I wasn’t always resolute in my non-professionalism, thinking years ago about spending lots of time meditating on the exact meanings I should transmit to specific words and phrases. I thought about spending a great deal of time on a small number of works, bringing the prose to the turgid perfection found in the great works of so many professionals. To be sure, turgidity isn’t always the best measure of philosophical greatness—there are likely many unknown university professors who have surpassed Kant and Heidegger. And I have to confess to writing at times to the standards of turgid imperfection. So it was that I had thought to become a professional but decided instead to pursue the truth which always lies outside the boundaries of human systems, of human professionalism. Sometimes it’s more important to deal with questions within the current reach of professional philosophy and sometimes we are forced to step beyond that reach.
Gilson strongly prefers professionals for the most part—why not?—but he acknowledges that David Hume was a potentially pivotal non-professional who tried to turn philosophy back to a recognition of the proper claims of empirical reality; the consummate professional, Immanuel Kant, undid what Hume had done. The story’s a bit more complicated than that, but not so much different.
I’m only about half-Scottish but I’ve been following in Hume’s footsteps, in my own way. This is to say I work hard to return my own attention and the attention of my readers to empirical reality, not the reduced empirical reality of too many modern thinkers—such a reality can be plausible only when beefed up by the modern dualism by which our brains, though bereft of minds, can access Platonic realms of the Real to pull down transfinite numbers or schemes of political order or schemes by which chaotic systems magically order themselves. This is to admit the pantheists and even atheists who see Reason as ruling the world see part of the truth; human reason, even in its most ethereal forms, is found in the world or—more accurately—in our responses to the world around us. If those dedicated to Christian revelations are right with regard to some truths, these sorts of pantheists are also right with regard to some truths. The first sees God in His transcendence but not His immanence as Creator and the second sees god-like Reason in its immanence without seeing the transcendent God Of course, there are some believing Christians who see God the Creator and see Him in His unity as the God of the Creeds. There are also some pantheists and atheists who see hints of a transcendent God but never achieve personal belief.
There are also some in the modern world who think in ways scientistic or reductionistic. As literalistic as any Bible-thumping preacher out of a Flannery O’Connor novel, they see human language as being transparent, framing the truth underlying what is so that it can be organized to fundamentalist purposes but otherwise showing us the unadorned truth, as 1960s sit-coms were once believed to show the real truth about American life and moral order. As Miss O’Connor acknowledged and even celebrated, those sorts of thinkers see a limited portion of the truth but see it as in the rays of a police searchlight.
Reductionism isn’t the only problem making it difficult for philosophically and theologically inclined men to make sense of all that is now known of certain domains or aspects of Creation; such men are both those who respect the underlying reason of our universe as being a part of the wisdom of God and those who respect that underlying reason as if it were some better version of Pan. Such men have created great systems of thought and belief, including some men with a partial or clearly defective view of created being.
Ways of understanding all that exists (by whatever definition) have staying power—call them cosmologies if you will; I’ve called them `worldviews’ in some of my writings. Such cosmologies or worldviews are built into our language and the workings of our minds, the workings of our attitudes toward God or the gods and toward other men and toward the world as a whole, and the workings of our hands as we make our livings or create works of beauty.
So it is that we modern men have to deal with the persistence of what might be called categorical schemes of metaphysics, building block concepts of being and existence, in a world which is dominated by evolutionary and developmental processes. In fact, so far as the realms of created being go, these building blocks don’t pre-exist the entities which are made of those blocks. They evolve and develop as do the complex entities themselves. In fact, the dividing line between part and entity is always somewhat fluid and always somewhat arbitrary. There is no essence of man but rather the stories of creatures branching into other stories, some of which were and are the stories of men. And there is the story of the perfect and complete man, the communal being who is the Body of Christ, communal as God is. The Almighty is three Persons who retain their individuality while being one God. The Body of Christ is a multitude of human natures who retain their individuality while being one Man or one Body of Christ.
I’ll switch to using the term `process’ and reserve the use of `story’ for streams of events involving higher entities—including the physical universe as a whole. A man lives a story intertangled or embedded in a variety of other stories but that man came to be, in terms of his evolved species and also his individual being, by way of evolutionary processes and metabolic processes and so on.
(I’m in a semi-professional mode here, loosely defining my words and also moving on to loosely define some of the relationships between realms of being.)
