligent and knowledgeable human beings who don’t give any strong signs of having real minds, active and probing entities. They don’t respond to God’s world, don’t actively reach out in an effort to understand. They grow up as passive victims of modern school systems as well as passive victims of the entertainment industry. Perhaps it’s always been true that the vast majority of human beings pick up their most basic attitudes and beliefs in such passive ways. If true, that would argue against the possibility of good self-government in this dynamic world, but I’ll not argue that issue one way or another. It does seem true that we in the modern West have failed to exercise our own human nature in active responses to the world around us.

We must learn to be more active and more responsible for the formation of our own minds and our own moral natures, and we must help our children to do the same. The proper way to do that is to respond to God’s Creation as we best know it and understand it, the upsetting parts of science and history as well as those parts which generate material prosperity or make us feel good about ourselves. We must move forward, remembering the lessons of the past, lessons of what worked well and what didn’t work very well, but we must look ahead to a future which can seem awfully frightening because there are many signs of great changes in the world of men, changes largely forced by successes in exploring and using the resources of this world.

I’ll move on in my next posting or two to try to establish some coherent understanding of that misunderstood and misused word, ‘creative’, in terms of my updated Thomistic existentialism and then I hope to explore Flannery O’Connor’s observation that the good under formation is sometimes rather grotesque in appearance.

In recent months, I’ve not posted often to my other blog, To See a World in a Grain of Sand, but I’ve posted an article, A Truer Ecumenical Movement — Who is a Christian?,that may be of some interest to the readers of this blog.

Jesus tells of a master going on a journey and entrusting a part of his treasure to some servants (3 or 10, there are multiple recorded versions). On his return, some had invested the portion entrusted to them and had made a profit. In each version, one servant had merely hidden away his share of the treasure, his talent, to keep it safe. And by doing so, he kept that talent sterile, non-productive.

There is a lesson we should have learned from those parables which would have maybe guided Christians, over the past two or more centuries, to a greater sense of moral responsibility. That is, those of us who believe in the all-powerful Creator, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, should go forth with courage and faith into the world to invest our talents in God’s work. We should respond in good faith to God’s Creation even — no, especially — when it gives us strong reason to reject some of our favorite human beliefs.

What happened to the Western Civilization built by St. Augustine and his successors over many centuries? It was Christian and was the home of the Christian Church. It was under the stewardship of Christians. In a word, it was ours to nurture or to lose and we lost it. Western Civilization wasn’t taken from Christians by Satan or by masses of hostile pagans. We lost it and we lost it largely by petrifying the dynamic, living ways of thought given to us by the likes of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. This process of petrifying our mental and spiritual food led to a petrification of our minds and souls.

Still more directed to the angle I’m presenting in this entry:

We Christians walked away from Western Civilization and locked ourselves in various intellectual and spiritual ghettos.

Any rational efforts to construct a story where Satan or masses of pagans took Western Civilization over by force will just dissipate into smoke and dust. There are no great battles between Christian defenders of Western Civilization and demon-worshiping barbarians red of tooth and claw. There are very few Christian defenders worth mentioning in the, mostly, pitiful struggle over the past two centuries or so over the understanding of our world and our appropriate responses to it. For the most part, the emptied squares of the Christian city, a city of both God and man, were occupied by unwise men who tried not to return to barbarism or paganism so much as to create Hazel Motes’ church of truth without Jesus Christ crucified. (Read Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood to learn about this most modern of churches.) But those who created such strange ways of thought, whether Nietzsche himself or his rather mindless successors in modern liberal democracies, were themselves victims of the moral irresponsibility of those Christians who had the duty to protect and nurture Western Civilization, or find and educate those who might be up to the task.

