[Because of its importance to ideas which have been simmering in my mind for years, I’m publishing a minor update of one of my first weblog entries: Symmetry-breaking, From Physics and Mathematics to Metaphysics first published on 2006/12/05. I’ll soon be publishing a new entry which builds on some aspects of the ideas in this entry.]
In my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand, I danced around an analogy that I can now see a little more clearly though I’m beginning to fear it’s more than just an analogy. Concrete being, such as the matter and energy of our universe, results from a broken symmetry of metaphysical truths. In this claim, I’m basically exploring an expansion of the symmetry breaking which underlies modern cosmology, particle physics, and quantum physics. I’ll assume a lot on the part of the reader of this entry, but I will say that the intuitive idea of symmetry should be enough to understand what I’m saying. For example, a sphere is a symmetrical object in three-dimensional space under rotation because it’s the same object no matter how you turn it. On the other hand, it changes in some sense when it is moved to the left or the right. It would change dramatically if it were split in two forms such as, say, a northern hemisphere with a north monopole and a southern hemisphere with a south monopole.
In modern physics, mathematical descriptions of, say, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force (responsible for the explosive power of nuclear fission) are such that they are broken or defective versions of a symmetry which is assumed to provide the mathematical description of a more general force labeled as ‘electroweak’. Putting aside the question as to whether monopoles exist in our universe — though they seem to be something which could exist in some universe at least similar to ours — this split between electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force is somewhat similar to a split of a sphere so that it becomes two hemisphere with perhaps shadowy and strange properties at the equator where they don’t meet with anything else. They don’t continue onto anything we could perceive but they don’t quite end with a concrete boundary. Strange, and at least vaguely indicative of the sort of strangeness which physicists see as underlying the concrete being of this universe.
In To See a World in a Grain of Sand, I followed the standard cosmological modern, the so-called Big Bang, back in time and projected that beginning of the expansionary phase of our universe was also a shaping by God of a more general sort of being, a shaping which was — at least in some ways — a breaking of the symmetry, the sheer elegance, of metaphysical truths. The best and most important example is that the principle of unity became gravity. This is the best and most important example just because it is likely the only metaphysical principle that ‘decayed’ into something specific in this particularized universe. At the least, this would indicate the importance of gravity.
To be honest, I’m not sure how far I’d push this viewpoint. Is it metaphor or literal truth? Does it matter? In any case, it’s an effort to expand metaphysics to consider modern day physics. It’s an attempt to escape the straight-jackets thinkers have worn by adopting, as the full truth, systems of metaphysics extrapolated from ancient or Medieval understandings of physical reality and mathematics. The word meta-physics means what it says and a particular metaphysics means nothing if it is not consistent with what is known of physics. And mathematics. And revealed truths and history and literature. Meta-physics needs to be consistent with empirical knowledge before it can even be a candidate for a truthful system.
My main motive for pushing further in this direction has been stated in prior blog entries and partially in my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand: I do not view God the Creator as a processor of knowledge and truths and ideas which somehow pre-exist Him but rather as the Creator of all, including truths. This doesn’t lessen their status as truths nor am I able to claim He necessarily could have created a universe in which a different set of truths held. It merely recognizes that the term `all-powerful Creator’ means just that. And I think that just that implies that truths are created thing-like. And this claim runs parallel, in my way of thought, to the Thomistic claim that things are true:
Things are true.
Truths are thing-like.
But, though created, truths are not particular in the same way as things. Truths are more elegant, more smooth, more regular. We could say more symmetric. Things, including living creatures, come to be when truths are broken down in some way, when that elegance, smoothness, regularity, is shattered in some way; when the symmetry is broken.
We are formed at the margins of order and disorder. We are jagged creatures, forming by processes that often leave us rather grotesque in our intermediary stages. Our moral selves are diseased in some parts and robust in other parts, but we can often be the hosts to cancerous processes in those moral selves, in our souls and our minds.
