In two earlier entries, The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 2. God as the Creator of Truths and The Christian in the Universe of Einstein: 2. What is Mathematics?, I argued that God creates truths, though not in the sense that He could have created contradictions or the ‘truth’ of “1 + 1 = 3”. My claim is that the fundamental stuff of Creation is what I call the Primordial Universe, the manifestation of the truths God chose for Creation. It is the Primordial Universe which the Almighty brought into existence from nothing and other phases of Creation, including particular and thing-like phases, are shaped from that Primordial Universe.
My goal is to develop a rational and consistent way of speaking about created being and especially human nature while recognizing that we are part of a particular universe which is part of a greater Creation. The human mind is not a ‘knower of truths’ as in most traditional philosophies but rather an entity shaped to deal first with practical needs of human life and then — perhaps — to deal with the desire some of us have to understand what lies around us. In my way of looking at things, to understand is to shape our minds in response to our environments, then to our universe if we can imagine such into existence. A still greater leap of imagination will open the possibility of shaping our minds to Creation in a larger sense.
It’s a mistake to believe human beings are born with minds, mental parts which come into existence automatically with our bodies. It’s also a mistake to think of knowledge, even knowledge of the most absolute of truths, as coming from any sort of realm outside of creaturely being. How could we really grab such knowledge or even receive it if it were somehow streaming into Creation? As Aquinas told us, we know about God Himself through His effects in Creation.
We’re creatures with a certain type of being, though physics and mathematics indicate that our being has aspects that are only hinted at when we try to deal with quantum mechanics or transfinite set theory. We know that our being, and that of every creature in our universe and certainly the universe itself as an entity, has aspects which are quite strange and even abstract just because human beings have been struggling to shape their minds to deal with the being of quarks and stars and a spacetime seemingly shaped in ways describable by Riemannian geometry. In speaking of these matters, I mean to direct our thought in this context towards some abstract and conceptually difficult aspects of being that indicate our universe is part of a much greater Creation.
So this provides another way of looking at my way of viewing God as a Creator of truths. If the human mind is shaped by responses to its environments and its universe and its Creation, then any truths we can know are manifested in Creation. If we can respond to truths barely detected that we might begin to understand them, this must be a similar process to responding to the smiles and baby-talk of our mothers. The truths we can know are to be found in Creation. This is true of God’s revelations as well. Having created us as physical creatures which build minds upon the substance of physical brains, the Almighty Himself reaches us through His effects in Creation.
The concrete things of this world, such as water, are manifested in creation and we can respond to them or to different factual possibilities they imply. Abstract truths, such as those of group theory, are also manifested and we can respond to them or to different abstract possibilities they imply. That abstract truths are more difficult to see isn’t a problem as such. After all there are concrete things, such as planets or comets or DNA, which are more difficult to understand than water in its simple attributes. Then again, water can only be better understood as we learn more of chemistry and quantum mechanics and the allied mathematical fields. In my worldview, concrete being is shaped from from abstract being. Our understanding of the concrete and the abstract must advance in tandem or else we’ll generate imbalanced or even false understandings.
So it is that I claim that it’s proper to speak of God creating truths. On the whole, it’s perhaps better to say that God brings actual truths into being from nothing in that fundamental phase of Creation I call the Primordial Universe and He creates concrete being, such as this universe or the universe of the resurrected, by shaping it from the manifested truths of the Primordial Universe.
As a final point, I don’t mean to deny the value of literature and history and biology in shaping a proper human mind. Nor do I mean to deny poets and novelists, spiritual leaders and political leaders, their importance in the human task of understanding God’s Creation. In fact, the history of philosophy would indicate that much of my thought might be found in some pre-metaphysic form not only in modern science but also in the unmined treasures of Western Civilization — has anyone ever dealt adequately with Melville’s struggle with the nature of created being in Moby Dick? I was obsessed with that book during the years immediately preceding my journey into metaphysical oceans. I only started to read philosophical works seriously after I’d begun that journey.