Because of that moral irresponsibility of Christians who walked away from their duties as stewards of Western Civilization, men of the West have come to see Creation as apart from its Creator. Western Civilization was a home for the Church, but still better: a setting and itself a character in a drama in which the story of this world was played out by the likes of Augustine of Hippo and Albert Magnus, Fra Angelico and Michelangelo, Johann Sebastian Bach and Amadeus Mozart, Isaac Newton and Carl Linnaeus, William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy, Louis I of France and George Washington. These men were but children learning to imitate their Father in Heaven as He went about His work as Creator. Yet, they were children of some greatness. Certainly, they were children of promise and they created a way of thought, as time-bound as it proved to be, which allowed men to see the increasingly transparent universe as being certain aspects of a true world, unified and coherent and complete, a physical place yes but one which is a setting for a morally well-ordered story told by God.

For sure, there have been some serious Christian thinkers in recent centuries, such as the historians of theology, John Henry Newman and Jaroslav Pelikan, or the historians and philosophers of science, Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki. There have been some novelists, the somewhat Jansenistic Graham Greene and the Thomistic Flannery O’Connor come to mind, who’ve shown they can explore human nature from two radically different Christian viewpoints and produce serious literature, not pietistic nonsense but also not moral chaos. On the whole, I know of little in the way of modern Christian philosophy or theology which is so fruitful of insights as the anti-Christian writings of Nietzsche and Sartre.

The list of Christian thinkers who have responded with open hearts and open minds to God’s Creation in recent centuries is frighteningly short, even if expanded to include all plausible substantial thinkers, at least those known publicly. Thinkers who did better may well have been buried in the dust-bin of history by bureaucrats and time-servers afraid of the newness with which Creation presents itself as Western Civilization developed, and often enough developed so explosively as to blow apart even those institutions which best served God.

On the whole, Christians have been in retreat from a world which had suddenly asked questions not to be found in our textbooks and our stale sermons. But what of all those who fill the catalogs of Christian publishers, Catholic or Protestant? Let me mention a few. C.S. Lewis combined some moral insight with non-Christian ideas about reality. His version of substantialist philosophy of the Neoplatonic variety is more consistent with a pagan idea of matter which co-exists eternally with God rather than a more radical idea of God as a true Creator. (To be sure, the alleged Thomist G.E.M. Anscombe wasn’t so far from Lewis’ viewpoint as she should have been — indicative of a deep problem with modern thinkers.) Hillare Belloc was a second-rate mind, a high achievement indeed as there aren’t that many first-rate minds. G.K. Chesterton was perhaps a third-rate mind with some worthwhile insights into the role of faith in human life. To mention a Protestant unfairly slighted: Jonathon Edwards perhaps had a first-rate mind, but one who proved the main thrust of Calvinism was a return to the higher paganism with a radically isolated God and not Christianity with its open promise of a union between men and God. I suspect a more coherent modern political philosophy could be built upon the anthropology of Edwards than upon that of Locke — after all, we are pagans dedicated to shaping the world to our own needs and not to the purposes of God. Edwards’ anthropology was a pessimistic form of modern liberalism — perhaps in the line of Hobbes, and far more rational for that pessimism. This is to say that the positing of a will which mysteriously floats free of our embodied selves leads more consistently to the idea that we are truly and inherently depraved. We act in a depraved manner when we gain the power to do so. If we are, on the other hand, embodied creatures which develop and evolve, then other possibilities arise, even the possibility of becoming Christ-like so that we can share, in a properly limited way, the life of God for time without end. The possibility even arises that we can, in principle, learn to properly handle great power in this mortal realm.

The main thrust of this highly opinionated article is: Christians have shaped their minds to the limited environments to be found in the ghettos they built for themselves. There are libraries of books, many great, written in earlier times and written to produce systems of thought including ancient or Medieval understandings of Creation. We have enriched understandings of some aspects of that Creation and yet we haven’t had the courage to revise our total understanding of Creation, to add any works to that library which show the faith and courage of Origen or Augustine. For example, our ways of understanding reality, when we think as Christians, remain bound to the understandings of time and space and matter derived by ancient, Medieval, and early-modern thinkers, not all Christians for sure. We think of ourselves as born as certain ‘persons’ rather than as dynamically developing entities in a story far greater than ourselves. We are defined by the overlapping developments of our bodies and our roles in that story being told by God. We are some endpoints of those developments, endpoints known only to God.