If we were better ordered, we would not go through these particular life-processes, leading to life for some and perhaps the permanent grave for others. We would be crystalline structures, mathematically elegant. Can we imagine the Son of God bothering to incarnate Himself in a world of entities resembling theorems of mathematics? I can’t, but I’m a creature of flesh-and-blood. That gives me some strong prejudices but I believe those prejudices to be at least partially confirmed by one rather obvious fact: God chose to make this world and not that more elegant and more symmetric world. Or rather, in terms of my worldview as expressed in To See a World in a Grain of Sand, God first created that more symmetric world, a world describable as a manifestation of a metaphysical system, and then He created this world by breaking some of those symmetries and shaping this physical universe, a universe which becomes a world when seen in light of the Creator’s purposes.
Now I’m stuck because I believe that we exist to be prepared for a truer life as God’s companions. If we came from a breakdown of symmetry, then we might first think that our healing would lead to a restoration of that symmetry, but that can’t be. At least I don’t think so. Life is factual and personal, not symmetric. And now the reader aware of the history of human thought can see that I’ve restated, in terms of modern physics and mathematics, the age-old cartoonish dilemma between a version of ‘to be’ and ‘to do’. In terms of this dilemma, shown most clearly in Herbert Read’s novelistic fable, “The Green Child”, the perfect being is (maybe) a crystal — frozen in its perfection and symmetry for time without end. Doing is seen as being made possible, and neccessary, by the sorts of change that involve pain and decay.
Perhaps this is a false dilemma? Perhaps there is some state of dynamic being that surpasses the mixture of order and disorder we find in this life and also surpasses any human conception of the order hinted at by the concept of symmetry?
It’s time to talk about God. Usually we ascend to some greater understanding of God by starting from His self-revelations, most perfectly the Son of God Himself. We try to come to some deeper, creaturely understanding of God by considering those revelations through analogies drawn from God’s Creation, which is an image of God Himself, but really just an image of — in a manner of speaking — a few of God’s thoughts. After proposing some analogies describing God and based upon aspects of His Creation, we begin the process of qualifying or even denying those analogies. This last process leads us into negative theology, where we begin to make strange statements of the sort:
God is perfectly simple.
Roughly speaking, the negative theologians of the Middle Ages made this particular statement to correct wrongful thoughts about God which might come from Aristotelian explanations of movement — movement was possible only to entities having parts and thus subject to creaturely change, including decay.
We are at a stage of human thought where many of our most basic metaphors have been overthrown because modern empirical research, in history and literary studies as well as physics and biology, has damaged the foundations of many of our important metaphors in theology and philosophy. Our stock of revealed truths which came from God in a fairly direct way is small and now our stock of speculative truths of God the Creator is known to be wrong in some deep sense — as will always be ultimately true of any creaturely speculations. Take the above statement of negative theology: God is perfectly simple. This statement doesn’t particularly impress me because I don’t hold the Aristotelian concept of motion. On the other hand, it still points to a basic truth: God, unlike us, isn’t embedded in durational time. But it doesn’t work for me as a corrective because my metaphors, poorly formed as they are for now, don’t seem to need such a corrective.
The correctives I need are for my preferred metaphors dealing with order and disorder. To be sure, I speak in these terms when discussing Creation and creatures, particularly the human aspects of Creation. And yet I believe, and have stated in various places, that we use our firm knowledge and our speculations about Creation to better understand God and what He expects from us. My metaphors, based on truths about empirical reality and speculations from those truths, should lead to new ways of understanding our treasure trove of revealed truths. For example, a more accurate understanding of human nature and how the human race came into existence will help us better understand what the Son of God did by His Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection.
As of 2011/06/13, I would add three perhaps clarifying comments:
- The concept of breaking symmetry seems to me to be a way of describing some ways, but not all, of moving from more abstract forms of being to more concrete forms of being. Breaking symmetry is to the movement from abstract forms to concrete forms as mathematics is to metaphysics. At least, sort of.
-
When I say God creates truths, I mostly intend to say He manifests some particular, probably absolutely infinite, set of truths as the raw stuff of created being, the most abstract and fundamental level of created being, what I called the Primordial Universe in To See a World in a Grain of Sand. I don’t have a clue of how to speak about the truths to be found in the fullness of God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, in His transcendent fullness.
-
In the years since I first wrote this posting, I have raised some possibilities about discussing not only abstract being but also the other world shaped from abstract being, the world of the resurrected or Heaven. See What are the Thermodynamic Properties of Heaven? for a mere hint of how we can discuss Heaven in terms which make sense to modern men.