We modern human beings have illusions of control; as a consequence, even our ways of approaching human freedom look not so much different from the ways of implementing systems of hierarchical control, even totalitarianism. We think to have some sort of great power over reality, if only in ways of thought and attitude. On the other hand, in many ways, human beings are well-adapted to the real world. We can be said to be an empirically-oriented species in that, for example, our morality is manifested—if quite imperfectly—in our physical selves, in our instincts to live according to such rules as “Thou shall not murder” in our social relationships. (Scientific understandings, as of two or three decades ago, indicated wolves have stronger instincts not to kill members of their own species than do human beings, but our corresponding instincts are clearly good enough for human survival and reproduction and our abstract reasoning ability leads to complex societies and complex moral behaviors and beliefs well beyond those of any other known species.)
In a sense, I continue to beat the dead horse which is traditional human understandings of reality at various levels: our own individual or communal selves, our environments, the entire earth, the universe, or the world which I see as a universe seen in light of a proper, moral ordering. I addressed the same general issue in a recently posted essay, Imposing Ideals Upon Empirical Reality is Insane and Not Noble, in which I claimed this world to be worthy of the highest respect and as needing study just because it is the work of the Creator, a manifestation of specific thoughts of the Almighty.
Here, I wish to emphasize the need to regard all of our speculative understandings as provisional but also necessary to our further progress even in the seemingly mundane work of gathering further facts about empirical reality and in the mathematical work of building systems of thought which account for aspects of that empirical reality. We also need provisional understandings to guide us in our ways of living and that includes the formation of our institutions, ecclesiastical and political and economic. In the previous two sentences, we can notice a convergence between knowing and doing. To know or to do in this empirical reality, we experiment; we try new ideas, new ways of doing things when we run into new situations or when problems develop even when it seems little has changed in the basic situation. Mathematicians and philosophers and others have explored even mathematics as an empirical field and have produced some interesting results (such as the proof of the four-color theorem—generated partly by computerized examination and elimination of pathological results) though it’s far from settled as to whether some mathematics can only be done by way of experiments, including the `accidental’ experiments in which physicists have been known to produce important new mathematical results by solving a physical problem by way of seemingly illicit mathematical techniques. In the case of the Dirac delta function, mathematicians accepted Paul Dirac‘s `non-function’ by accepting the idea that such an entity could be integrated though not a real function—read the article for a more extensive and less simplistic explanation.
As a Christian, I would say that when we experiment and test against reality, we are learning thoughts of God we might not have been able to otherwise reach.
We aren’t inclined toward innovation so much as we pretend, at least not in the short-term and, again as a Christian, I think we would do better if we tried to work directly in response to God in His role as Creator—He has a much richer imagination than any of us have. In any case, there is a fundamental conservatism which is embodied in the very thought that there is such a thing as a `best’ way to understand or to live, a `best’ set of institutions, that is, a best way we can derive as if adding a column of numbers. We want to return to a stable region, an Eden—itself understood in a way that is something of a general-purpose ideological understanding of the Biblical story, and we want to do it by way of fundamental truths we think to already possess as a basis of all knowledge.
At any given time, we—as individuals and communities—will have some general understanding of important aspects and realms of being which is stated as a worldview and it might be well-enough structured to include an understanding of physical reality, an understanding of moral-order, an understanding of abstract mathematics, and maybe an understanding of how all of this is one greater reality, a Creation to a Christian or Jew or a Cosmos to a pagan. Or it might even be an understanding of what-exists as not really fitting together.
I’ll not claim pagans or atheists or others can’t provide a good-enough understanding of a universe which is on a trajectory of evolutionary and developmental paths—paths in a general sense of connectors between `states’ or `phases’. (See the short Wikipedia article on State space or the slightly more extensive article on Phase space.) Yet, pagans at least tend strongly (perhaps not necessarily?) to believe that the realm of being which we see as this concrete world is what it is and has to be; it exists alongside of the divine world, even the God himself.
All human beings, not just pagans, have similar thoughts about any mathematical system once it can be expressed in an axiomatic form, so that—for example—Euclidean Geometry had to be the one and only true geometry once so expressed; we had returned to Eden until modern mathematicians ate again of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. In effect, human beings, even Christians and Jews who should know better, tend to see the possible configurations, states or phases, of this world and all else that exists outside of the gods as being contingent but the basic stuff and the currently expressible relationships between entities formed of that stuff are seen as having necessary existence.