The ideal human mind is well-formed while being flexible enough to deal with new knowledge or new views. To withdraw, as a group of some sort, into an intellectual ghetto might seem the right way to protect our own minds and the minds of future generations in our group when we’re under some sort of assault. It’s never the right way for Christians for the simple reason that we believe that God is Creator and Sustainer of all that is. We learned the truths that emerged from the synthesis of Plato and Moses to be found in the works of the Jewish philosopher Philo, a contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, and we, especially Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, made those truths still more fundamental to our systems of thought than did even the Jews who followed Philo. No one, other than perhaps me, has come up with even the beginning of a new understanding of God’s Creation which properly considers the insights of Newton and Galois, Cantor and Einstein, Huxley and Watson. Nor has anyone produced a proper response to modernist streams of abstract thought other than perhaps Etienne Gilson, who had great respect for some of those streams, even some which were anti-Christian.

The world around us is God’s in all senses. If we Christians can’t make sense of the best knowledge of that world in terms of our faith, then we have a problem and we should work on that problem and not try to shut out the parts of God’s world which don’t fit conveniently into our systems of thought. I would even suggest it possible that such an attempt to shut out God’s world is one form of the sin against the Holy Spirit. If we teach ourselves to be rigid in the face of inconvenient facts or events while we live in this phase of God’s Creation, what would make us think we’ll magically loosen up in Heaven? In fact, I fear Heaven would be Hell to a rigid mind because such a mind would be constantly resisting God’s own advances.

I came to these thoughts while thinking about occasional stories indicating that current religious believers might be dumber, on average, than non-believers. My speculation, for now, is that this is true but only because of the ‘top end’. That is, smarter and more creative thinkers are more attracted to non-believing communities and ways of thought, at least partly because they wouldn’t be allowed to use their higher intelligence and/or creativity if they were to become Christians. Some might remain or become Christians while keeping their more substantial intellectual and creative lives separate from their lives as worshipers.

I’ll speak of a personal experience from 20 years ago or so, without naming the publisher or individual persons. I submitted to a Catholic publisher a novel about my spiritual conversion, years before I understood that conversion as it turned out, and the publisher wished to go with the book but his literary adviser told him he’d lose money because there’s no market among American Catholics for serious literature, though the problem is more general. It’s not too hard to find Catholics, or other Christians, who’ve read all the books of Robert Ludlum and maybe seen all the movies, but Flannery O’Connor is following Hermann Melville into some sort of an abyss though she probably had a more interesting, more orthodox, and more insightful way of dealing with sin in the light of the modern perspective than any best-selling Christian author or any Christian academician I know of.

Of course, Christians, maybe believers in general, are dumber than non-believers. Christians discourage thought and discourage the development of a living mind. They either cripple the mental workings of their children’s minds or drive them out of Christianity.

But this is God’s world and I’ll be posting some more optimistic view of what’s happening in our troubled age. The outlook is good for future generations, but we can bring that future closer in time by courageously and faithfully doing our part to encourage creative thought in ourselves or in others.

God has shaped a thing-like world out of more basic stuff. I’ve discussed this in various ways, especially in the category: Christian in the Universe of Einstein. We human beings form our minds by responding actively to that world and by penetrating to understandings of that more basic stuff. A particular thing is a manifestation of a particular thought of God though all things in Creation are intertwined in the most complex and complicated way as William Blake told us in his efforts to see a world in a grain of sand. Each grain of sand is made of various particles made of sub-particles, each of which has peculiar properties and ways of relating to other particles or sub-particles or even other things. The particular things also have their forms of behavior and of relating to other things.

The world is not a dualistic mish-mash of various sorts of substances, mind-soul and body in many traditions. The world is a story God is telling with a universe He shaped out of some strangely abstract stuff which, so to speak, lies on the other side of the Big Bang. There might actually be many complex stages or even a series of expansions and collapses before we could get ‘closer’ to God’s original act-of-being by which He created from nothingness. Those details aren’t important for now.

