A Non-dummy’s Guide to Understanding God’s Creation
I’ve written before of Ortega y Gasset’s prophecies of the collapse of modern Western man into a condition of barbarian childhood. See Civilization for Dummies for a fairly recent essay on the subject. In that essay, I spoke about the importance of books to Western Civilization in particular and I concluded:
We had a vibrant civilization in the West when we had a substantial number of human beings in the West who had faith in the Biblical stories and some faith in the appropriate and tentative narratives told by their poets and philosophers and—more recently—their physicists and biologists and mathematicians. We have no such faith in the Bible, no narratives worthy of the vast accumulations of knowledge in our libraries and computers. Not surprisingly, we also have a decaying civilization. Despite the belief of some that science and other empirical fields of knowledge have somehow come to dominance over revealed knowledge and faith, I don’t even see evidence there are many scientists or historians who have a coherent view of science beyond the horizons of their own highly specialized fields. Not only has the center not held, the pieces have themselves fragmented.
This issue of books, substantial books which have ideas in them, is a sore point with me since I’m one of those authors who have found that such books are mostly unpublishable nowadays and typically generate few sales if they do get published. So it is that I’ve been bothered recently by statements of my fellow Christians about how certain books or talks about Christianity, usually from the Catholic viewpoint, are good because they are simple and easy to understand.
Why in the world do these people think God created a world which is simple and easy to understand? Or is it the case that they aren’t concerned with what God has done but only with feeling good in their comfort zones? Why would Catholics who claim to believe in some sacramental union of concrete stuff and God think it’s good to understand that created stuff as being simple when they know that physicists and chemists and mathematicians and biologists and many others have shown it isn’t so simple? Is God and His Creation to be simpler than important elements or aspects of that Creation? Is it good for the Christian mind to be simpler than the mind of an accomplished mathematician or physicist or philosopher? We glorify great Christian thinkers from past centuries when the best of European thinkers were mostly Christians in a manner quite conscious and explicit. Mostly we like such great thinkers of the past because they are safely in the grave so that we can pretend that God’s world is simple to understand.
Even the simpleness which exists comes in the form of elegant and very abstract mathematics, such as the famous theorem of Amalie Emmy Noether which tells us that conservation laws in this universe (energy and momentum and angular momentum and a few others) are closely related to some of those elegant symmetries of abstract algebra, can only be truly understood by some and then only after years of study.
We Christians claim men are created as the images of God but apparently we Christians are the images of a God more limited in physical knowledge and mathematical skills than whoever it was who created the Universe of Einstein and Darwin. I spoke to this problem years ago in Restricting God’s Thoughts to Freshman Mathematics. The entirety of that commentary is the following two paragraphs:
Those who belong to that school of thought labeled Intelligent Design typically describe themselves as Christian, sometimes Jewish, and sometimes there is only an impression of a vague Theism. In any case, most of these thinkers would likely claim to believe in a Creator who is an all-powerful and all-knowing God. Yet, they think to understand the Lord’s work and His thoughts using what can be readily learned in less than two years of modestly difficult college work—a little calculus and some probability and statistics, a little chemistry and some astronomy and physics.
Do these thinkers imagine God’s thoughts and the possibilities open to Him as a Creator to be so limited? Math is hard. Physics is hard. Philosophy and literary studies are hard. Understanding God’s acts of Creation is all of that plus one hell of a lot harder. Anyone who thinks the Creator’s thoughts and acts can be understood by simply applying a few equations from Probability Theory 101 is deluding himself and insulting God.
Much of human intelligence in this mortal realm is communal, including any forms of intelligence which might be specifically labeled `Christian’. Christianity is community with intelligence, not some sort of herd life in a comfortable, protected meadow. In my way of describing matters, the ultimate and complete communal human intelligence is to be found in the mind of the Body of Christ. This is to say that the Body must think its communal thoughts at the highest level and in the best possible way. In this mortal realm, the pilgrim Body of Christ must do its best. It must use the best of human knowledge and the best forms of human thought to build its understanding of Creation. For background on the nature of the “communal and capitalized form of live intelligence”, see my essay on Jacques Barzun’s book, The House of Intellect: Intelligence vs. Intellect. On page 4 of that book, Professor Barzun tells us:
Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand.
Intellect is misleadingly simple because most will think about complex or abstract issues by repeating the thoughts of their traditions. This is true of serious scientists and historians and poets as well as fourth grade teachers and shipping dock clerks. Intellect is created over time by the more creative thinkers, but our age is too democratic to accept elites of this sort. As our traditions are destroyed, sometimes rapidly and sometimes slowly, by unresolved conflicts with new knowledge about God’s Creation, we need Augustines and Shakespeares, Newtons and Actons, but we much prefer to remain in our comfort zone and to have God’s Creation, including our own natures, related to us in distorted and mutilated form, so long as all that knowledge has already been processed in easy-to-read textbook form with lots of glossy pictures.
And so our bookstores are filled with histories and Christian theologies which are simple, not true, but simple and easy to digest because the included knowledge and interpretations are much like baby food. And there certainly is enough truth in those histories and theologies and other books to bring us to the early stages of adulthood in a dynamic and living civilization of the sort we no longer have. What’s in those books are what we’ve been taught to like by the teachers and clergymen and cultural leaders of the Modern West.
