Where do I go from here? I probably should go more slowly than I did in my previous entry: Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: The Ascent of the Human Mind. In that posting, I was
unleashing my mind and imagination, trying to map the entire path from here to there in one image. In terms of the conventional descriptions of creative writing, I didn’t just cut open a vein, I ripped open an artery and let it gush out onto my keyboard. Let’s travel a bit more slowly for the next few postings.
As I noted in a prior entry, Bohr was said by some reports to have had a good response to Einstein’s famous, “God doesn’t play with dice.” Bohr may have said:
Don’t tell God what to do.
Let me impose my own understanding upon this statement:
Listen to Creation to try to understand what God did. If our theories of physics or our supposed metaphysical truths are in conflict with the evidence of God’s Creation, then do more research, thinking, contemplation, and praying. Try to understand what God did as Creator rather than imposing our presumptions upon Creation.
So far as I can see, empirical knowledge gives us our only possible picture of God in His freely chosen role as Creator just as revealed truths give us the only possible picture of God in His necessary and transcendent being but even revelations are uncertain precisely because they come through experiences. Revelations must also be treated as empirical knowledge to some extent, as the Catholic Church does in evaluating possible apparitions of the Mother of God. In any case, speculative thought, especially metaphysics, typically functions as the glue to hold it all together, from our creaturely viewpoint, though speculation is the inferior of revealed knowledge (revealed truths mediated by human ways of thought).
But we need to go further, at least to the point of St. Thomas Aquinas that our interactions with our physical environments shape our minds. No, further than that. We need to supplement the Thomistic claim with the findings of modern psychologists (see A Review of “Adaptive Minds”, Part I and four subsequent entries) that much of our knowledge is found in our environments and remains there. In a sense, much of our conscious thinking is done by way of interacting with our environments in non-conscious ways. One reason that the term ‘mind’ is useful is this realization, explicit in our understanding of libraries, that our minds overlap into our societies and our physical environments. Our minds expand beyond our brains and the other parts of our bodies.
Before I’d even read Professor Gigerenzer’s Adaptive Minds, I’d made the claim in my first published book (To See a World in a Grain of Sand) that the uniqueness of human beings is the ability of the human mind to expand out beyond its immediate environment to see the universe and beyond to see the universe as morally ordered to God’s purposes. It is when this moral order is perceived, however vaguely, that the universe becomes what I call a world, having the attributes of unity, coherence. and completeness.
Notice that this process culminates in a human being which is a better image of God, having a mind which can encapsulate some of what God creates. It’s a playful image, much like the child who picks up sticks and rocks to use them in imitation of his father who’s building a shed with saws and hammers. This is perhaps the major reason for the importance of empirical knowledge:
Empirical knowledge helps us to shape our minds in imitation of God in His freely chosen role as Creator.
By empirical knowledge, I mean not only knowledge of stars and galaxies, of long-ago ape-men and dinosaurs. I mean also knowledge of the events leading up to World War I and the American War Between the States, the proposed explanations for the development of science in Christian Europe and the possible reasons for the plethora of high-quality novels written in Europe during the 1800s. For Americans, it would be of particular importance to understand the failure to produce a true American culture outside of some music genres. For European Christians, it would be of particular importance to understand why 2,000 years wasn’t sufficient for Christianity to conquer the hearts and minds of their fellow-citizens.
We need a way of understanding the Gospel and our other empirical knowledge as being part of one story. We need a way of understanding and I can conjecture no other way to understand all of this than by putting it in a story, a morally ordered narrative. God, as Creator, is more a story-teller than an engineer.
We are failing to see this story, acting as if the universe were somehow a region alien to moral truths or other truths. We are refusing to pay proper attention and proper respect to the empirical knowledge which is our perception of this story. We often think and speak as if we believe this world to be not good enough for us when this world is our birthplace, the womb in which the resurrected are growing now even if we can’t be sure who is in that group. Rather than womb, we often think and speak as if it were a stage and we’re pre-formed characters passing from stage left to stage right.
This world is the womb for those who will be re-born into life without end. We have little serious reason to believe that God provides us substance or nourishment from outside of this womb. He even sent His Son to also develop His human nature in this womb. We have to remember that, in my terms, each human being — but also each rock and rattlesnake — is an object of God’s love. It’s that divine love which provides us with what we need and we should assume the Lord has provided a world adequate in itself to shape us to His purposes.
In his defense of the ultimate truths, Pope Benedict is sticking with traditional metaphysics, including its ways of interpreting experience, the basis of empirical knowledge and also that which shapes our minds. He’s sticking with a metaphysics that was, in fact, shaped by empirical knowledge including mathematics. It was shaped by the empirical knowledge of the ancient Greeks and has been enhanced in subsequent centuries but not nearly enough. Certainly, that knowledge was good enough to allow Plato and Augustine to see much in the way of truth and to allow Aquinas to achieve some insights which couldn’t really be appreciated before the development of modern neuroscience, mathematics, and cosmology.
We can do better now because we have better tools but the tools are themselves the objects of study — the things and relationships of God’s world. The main purpose of the research is to shape the mind of the researcher and to shape it to encapsulate the world, the story being told by God. This and not utilitarian goals is the true motive for one who strives to understand the world as a duty he owes to his Maker. This is the understanding that can best make sense of this universe as more than just a collection of things that sometimes work in a way that implies some hidden order. The order is not fully hidden though it can be seen, however vaguely, only by those who have the faith that God is the Creator of this universe. Atheists and agnostics and Deists can see strong hints of the order, but not hints that allow them to even conjecture a world, unified and coherent and complete.
But there are problems also with Christians who see this world as not quite enough for God’s purposes, not really a manifestation of truths but only a setting for creatures who process knowledge as if it were some sort of data independent of the mind in which that knowledge resides. The human mind is the knowledge. The mind is the encapsulation of the world if it reaches that lofty shape. By being such an encapsulation, the mind has been shaped to an image of the thoughts that God manifests in His acts-of-being by which He created from nothing the foundational stuff of Creation and then shaped it into this world and also the world of the resurrected. When we learn to encapsulate this world in our minds, we learn to think the thoughts God manifested in Creation. Each age has done something of this sort, but no one until Aquinas realized that our minds are shaped by our responses to our environment and no one was able to prove how it happens until the development of modern neurosciences. The thinkers of each age have the duty to their Maker to form the best possible story of God’s world.
In this age, the major task for thinkers, especially Christian thinkers, is to understand the moral ordering by which the universe is a world. To fulfill this task properly, we must make modern empirical knowledge part of our thought even at the expense of a painful expansion of our understanding of what this world is and a corresponding contraction in our illusions about human minds being able to directly access truths, metaphysical and mathematical, which lie beyond this world. The truths God manifested in the basic stuff of Creation are part of this universe and empirical knowledge gives us the path to move towards better understandings of those truths, but — again — the better understanding is not separable from the mind it contains. It’s this insight and not any particular views about biological evolution or randomness or the nature of matter which is important in my efforts to develop a worldview which gives us a new view of the unity and coherence and completeness of this world. We’ve not had such a view since Christian thinkers, including the leaders of the Church, failed to respond properly to the modern dismantling of the Cosmos which the early Christian Fathers adopted from the great pagan thinkers.