Human beings aren’t born with minds or souls attached to their bodies by some mysterious glue. Human beings are born with brains which have major regions which have the potential for abstract thinking — such as that form of thinking which we might describe as future-oriented. Those regions are not preset to function in highly specific ways as, for example, the hippocampus is preset to form long-term memories out of short-term ones according to certain criteria. Cells in the regions of the human brain devoted to abstract thinking shape their connections to other cells in the same regions and to cells in other regions according to criteria which have been investigated by modern brain-scientists. (See the various writings of Gerald Edelman for a powerful and coherent understanding of the brain’s ‘shaping’ processes.)

Mozart wasn’t born a great musician, though he clearly was born with a brain that could be shaped into that of a composer who could see a piece of music in its entirety the way that we more ordinary folk can see a tree in its entirety — so long as we stand back from the tree but not too far back. Our brains can encompass only so much, too much detail can destroy the understanding as easily as can a sweeping landscape view. But even the ability to see a tree truly, in its concrete or abstract nature, comes from our active response to trees when we see them as children, perhaps under the guidance of an adult interested in nature.

God made that tree, as a poet once reminded us. The Creator made that tree by manifesting certain abstract ideas from which He shaped the basic stuff of this universe and then by manifesting the idea of certain sorts of developmental processes which formed first protons, then atoms of hydrogen and helium, then atoms of carbon and oxygen, then stars and planets, then organic chemicals, then slime-molds, then apes, and so forth.

Brilliant men of the pre-modern era somewhat wrongly shaped their minds and taught us to wrongly shape our minds because they saw that tree as a manifestation of an ideal object (to play a little loose with metaphysical language for the sake of conciseness) rather than seeing it as a dynamic object, even a character of sorts, in a stream of events. And, yet, there were also those who saw that tree as arising out of some sort of chaos and they formed an anti-metaphysics of sorts.

It would seem that God doesn’t feel bound to operate by the rules of either Plato or Heraclitus. We should honor them and see the insightfulness in their thoughts, for they were also characters in a sub-narrative of human history, a small but important story we could title: The Development of the Human Mind at the Racial Level. We now know enough to move on to a higher level of understanding, however inadequate it might eventually prove to be.

From the metaphysics of the Greeks, based upon very simple physics, to Augustine of Hippo who provided a substantial appreciation of the importance of time and the flow of events, through Aquinas who provided a deeper understanding of both the mind and also of being, through various modern philosopher-scientists who gave us brilliant understandings of the interaction of matter and of abstract mathematics — including Einstein and Planck and Dirac who enriched our understanding of time and space and matter and relationships, we come to us with our minds not so well shaped as they should be to these modern understandings of Creation at its concrete and abstract levels.

But some of us are trying and many seem at least willing to admit their confusion at trying to fit evolutionary concepts into brains shaped to consider species as ideal categories or to fit the theories of relativity into brains shaped to regard time as uniformly flowing in a way fully separable from space which is itself absolute or trying to make sense of traditional moral rules when geneticists have found strong correlations, as one example, between mutations and strong feelings of ‘transsexualism’ in some who are otherwise fully male in their genetic make-up. Where is this ‘free-will’ that can overcome a creature’s own fundamental being?

Ah, the world be far more complex than the most convoluted of the sentences I’ve constructed in this article. We do need, in fact, new ways to speak of complex facts which overwhelm our language. We need musicians to compose in new ways consistent with Einstein’s insights into space-time and poets to speak of Turing’s insights into the nature of algorithmic thought.

The human mind, in its abstract aspects, is the human understanding of Creation, in all perceivable and conceivable aspects. The contents of knowledge are the container of the mind and it is shaped by the quite active responses human beings make to Creation. But the very language of ‘contents’ and ‘container’ needs to be at least refreshed and maybe replaced entirely. We also have to remember the communal foundation of the human mind, but I’ll pass over that in this short article.

Let me summarize:

God created things as manifestations of some of His thoughts. By learning to shape his brain in response to those things, man brings into being certain states of that brain which can be truly called a human mind.