Are those processes found only at the level of concrete being? Could they possibly go to the most fundamental levels of created being? My answer is that truths of a sort claimed as metaphysical principles were manifested by God as the raw stuff of created being. That raw stuff was shaped in various stages coming to a climax of sorts, from our viewpoint in this mortal realm, in the phase change to thing-like being which we know as the Big Bang. It’s better in many ways to see thing-like being as arising some hundreds of thousands of years after that when `matter’ and electromagnetic radiation decoupled, an event we see as the cosmic background radiation. I provide an overview at The Liberal Mind: The Essence of Liberalism where I perhaps first stated clearly my motivation for my current philosophical and theological work:
I’m going to head in a radically different direction, questioning whether we even understand the components of human nature and human community life well enough to have meaningful discussions based upon such aspects of human life as ‘freedom’ or ‘happiness’. My goal is not to produce another critique of political thought and behavior in the modern world, though I have to engage in those sorts of critiques at times. My goal is to provide a framework and language for discussing human moral communities of all sorts, including political communities. That might not be a goal to be achieved in a single lifetime nor by one man. In fact, this new understanding of Adam in what is truly a new phase of God’s story, our world or even the entirety of Creation, is a substantial part of what needs to be attained to build a foundation for a new civilization.
I go on to state:
I consider created being as, in one sense, a spectrum running from abstract truths to concrete things. That is: “Things are true,” as St. Thomas Aquinas claimed, and “Truths are thing-like,” as I’ve claimed. It’s also necessary to bear in mind that concrete being is shaped from more abstract forms of being grounded ultimately in truths God chose to manifest for this particular Creation. It’s unclear how we can talk about the different layers of created being, that is forms of being with different degrees of abstraction and concreteness.
I then go on in that essay to explain this a little and even provide a diagram explaining a little of what it all means: 
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There is no generally accepted way to understand our world as matters now stand. Is there one which should be accepted or should we be trying to build a new understanding? I see little reason to believe that we will get a complete and coherent understanding from the mainstream of philosophy.
Some professional philosophers draw fundamental truths or principles out of their `intuitions’ or the intuitions of ancient Greeks or Medieval friars or German scholars of the early Modern Age. Others seem to feel their calling is to simply make sense, or a less disorderly mess, of the history of scientific thought and perhaps the current state of scientific knowledge.
Scientific knowledge is only a part of human knowledge, a very important part though currently overrated beyond even that great importance. At the same time, scientific knowledge is often distorted and otherwise misunderstood and there is a need for a proper evaluation of all that modern empirical knowledge can tell us about the actions of the Creator, though we don’t need an unqualified exaltation of scientific knowledge. There is also a need to set scientific knowledge in the context of all human knowledge and, indeed, also the context of all human experiences including those which only fit into the default bucket of random or factual events in this narrative which is our world.
The traditional metaphysics of the Greeks (most anyway) assumed we have minds separate from our bodily natures and those minds deal with transcendental truths. Most Christian traditions assumed something very similar. At least those earlier thinkers saw the problem of a physical creature being able to access absolute truths if it is born into and developing in a physical world. Some of them also acknowledged the serious question: how could a body and mind (or soul) of completely different sorts of being even communicate?
A truer metaphysics lies in the context of human knowledge as much as does carpentry and the theory of music. This human knowledge is composed of three parts weak in different ways:
- our inborn thoughts or intuitions which are a racial mind of sorts built over the millenia by evolutionary processes,
- our intellects, in the words of Jacques Barzun: “the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence,”; think of this roughly as `cultural’ intelligence or look into the issue a little deeper starting with my essay, Intelligence vs. Intellect, and
- our live intelligences, our individual minds which arise through processes in a very complex brain which is capable of encapsulating at least parts of the complex universe in which we find ourselves.
We don’t have minds which access transcendental realms of truth but rather minds which are shaped by responses to reality: those responses of our `biological’ ancestors, floating and swimming and crawling and walking, over the millenia; those responses of our `cultural’ ancestors; and those responses we make, often in conjunction with those around us. I used scare-quotes on `biological’ and `cultural’ just to indicate a rough division between processes which require a lot of words to define and then keep separate. In the end, those processes will always be intertangled and overlapping to such an extent as to not be truly separable.
Yes, I am saying the sublime thoughts of Plato came from a combination of `intuitions’ built into his brain by evolutionary processes over hundreds of millions of years, thoughts put into his brain by `cultural conditioning’, and thoughts he had based upon his responses to his experiences in a society which knew Euclid but not Riemann, Heraclitus but not Schrodinger, not Darwin nor Einstein in even a true precursor.
How could this work? For a Christian, the answer is obvious—at least once heard:
Contingent being, that which is not God, is a coherent collection of manifested thoughts of God. The workings of evolution, natural selection and genetic processes, are among those manifested thoughts as are the quantum processes which bring matter into being and the processes which bring spacetime into being and shape it, the historical processes which have shaped human communities and the artistic processes which have shown us the beauty in Creation.