Pope Benedict has an appropriate respect for the human mind and its products, cultural and intellectual and spiritual. Yet, there’s a big gap in his thought that could be filled only by a proper appreciation for modern empirical knowledge, including in a very explicit way the problem areas of mathematics, physics, and evolutionary biology. I also question if he’s being given good information about some of these areas, such as evolutionary theory and chaos theory — both of which he seemed to dismiss as sources of any sort of truth in Jesus of Nazareth, his first book of a series on the Lord Jesus Christ. But the real problem is the fundamental gap in his thought about human knowledge: he speaks openly and carefully of speculative knowledge and revealed knowledge (or truths) but doesn’t seem to have an explicit view of how empirical knowledge fits in to the total picture.
In many of my writings, I’m primarily interested in creatively viewing God’s Creation, viewing it as clearly as possible given our stock of knowledge, revealed knowledge and speculative knowledge (such as metaphysics) and empirical knowledge (separated in one of my unpublished book into scientific and practical). Pope Benedict doesn’t seem to take seriously enough the work of empirical thinkers who work in the domain of physics and mathematics and evolutionary biology and other such-like sciences, but this might simply be a problem of not having a way of relating the results of those fields of study to revealed and speculative knowledge.
Aquinas told us that metaphysics uses the specific sciences. I’ve gone beyond that, noting that Hellenistic metaphysics was a Siamese twin of Hellenistic mathematics. Our idea of what mathematics is has expanded greatly, implying that we should expand our ideas of what metaphysics is in a parallel way. (See Hellenistic Metaphysics is Too Small for a discussion I posted after Pope Benedict’s well-publicized speech at Regensburg.) As a hint of the possibilities: I’ve used modern understandings of randomness as algorithmically complexity — factuality — to argue that only God could make a random number, only God could act in a random way, a truly personal way. I leave it to the reader to draw the meanings of this way of thought, perhaps by exploring my posts at this website, Acts of Being, or by reading my first published book To See a World in a Grain of Sand.
There’s more too it than that, such as the realization that modern physics points to the likelihood that physical matter and energy and fields are shaped from a strange stuff that can be seen as a manifestation of mathematical truths and metaphysical truths. Speaking somewhat poetically, matter is frozen soul-stuff.
For the current discussion, the point is simple and clear: modern mathematics and physics point to richer possibilities for metaphysical understandings of created being. In addition, the shaping processes which turn that abstract stuff into thing-like matter are more a narrative than a tinker-toy construction using pre-formed components. In terms of Hellenistic metaphysics, this implies that the Timaeus, the only dialogue Plato wrote to deal directly with the God and His creative acts, needs to be used as a strong corrective to the more prosaic, and pantheistic, views of Aristotle as well as Plato’s more ‘philosophical’ dialogues in which matter and human souls seemed more god-like than the gods and the God lurked way in the background. Aquinas, of course, had the Bible as a corrective to his use of Aristotle, a use which Etienne Gilson thought to be a complete reshaping of Aristotle’s thought for what it’s worth. It’s also interesting to note that, in the Timaeus, Plato the religious believer denied that any creature, human soul or god, could be immortal. Only the God, the Father and Creator of all could be truly immortal.
Though many Christians who fret over empirical knowledge are mostly worried about evolutionary biology, it’s actually a trivial intellectual maneuver to talk even about the evolution of moral nature once the basic story is in place by which some strange stuff, manifested truths, is shaped into the stuff things. As living creatures, we may be bothered at first by this claim but the basic properties of matter are more important to our metaphysics — even where it impacts upon morality — than are the biological issues.
We Christians need to pay close attention and give proper respect to all sorts of human knowledge. In an unpublished book, I classified (true) human knowledge into four categories: revealed truths, speculative knowledge, ‘scientific’ empirical knowledge, and practical empirical knowledge. I went on to claim that this is a practical division, made necessary by our creaturely perspective. Ultimately, there are only two sorts of knowledge: that of God in His necessary and transcendent Being and that of God in His chosen role of Creator making contingent decisions about the stuff and events of created reality. And that’s leads to an understanding of the importance of physics which is not the study of some sort of neutral stuff upon which the drama of salvation will take place. The basic stuff of our universe, including energy and fields as well as matter, is an active part of that drama. Again, I recommend the interested reader explore the posts at this website, Acts of Being, or read my first published book To See a World in a Grain of Sand.
My philosophical and theological writings aren’t always easy to read but this is because I eschew the textbook style and also the modern rules about separation of different ‘realms’ of knowledge. Believing that many of our wrongful views of even mathematics and physics are due to our moral problems, I’ll intertwine discussions of moral issues and the birth and development of stars and I’ll use insights from mathematics and physics to critique our understandings of our moral selves.
Our empirical knowledge tells us how it is that we receive and understand even revealed truths. We have no truth-organs in our bodies upon which God stamps those truths. We have brains which, ideally, shape themselves to encapsulate our environments (which we can pray to include a morally well-ordered human society), the universe as a whole if things go well, and God’s world (the universe seen in light of God’s purposes) if things go very well. Not only is our speculative knowledge and our stock of revealed truths mediated in the human body through mundane things such as brain-cells and hormones, but our understanding of speculative possibilities and our understanding of revealed truths can be enriched by a better understanding of empirical knowledge, knowledge of God’s universe, knowledge of some of the decisions God made in shaping the raw stuff of Creation into the thing-like stuff of this world.
To complete his system of thought, Pope Benedict needs to consider empirical knowledge in addition to revealed truths and speculative knowledge.