And so man’s mind and the being created by God are not so readily separable. Bishop Berkeley was onto something with his insight that created things can be regarded as thoughts of God but he made the mistake of thinking human beings can directly penetrate to the thoughts manifested as substantial entities. He also seemed to think that abstractions had some sort of absolute existence independent of the thoughts of God. To Berkeley, and others, there are abstract truths which form a common language for God and man, while I’m proposing that God has a language and man learns it by responding to God’s work as Creator.

[I'm working on a series of books summarizing my thoughts and writings over the past 3+ years, building upon the contents of my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand. As I review my work to-date, I'll be republishing some of the articles from my blogs, sometimes pretty much unaltered but sometimes with some updating. This article was first published in September of 2007 on my other website as: Randomness as a Sign of God's Presence.]

One of the most important, if little noticed, intellectual events of modern times is the development of a rational understanding of randomness to potentially replace an ancient understanding which is surprising mystical for such an important concept in modern mathematics and other fields of modern science. Based on that rational understanding, I made the following claims in my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand:

• Only God can make a truly random number, and

• Only God can act in a truly random way

In this article, I’ll be discussing the reasons for these two tightly related claims and I’ll try to make the discussion accessible to a larger body of readers unacquainted with the work in a field with the forbidding name of algorithmic number theory. This field started to develop in the 1960s. In the middle of that decade, a prominent Russian mathematician, A. N. Kolmogorov, and an American high school student, Gregory Chaitin, both had the idea that randomness was more a matter of algorithmic complexity than of some sort of magic. To cut to the chase, a random number is one which has no patterns which allow it to be described more briefly than simply listing the digits. To be perfectly random, the number can have no patterns at all. It would be essentially a listing of digits which have algorithmic complexity that is absolutely infinite. A number of such an unfathomable nature could be described as the rawest of facts.

Gregory Chaitin continued to work in the field of algorithmic number theory even as he worked as a programmer in an IBM research laboratory. In fact, he ended up proving his major result in this field, to be discussed below, by constructing a compiler for his own dialect of lisp (programming language), the powerful computer language invented by John McCarthy as part of early efforts in the wrongly named field of artificial intelligence. Dr. Chaitin constructed his compiler in such a way that it would ‘work’ only if his theorem is correct. It worked and the theorem was proved.

See Gregory Chaitin’s homepage for both downloadable articles and information on books by Dr. Chaitin. Some of those articles include background information including some comments on those thinkers who are considered by Dr. Chaitin to have had a formative influence on the development of algorithmic number theory. The proof of the main theorem and some background knowledge is presented in his book Algorithmic Information Theory. The first paragraph of the description of Algorithmic Information Theory is:

Chaitin, the inventor of algorithmic information theory, presents in this book the strongest possible version of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, using an information theoretic approach based on the size of computer programs. One half of the book is concerned with studying the halting probability of a universal computer if its program is chosen by tossing a coin. The other half is concerned with encoding the halting probability as an algebraic equation in integers, a so-called exponential diophantine equation.

Algorithmic information theory, deals with degrees of randomness more than with perfect randomness because we can’t produce a random number. Nor do we have the slightest reason to believe that nature can produce a random number or any movement or change that corresponds to pure randomness — unless God interjects that randomness. It seems to me to be an open question whether God could even do that without violating the integrity of His own Creation. See the ending to the story of Noah in the book of Genesis for an early discussion into God’s promise to honor His Creation. I’d say that promise was inherent in the sort of Creation He chose to bring into being.

In any case, Chaitin’s major result in many ways was a surprisingly simple proof — by the standards of modern mathematics — that every number is random. No number has a pattern. This doesn’t mean that 1.22222… or 1.25 are random nor does it mean that they aren’t numbers. It means that those numbers and similar finitely describable numbers represent a vanishingly small point on the number line. It turns out that all numbers with patterns, all the numbers of our elegant and well-ordered mathematics, add up to a vanishingly small length on the number line. It also means we can’t generate a truly random number yet there are so many random numbers that the infinities of numbers with some patterns are overwhelmed. In the sense of that field of modern mathematics called ‘measure theory’, there are essentially no numbers with patterns in relation to the totality of numbers, ‘all’ of which are true random numbers.

