In my soon-to-be updated collection of weblog writings, Acts of Being: Selected Weblog Writings From 2006 to 2011, I separated those essays into seven categories including Love and Stuff and, the largest of the seven by a good margin, The Narrative We Know as a World. I’ll not slight the other five sections in their deep connection to created being, but I would like to concentrate on what I consider a fundamental expansion of our concept of being. Most of what I write in this essay repeats discussions in some of my earlier essays but as I work my entire worldview out I’m introducing subtle changes and some greater changes in my most basic ideas. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be re-examining a few issues on the most basic issue of all: What is created being? Really, what is it?
We tend to think of created being as concrete stuff, matter and energy and fields. Neutrinos and quarks and protons. Rocks and hydrogen gas and bacteria. The energy of explosions of various sorts. Fields such as those of the magnet and of quantum interactions. A little knowledge of the history of philosophy and science and technology will let us see that this listing of stuff is somewhat problematic. Some of the most important items on this list of concrete stuff have been added since Newton although it’s possible the changes really began in the Middle Ages as scholars debated the nature of infinity and tried to determine if Aristotelian physics could be true; that claim depends upon how some complex and complicated statements are to be understood.
As I’ve been developing a Christian understanding of being, I’ve combined the basic insights of the school of St. John the Evangelist and the insights of St. Thomas Aquinas with modern knowledge I generally describe symbolically but truly as being that of Einstein and Darwin.
I have written before of the primacy of relationships over stuff. In fact, fields have the air of relationships not yet settled down into concrete entities, settled down or collapsed in useful but problematic terms in quantum mechanics. In an essay from early in my blogging career, Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality:, I wrote (quoting the short essay in its entirety):
Years ago, I read about this famous debate in which Bohr spoke of objects coming into existence as quantum waves ‘collapsed’ because of an observation. Einstein refused to believe this could be and spoke as if he were defending common sense.
Years ago, I also read “Critique of Scientific Reason” by the philosopher Kurt Hubner. He talked about this debate but I didn’t remember his restatement of the debate: “Einstein was claiming that reality consists of substances which remain unaltered by their relationships with other substances while Bohr was claiming that it is the relationships which are primary and those relationships bring substances into existence.”
Over the past year, I pulled this book out of storage several times to reread Hubner’s discussion of this argument. It occurred to me that this argument puts Bohr’s ‘radical’ interpretation of reality in line with Christian beliefs. Einstein’s seeming common-sense is that of a hardheaded pagan who believes that matter exists eternally and independent of the will of God. God may be in charge in this world, in Einstein’s view, but He couldn’t be the Creator in quite the way that Christians believe Him to be.
How did God Create the world? How did the world and all of us come into existence?
Created being exists because God loved the world before it existed, loved us before we were conceived.
The world came to be as the result of God’s free-will decision to love it even before it existed.
Pay attention to the line of argument but be aware that time-related language, such as ‘before’ should not be taken literally. That is, it can denote what philosophers would call an ontological relationship rather than a time relationship. The world could, in theory, be eternal when we consider whatever exists on the other side of the so-called Big Bang—more accurately, the beginning of the current expansionary phase of the universe.
I set out to, in a manner of speaking, discipline modern empirical knowledge to Christian truth which mostly means seeing Creation as being a story told by God for purposes partially, but perhaps substantially, revealed in the Gospels, the communal memories of the incarnate Son of God. So it is that I came to see that not only are we men creatures but so is everything which isn’t God. Since things come from relationships, such as those described by quantum fields, we can see a modern justification for the claim of Aquinas: “Things are true,” and also for my additional claim: “Truths are thing-like.”
Created being, in all its forms and in all its realms even the most abstract, is the manifestation of thoughts God had; it is, so to speak, the setup for the telling of the story of the Son of God making of Himself a sacrifice to the Father. All of it is created because all of it must be manifested by God. None of it, not even such simple truths as “1 + 1 = 2” exist outside of God unless He manifests it in such a way that it becomes an object of love to Him, a thing-like entity which shares, but only in certain ways, in the being of the Creator. Creatures can see abstract truths because we are shaped from such truths and those truths remain part of us and part of what lies around us. Human beings are those who have come to truly see these sorts of truths because we have brains and hormonal flows and so forth which naturally encourage totemic behavior: see Darwin, Einstein, and the Totemic Mind.
We creatures have no part in being outside of what God created and then shaped in various sorts of acts-of-being. We can’t shape our minds in response to other than what we can experience in or through the concrete, thing-like being of this universe. Through this thing-like being, we can see even the most abstract truths God has manifested as the raw stuff of all created being.
Created being is created being which is in turn: stuff and relationships and narratives. Stuff and love and stories in a manner of speaking.
So it was that one of the most famous and most important of scientific debates, that between Einstein and Bohr, was really a debate about the nature of being. Eventually, it became clear that Bohr had the better argument, one equivalent to the metaphysical claim: “[I]t is the relationships which are primary and those relationships bring substances into existence.” Einstein’s argument was equivalent to the metaphysical claim: “[R]eality consists of substances which remain unaltered by their relationships with other substances.” What seems remarkable, or at least should seem remarkable, is that the physics community lined up behind Bohr, most physicists lining up within a few short years, because of the empirical evidence plus the specific theories and equations which were drawn from that evidence. Science had settled a metaphysical question, a fundamental question about being, and it had discovered an answer given a long time ago by St. John the Evangelist and then, set in the context of a philosophical system by Aquinas.
Relations are the primary acts-of-being; stuff comes into existence as a result of relations; and stuff begins to move, forming new relationships, and causing streams of events which evolve and develop into coherent narratives. All of this is created being. God’s love created all contingent being. We change the state of an atom by observing it because any observation is an interaction, the forming of a relationship. We can change others by loving them. We can all be changed by participating in a proper, morally well-ordered story. That is the purpose for which God has created this world and all the other realms of created being even the world of those raised to live with Jesus Christ for time without end.