So it was that, in the above referenced essay—The House of Intellect: Intelligence vs. Intellect, I wrote:
As a country [the United States but actually the entire modern West], we’ve utterly failed to develop an intellect, that is a morally well-ordered understanding of our world. We don’t really even seem to have done much to take the small, educational steps of developing a rational understanding of our relationships to Mexico or Cuba or even Canada. We’re too smart and too proud to admit we’re poorly educated adolescents—at best. In the sense of individual intelligence, we’re as smart as we think we are, but we’re pretty dumb and very ignorant in the sense of that intellect, that capitalized and communal intelligence, so important to being morally responsible members of these modern communities, so large and complex.
We’ve created those large and complex communities in various realms of human life, political and economic and cultural, but those communities are poorly founded—which is, at least for this discussion, the same as saying we haven’t developed any understanding, any intellect or communal and capitalized intelligence adequate to the tasks of running such complex communities.
Very similar but more particular comments can be made about the strangely inappropriate communal thoughts and communal feelings and communal acts of modern Christians. Our refusal as Christians to deal with the new knowledge of God’s Creation can even be seen as self-servingly blasphemous as I noted years ago in Taking the Fresh Fruits and Giving God the Leftovers. That essay was fairly short and so I’ll quote it in its entirety:
Taking the Fresh Fruits and Giving God the Leftovers
The point I’d like to make is a general one, but I’m mostly targeting my fellow-Christians who have the greater responsibility if they truly have the belief they claim in God as the all-powerful Creator of this world. First, a poem by Emily Dickinson:
Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency!
I’m not sure Emily Dickinson would agree with the fullness of the claim I’ll be making but she’s at least noting a certain fragmentation in our thought where faith is no longer allied to matters of ‘prudence’, of practical decision-making. At a more fundamental level, faith is no longer allied to our views of created being and that means faith has been separated from the mainstream of modern empirical knowledge.
We have a funny understanding of prudence in the modern world, turning the guiding virtue of Stoic and Christian ethics into a cowardly sort of attitude. In truth, prudence is ‘practical, but mostly an ordering wisdom that allows higher moral claims to overrule considerations of personal safety or comfort. Prudence can lead a Christian to martyrdom, but it could also lead pagans to great sacrifices, even a form of martyrdom. When Cato, the great defender of the Roman Republic, dived off a cliff rather than accept Julius Caesar’s offer to return to his honored place and his family wealth in Rome—Cato had accepted the offer for his family and retainers and sent them to Rome—he was a martyr for a complex set of political beliefs that did contain some valid elements of moral truths shared with Christians and those poor, incoherent creatures I’ll label as ‘post-Christians’.
So, faith is a fine invention, especially when we’re cheerfully singing songs of our God conquering evil and bringing a new world to existence, a world which is free of evil and corruption. On the other hand, microscopes are prudent—MRIs even more so—in an emergency. If our faith, or rather—our human statements of our faith, be in conflict with the underlying assumptions of the use of microscopes and MRIs, we can always discard that faith or hold it in abeyance when we enter regions where our worldly ills are to be ameliorated or even healed, if only for a matter of a few years.
When the life of a bishop or a priest or an evangelical minister or the most devout of Christians is at risk, they rush to a hospital which practices medicine according to the highest of scientific standards, standards that include knowledge that is in conflict with the Christianity’s more or less official explanation for man’s state of sin—the Augustinian version of original sin which is an idea which seemed necessary to Augustine after he had rejected the idea that mankind transmuted from another species. Augustine had then proposed man was created by God outside of the natural order, though man was inserted from the instant of his special creation into the natural order. Having now claimed man as a special creation of God, Augustine had to explain how an all-mighty and all-knowing Creator had made such a botch of things. He grafted onto Christianity the pagan idea of a great Fall from a Golden Age, an idea not really consistent with the Christian understanding of the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator, but it’s an idea which seems to have a frightening staying power. It’s an idea which makes it all but impossible for Christians to make peace with God’s Creation as known through empirical investigation.
Now this idea of original sin is a stale doctrine, a miserably poor explanation of the sinful state of a mankind evolved from an earlier species of apes. Like many other Christian teachings about Creation, this Augustinian doctrine sits and grows fungus in the back of that refrigerator which is the storehouse of ‘current human knowledge’. When our own lives and comfort are at stake, we Christians take out the fresh food in the front of that refrigerator. Nothing but the best for our precious selves. When it comes to paying God honor and glory by understanding ourselves and the rest of His Creation, that fungus-covered, rotting stuff is good enough.
An afterthought:
When I spoke of my point being more general, I meant to say that many current thinkers, economists and political philosophers and literary critics deliver up stale doctrines which are not absolute truths but rather time-bound speculations. It would seem that the human mind can’t readily distinguish between truths and speculations, at least not when those two are dished up in the form of textbook.
Summary
The best understandings of God’s Creation and the truths from which it was created are not to be within easy grasp of those who desire or need intellectual simplicity. The best understanding isn’t to be found in any one human mind, not even a mind of such power as the minds of Plato or Augustine or Aquinas or Goethe or Einstein had been. Even seen in context, each of these great thinkers missed some important possibilities and even made outright errors. Yet, it is when such minds get to work that a significant communal mind is enriched and enlarged. The process of enrichening and enlargening is more likely to introduce complications and complexities into the intellects of men with simplifications being possible only after a period of contemplations and of living with these newer understandings of Creation, these newer foundations for some or all living and future civilizations.
And I do understand that most readers can’t handle difficult material, but they should be reading books which contain simplifications of plausible and up-to-date understandings of God’s Creation. It’s the leaders of the West, including those who decide which books are published and those writers, not authors, who write simplifications and summaries of more difficult material who are to blame. Those writers should be following better scripts if they are not capable of taking on the role of author.