What does this mean? As the mathematician Marc Kac (pronounced ‘cats’) said in the early 1970s when the ideas of Chaitin and Kolmogorov were becoming known:

Now we know what a random number is. It’s a fact.

I quote from memory.

This is the basic insight lying behind my claim that God created the truths of Creation, the truths from which our physical universe is shaped. The number line is a set of facts rather than a construction as Pythagoras and his successors have thought. Elegance in the Pythagorean sense, order in the sense of the theorist of Intelligent design, and randomness in the mystical sense of a typical Darwinist philosopher, play no part in rational mathematics.

But elegant mathematics can arise from this pure factuality. In To See a World in a Grain of Sand, I compared this to the rising of islands of order from an absolutely infinite sea of chaos. Moreover, though I’ve not always been consistent, I’ve tended to at least imply that God created those facts as well. That infinite sea of absolute chaos is also a work of God.

I’ve also denied that God the Creator, He who is His own Act-of-being, works in a manner truly like that of a human workman. Only God exists necessarily and He is a pure act of existence. Mathematics and other truths of Creation are the sorts of truths that have to do with substantial being, the sort of being which is an object (of love) to God who alone is truly a self-contained subject or Person. Even mathematics would be unnecessary in the deepest sense, though perhaps interesting in some sense, to an entity of pure existence. God created mathematical truths and the other truths of Creation as He freely chose to love Creation. His decision to love Creation was the same as His act of creating Creation. To anticipate myself a little, this act was the only one we can (perhaps) know to have been (maybe) purely random. God chose a particular Creation out of possibilities absolutely infinite.

We should also remember that even the absolute truths revealed to us, those which deal with the necessary being of God and not with His free-will acts as Creator, have to be conceived and expressed in creaturely terms. We see the true God through our incomplete and sometimes distorted view of God as Creator and shaper of this universe.

Once God created the basic factual truths of Creation, He could begin to shape it and raise islands of order out of that ocean. As part of His initial Acts-of-being, by which He created from nothingness, He had created the number line and could move on to shape a universe in ways that raised those islands of order that we call Euclidean geometry, algebra, tensor calculus, and logic among many other more concrete laws of substantial being. As part of His acts of shaping this universe, He shaped time and space out of more abstract possibilities. We can imaginatively journey out on those oceans but we really couldn’t live there. In fact, I don’t think that sort of non-thing being could even register on our senses or our minds, though by the imaginative efforts of a disciplined mind, that non-thing being and even non-substantial forms of being can be thought about in a rational but indirect way.

Let’s flip things inside out, to look at matters from inside this universe rather than speaking of truths in the greater Creation. Let’s think in terms of constructing a random number, or executing a random act, inside this universe. To construct a single random number would require an absolutely infinite amount of computer power because each individual digit in the number would have to be checked against its neighbors to assure there are no runs which allow a shortening of the description of that number. Then neighboring groups would have to be checked against all other groups for the same purpose. All sizes of groups would have to be checked against all other groups. Then the differences between neighboring numbers would have to be checked because patterns in differences would allow a shortening of the description of that number. And so forth.

I believe that this understanding of randomness implies the construction of a truly random number would require a single act of thought because the concept of ‘neighbor’ implies a checking of numbers forward and not just backwards as would be true of calculations which seem possible to human beings. Working backward might get you trapped in dead-ends most of the time, though the number of dead-ends is infinitesimal compared to those paths which lead to true randomness.

What’s amazing is that Dr. Chaitin proved that all numbers, in a mathematical sense, pass these unimaginably demanding tests for randomness. I should point out here that Dr. Chaitin might well disagree with much of my use of his ideas in my effort to understand Creation.

I’ll repeat the claims, both mathematical and theological, I made above:

• Only God can make a truly random number, and

• Only God can act in a truly random way