Psalm 24 tells us rightly: “The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness, the world and all its peoples.”
It’s God who creates from nothingness and God who brings order to the raw stuff He first creates. This isn’t to deny that we human beings, in fact—all things and living creatures and all of created being, can work with the Almighty as He creates and shapes. It is to deny that we, in this mortal realm, have any direct access to transcendental truths; it is to deny that it is even sane, let alone good, to try to order the world to human ideals drawn from such alleged truths of a transcendental sort. I’m also claiming that Christians and Jews and other believers in an absolutely powerful Creator-God are, or at least should be, more committed to empirical reality than any other human beings.
We human beings can hold ideals contingently drawn from God’s revelations and His other acts in Creation, but that word `contingently’ packs a punch. Of course, Christians believe the fullness of God’s revelation was the Son of God incarnated as a man, but all who draw their beliefs from the Bible or any other sacred texts or prophetic traditions should realize that God speaks to us through human beings and in terms compatible with the individual things and the totality of what He has created.
There are some fundamental points to be made here:
- Moral order is what orders this particular world to the purposes of God.
- Institutions and ways of meeting human needs and other goods serve moral order, or they don’t; those institutions and those ways aren’t primary goods in themselves.
To a Christian, the primary purpose of God as Creator is to shape the Body of Christ and bring it to completion in the world of the resurrected. To a Jew, the primary purpose is similar but centered upon the People of Israel. Both of these purposes were drawn speculatively from empirical knowledge. Even the `ideals’ expressed in the Ten Commandments are drawn from:
- Our empirical realization of our state as creatures and our relationships to our Creator.
- Our empirical knowledge of our own human selves and other creatures and of the relationships between these many entities.
- Our speculative understanding of the world or of all of Creation.
After all, commandments are commandments, not truths and not ideals. I think it more plausible to believe those commandments arose in the minds of the early Hebrews as they speculated, perhaps unconsciously or even schizophrenically, upon their understanding or encapsulation of reality. Yet, the point is the same: the truths and ideals were drawn from commandments stated as if by a commanding general and were stated fully in terms understandable to monotheists emerging from a pagan background and to human residents of this particular planet in this particular universe. [See the Wikipedia article on Julian Jaynes for an explanation of the word `schizophrenically’ in this context.]
Wherever I have written `empirical’, the reader can assume there is a mountain of factual information, including that which has been written into our human beings by the events of the evolution of life and of human life and also by the events of the development of human cultures and our individual selves.
There are many books to be written on this topic, many which will be written if a new Christian Civilization is raised to the glory of God. I’ll stop at these mere hints, but I’ll be dealing in upcoming essays with this general topic of order, moral and other sorts, as well as with my efforts to develop qualitative versions of mathematical and `scientific’ reasoning about the forms of order most basic to human beings.