By a way of reasoning which might be essentially the same as that underlying the natural (animistic pagan) beliefs of men, modern scientists as well as political theorists through the ages have assumed or somehow concluded that there is a secret which `explains’ all possible being in their particular field of study and a powerful enough abstraction from this world, by way of philosophical contemplation or theory construction, will be that secret. All possible being, or its lesser part in human political institutions, will be found in that secret. Though, as a Christian thinker, I have conjectured that God manifested some truths as the raw stuff of created being, I don’t pretend to know if those truths are building blocks or something totally different and perhaps even inexpressible until we can explore various ways of `returning’ to that raw stuff through realms of increasingly abstract being. As matters stand, we can ascend one realm of being above matter—the realm of abstract being which is studied as the equations of quantum physics and which I believe to truly be those mathematical relationships. We have also ascended to other abstract realms by way of mathematics and philosophical contemplation in all disciplined fields of study, but we can’t really put those realms into their proper relationships with each other and with Creation, the totality of created being. See From Abstract Being to Concrete Being and Narratives, What is Created Being? Really, what is it?, and What is an Explanation?: The Basic Stuff of Created Being for just three essays in which I’ve tried to better deal with the general effort to understand being from the viewpoint of a concrete, thing-like creature who starts from empirical knowledge.
I most certainly don’t think we’ve yet seen the limits of God’s imaginative powers, or those of Nature if you prefer. We have a lot to learn and what we need to learn includes the `tools’ of understanding; in fact, there isn’t quite the barrier between tools (of knowing) and being as we are often inclined to believe. We think there is a true `inside’ to our individual human selves or perhaps to our more complete individual and communal selves, but there is no such inside as I discussed somewhat in a recent essay, Science and Naive Anthropocentricism
What some physicists think to accomplish with a “Theory of Everything” is but a grander-scale version of what many biologists think to have already accomplished with Darwinian theories of the expanded sort (including genetics). This is also what some political scientists and philosophers think was already accomplished by Aristotle and his followers with their claims that all possible political relationships, and thus all possible political communities, fit into a small number of categories knowable to a great thinker living circa 300BC. We have a square hole and a circular hole and a triangular hole and we might be ignoring evidence that there are star-shaped pegs. More than that, we might be ignoring evidence that the shapes of holes and pegs might be evolving and developing and even being deformed by forces external to those specific systems. It might even be the case that there are times when there are no pegs shaped right to fill some important holes, no holes shaped right to hold some important pegs. And it might be the case that the true `geometry’ lies far beyond a peg and hole analogy.
I’m not taking a relativistic view of being and of truth but rather taking the position that we have no yet penetrated to truly fundamental levels of being and truth. I’m also not claiming that there is something incoherent or otherwise wrong with reality. That is a far stronger claim and one I most certainly wouldn’t make, believing as I do that God created ordered relationships which then produced stuff. I am claiming that we tend to see our provisional understandings, provisional knowledge of all sorts, as being absolutely true once they work well in helping us to survive or reproduce—as individuals and as communities—in a particular context, such as the world of Greek city-states or of modern nation-states. In other words, I am claiming there is something wrong with our understanding of our own human being and of other forms of created being. That’s all right. There’s bound to be many things wrong with our understandings, in the sense of incompleteness and of imperfection. It’s when we misunderstand our human understandings, when we don’t have the proper meta-understanding of our understanding, when we think that a good and elegant scheme is necessarily true, that we deform our relationships of mind and heart and hands.
A true understanding is a rich and complex body of knowledge which can be described from one angle in terms used in my book and its title: Four Kinds of Knowledge: Revealed Knowledge, Speculative Knowledge, Scientific Empirical Knowledge, Practical Empirical Knowledge. From another angle we can consider various elements which are narrative, others which describe the characters and non-living things in quantitative and qualitative terms. The end result is a worldview, an encapsulation of reality, what we can see and touch and smell but also what is derived from concrete reality through efforts of our minds and hearts and hands.
The act of understanding is an act of acceptance and, at least to saints of the mind or heart or hands and who are not all Christians, it is an act of offering gratitude. It is an act which requires the participation of one’s mind and heart and hands. It is an act which is more complete and a little closer to perfection when done as a human community and truly complete and perfect only when done by the completed and perfected human community which is the Body of Christ. (Translate or limit appropriately if you wish to have a non-Christian statement of this critique of our misunderstanding of human understandings.)