The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 4. The Cosmos of Thinkers Prior to Einstein

There was no one Cosmos common to all thinkers prior to Einstein but there were some general beliefs held by all, or nearly all, thinkers prior to Einstein — including most early modern scientists. This is not to say that there were none who suspected the Cosmos to be a distortion of reality. But those suspicions led nowhere. Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, suspected that the apparent stability of things masked a deeper reality in which change was ongoing. In “The City of God”, St. Augustine noted the earth is clearly very old — a radical claim for a believer in the linear time of Christian revelation rather than the cyclical time of most pagan thinkers. Moreover, Augustine speculated that species can transform into other species — though he refused to back down on the special creation of human beings.

So, Augustine had a critique of natural knowledge that anticipated Darwin by 1400 years and it led nowhere. In fact, many thinkers over the centuries have read the “City of God” while not giving any evidence that they noticed some of the outbreaks of creativity. In a similar way, philosophers and theologians over those centuries made critiques of the mainstream views of infinity, times, space, and so forth; critiques that pointed towards the discoveries of Cantor and Einstein and Planck and perhaps Goedel. Those critiques just sank from view. Apparently, thinkers during those centuries, including the critics themselves, had no hooks upon which to hang those ideas and they didn’t notice the validity of those critiques even if their eyes happened to pass over the proper page.

There was no magical transition point when all of a sudden men thought in a ‘modern, scientific’ way about their physical surroundings, no magical point when an unexpected mutation produced creatures we can label as true Scientists. Early scientists held beliefs now considered superstitious, though those beliefs might well have been reasonable in the context of the totality of scientific, philosophical, and theological knowledge of those times. At that, new knowledge led to a critique of general views of reality, a critique which did not at the time lead to a new, coherent view, what I called a ‘worldview’ in my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand. Over the intervening centuries, perhaps Kant produced something equivalent to a worldview but he made the very serious mistake of taking the laws, time-space structure, and perhaps the stuff of this universe as being necessary in their forms if not their particular configurations.

There were many problems in the ways that scientists and others viewed reality as they tried, and failed, to digest modern, empirical knowledge. For example, some of the greatest scientists and philosophers of modern times — those in the generation prior to Einstein, believed in an ether which filled space and was so rigid as to be able to vibrate trillions of times a second to transmit electromagnetism but also so light and flexible that the planets moved through with no measurable friction. It’s at least arguable that scientists prior to Planck should have long ago realized that continuous, non-discrete, energy levels are not consistent with stable atoms.

Man is a creature who moves through time with at least some self-awareness as well as a peculiar version of animal awareness of the surroundings. I’ve spoken elsewhere of man’s nature as a creature which seeks narratives as a means to morally order his surroundings. As background to those narratives, a serious thinker holds — however obscurely and implicitly — a view of reality as a whole, what I’ve called a ‘worldview’. You can’t help but to somehow relate the stars to rattlesnakes if only to claim they are made of radically different sorts of stuff, one being eternal and unchanging and the other subject to earthly laws of death and development.

There have always been a multitude of worldviews, but I’ll be speaking only of one pre-Einsteinian worldview, a non-existent straw-man to be sure. Sometimes writers or film-makers or comedians will construct an artificial worldview if only to make nasty fun of Bible-belt Christians or Orthodox Jews or others who may have problems in their worldviews but generally have a far more coherent view of reality than those writers or film-makers or comedians. At that, I know of no thinker prior to Einstein who had a view of this universe which allowed a completely coherent view of physical reality. And so, I speak of one pre-Einsteinian worldview only as a convenience for speaking of the totality of changes which Einstein has forced upon us, and I speak with great respect for those who held, or still hold, pre-Einsteinian views. I also speak to try and convince them of the richer possibilities available to us, possibilities quite consistent with deep religious beliefs.

Let me describe a few aspects of this Cosmos which seem particularly prominent in one or another body of thought which was not ‘Einsteinian’ in its empirical assumptions. I’m merely trying to describe the situation in general. A more thorough discussion would likely require years of study and careful thought.

1. All of Creation is to be found here, in what can be perceived, at least at a distance. The Heavens, perhaps even God Himself, lie beyond the moon, up where there is no change or decay, but it might be possible for a man to journey there in his mortal body and see the angels or perhaps the throne of God. If man has any component which is not bodily, then that component might belong naturally to that supra-lunar region when not tied to a body of clay. That immaterial component of a still-living man might even be inclined to visit that supra-lunar region if it is properly oriented.

2. All substances are found in a layered way, a great onion. Earthly things, mere matter — inert and lifeless in itself, are found between the ghostly existence of Hades and the ethereal realms where dwell the purer spirits, including perhaps human spirits released from their bodily prisons. It seems natural to believe that any given created substance can interact with all other created substances. Substance is seen in an oddly non-particularized way. Strangely enough, through the entire age of general awareness of empirical research, there are those who believe in a soul-stuff or mind-stuff that can interact with the human body but somehow remains invisible to scientific instruments.

3. Time and space are metaphysically necessary aspects of created being, though there might be a Creator God who lives beyond time and space, whatever that might mean in terms of a Cosmos worldview.

4. The type of substance we call ‘matter’ is inert and needs to be moved or shaped by immaterial beings or ‘energies’. The human body is inert but can be moved by a soul. Planets would have been inert if not inhabited by a god or other spirit in the way the soul inhabited the human body. Planet-moving spirits have been discarded more recently but the idea of a soul inhabiting the body is often retained by those who aren’t aware that the two ideas were part of a single, arguably consistent worldview. The natural inclinations of man allow construction of a worldview by way of rag-picking.

5. Anything that exists, even the Almighty Himself, is made of some kind of substance. Since God is made of some sort of stuff radically different from the stuff of this physical universe, He is often pushed off, perhaps to sit on a throne in Heaven.

True it is that there are inconsistencies in the way I’ve described the Cosmos worldview but I’ve said that few thinkers seem to recognize inconsistencies, choosing rather to pick up one belief here and another — inconsistent — belief elsewhere. In any case, when this general set of worldviews began to unravel, few there were to even consider a general re-thinking of the situation. This is at least partly because of the wrongheaded arguments that moral philosophy and physics and theology are completely separate ‘fields of knowledge’ that cannot be woven together to produce a coherent understanding of Creator and Creation. Men no longer even have a coherent understanding of human nature or human society, and that is hardly surprising.

We are [still] lost in the Cosmos as Walker Percy said, but he didn’t help matters any. He was sometimes described as a Thomistic Catholic, but looking back to the years when I read several of Dr. Percy’s books, I fear he was probably reading Kierkegaard while thinking he was reading Aquinas. Kierkegaard re-discovered some of the insights of St. Thomas Aquinas but his attacks upon essentialist ways of thought were brutally unbalanced so that he showed no understanding of the importance of substance in this universe created by the God who is His own Act-of-being. Without an appreciation of substance, a thinker will lose sight of the goodness of Creation and will fall into the blackish moods common to Luther and Kierkegaard, Barth and Percy. But I digress, however usefully…