I’ve claimed that the human mind is the sort of entity capable of encapsulating the world though an individual mind isn’t capable of fully understanding so much as a gnat. I’ve also quoted the historian Carroll Quigley about the nature of the traditional Christian philosophy of methodical realism:
The truth unfolds in time through a communal process,
or, equivalently,
The human mind forms in time through a communal process,
The individual human being who responds properly to God’s Creation has started to travel a path which leads to a state of Christ-like perfection, but he travels that path as a member of a greater organism, a community. We won’t reach perfection in this mortal life and it may be still more disturbing to some that we travel toward perfection as members of a rather unruly herd with some members having traits and behaviors which invite stronger descriptions than ‘imperfect’. And I’m not preaching any sort of salvation-for-all creed. So far as I can see, many traveling with this herd aren’t truly part of it and some stubbornly refuse to change, remaining what they were at the beginning of the journey. It’s hard for me to believe that those who refuse to respond in a courageous and faith-filled manner to God’s Creation could ever be happy in Heaven and I suspect that such human beings, many or few, having refused to allow God to lift them out of their natural state as human animals will simply die a final death appropriate to animals.
The others will change at most a tiny bit in this mortal realm. Perhaps we gain a little moral and spiritual maturity as we age but some of that, and maybe most, is the result of losing the youthful energy to misbehave. Perhaps we learn a little but it’s awfully hard to apply the lessons of experience during our lives and even major nations have trouble digesting the results of their own history. Few there are who can see the human condition in its greater scope as human nature develops somewhat, and our powers of narrating that development is blended in. Becoming moral individuals and moral communities is largely a matter of learning how to honestly narrate our past and to produce some sort of speculative narrative for our futures and to try to follow that narrative.
There are various Christian narratives but all have to see the same end to this mortal chapter of our story, a transition to the individual perfection of a Christ-like man and an entry into the community perfection which is the Body of Christ.
This is all well and good, at least as good as the typical Christian talk about some Heaven that remains beyond investigation, but why do I speak of the reality of any sort of perfection? Perfection seems not to be possible in this world except as a manner of speaking. This also doesn’t matter to Christians because analysis of modern empirical knowledge under the assumption that we inherit a Creation, a work of an all-powerful God, points to a more reasonable view of created being as multi-leveled. The dominant pagan view was that this world was shaped from some vague sort of being they could only describe as ‘chaos’ or something similar. They were far from entirely wrong.
Philo was an Alexandrian Jew born perhaps in the same year as Jesus of Nazareth. Philo read the book of Genesis in light of Plato’s speculative claim that the world was created from nothing by the God and Father of all — see Plato’s dialog, Timaeus. Christians accepted Philo’s reading at a time when Christian thought was being born. Since then, the tradition has been to read the first chapters of Genesis as if it were a story of a creation from nothingness. In fact, the word translated as ‘create’ has a meaning akin to cleave in the sense of separate. The interested reader can look up Genesis 1 Through the Ages by Stanley Jaki, the Benedictine priest and polymath scholar who died in 2009.
The pagan idea wasn’t wrong so much as it was incomplete. This world was shaped from some form of created being which is strange to our thing-based ways of thought. I’m not speaking of mystical ideas but rather those of modern mathematical physics, specifically the narratives of the birth of this universe in the events inaccurately labeled the ‘Big Bang’. As we move backwards in time towards those early fractions of a second of this expanding universe, our best scientific theories speak of particular forms of matter and energy melting into a more general form of matter-energy which is a more abstract level or phase of created being. The God of Jesus Christ did create contingent being from nothing but we can’t see that creation. There might be multiple phases of being on the other side of that so-called Big Bang.
In my proposed narrative of Creation, to be filled in a little better in an upcoming series of books, the level of created being “just on the other side of the Big Bang” is the space of states of being which Roger Penrose and other mathematicians or physicists have described in terms of ‘possible universes’. Our universe is a highly particular one, a universe which seems to have nearly 0 probability of existing relative to all the set of possibilities which is that space.
As I see matters, that space of possible universes contains also that which is the world of the resurrected, the perfect and non-decaying universe from that space of possible universes which God chose to create. I could be wrong and we might have to go back several phases of God’s shaping of the raw stuff of Creation before we get to the level where He ‘restarts’ in His creation of that perfect world of the resurrected. For now, the main point I wish to make is that it’s possible for Christian thinkers to integrate modern empirical knowledge into our views of this world as being a part or phase or level or whatever of a Creation, a work of an all-powerful God who alone can create from nothingness. He created some strange stuff from nothingness, shaped this world from it, and shaped us inside this world as characters in a story He’s telling. There is every reason to believe that a Creator can create a perfect world and resurrect us, re-create us, inside that world as perfected men.
I’ve not yet completed the development of the worldview which presents perfected men (resurrected into a Christ-like or ‘spiritual’ state of embodiment) and a perfected world (Heaven) as events in the entirety of the same Creation in which this moral realm exists. If I had, it would prove eventually to be as tentative and as contextually bound as the worldviews produced by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. It’s also true that the very richness of modern empirical knowledge will force an equally rich understanding of God’s Creation and I don’t know that it will be possible to create a philosophical or theological system of the traditional sort. We may need to produce an open-ended narrative understanding that grows with new developments in God’s story — and some sorts of developments seem to be happening awfully fast now that man is doing so much to invent powerful technologies and to explore physical and abstract levels of created being.
I’ve written about most of these ideas before but I have two reasons for writing again about this general issue and at this time. First of all, I’m trying to keep working on better statements and enrichments of my thoughts as already developed. I might well discover I have to reformulate some of my thoughts or might even hit on a new insight or two. In addition, I’d like to point towards a great error in the thought of modern historians and political scientists, an error which is most culpable in Christian thinkers and those non-Christians who should understand the Christian viewpoint.
So-called traditionalists and conservatives will often deny that real progress can occur in this world. This is a valid viewpoint for a pagan thinker but not a Christian. A Christian has to believe that progress is possible, at least in principle. The individual man can, at least in principle, develop towards a Christ-like state. The entire race, even including those men who will not be resurrected into Heaven, can develop towards the state we call the Body of Christ. We can’t achieve such a state of perfection, even in principle, in a world where decay is a fact. This is the place to point out that decay, increasing entropy, isn’t a law but rather a direct world of God’s choice to produce a world particular in certain ways — the world has been advancing towards a more probable state since then. This particular advance results in an increase of entropy. In other words, ‘increasing entropy’ isn’t a fundamental property of matter and energy but rather a result of the universe starting out in a very specific state, specific in a sense still being explored by scientists.
As a summary of sorts, I’ll note it remains true to a Christian thinker that:
Grace completes nature and doesn’t destroy it to replace it with something else.
If what we are is the rough beginnings of a completed man — that is, one perfected to a Christ-like state, then a healthy moral imagination can imagine moving towards that perfected state. The principle is established that what we are can be perfected into a Christ-like state. A similar though more convoluted statement can be made about human communities, families and political communities and economic communities and the Church, being rough — in fact, fragmented — beginnings of the Body of Christ.