In my most recent post, the essay: How a Christian Finds Metaphysical Truths in Empirical Reality, I argued that Christians should respond confidently to what lies around us, to our concrete and thing-like realm of Creation and to all the other realms which remain yet in our universe which is our world when seen in light of God’s purposes. I concluded that essay by claiming:
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.
I’d like to elaborate on one aspect of traditional thought in general and traditional metaphysical thought in particular. In doing so, I’ll be overlapping my previous essay. Please bear with me.
Traditional metaphysics deals with abstract categories and I’ve argued against the use of categories and categorical reasoning: see Sex and Categorical Reasoning in a World of Evolution and Development. I wouldn’t really recommend a categorical rejection of categorical reasoning, only a realization that such reasoning and the related slotting of entities and relationships and so on into categories are dangerous in the way of fast-setting concrete. They give us frozen images of a dynamic Creation, sometimes good and useful frozen images but frozen nonetheless.
But there are many who think well so long as they have a schema with nodes drawn from well-defined categories, some of those men can be truly considered great thinkers or doers.
For those who have studied at least lightly the field of modern dynamics: categories are like a relatively tight cluster of points on a Poincare section, the tight clustering would represent a temporarily stable or quasi-stable orbit through the state space of the underlying dynamic system. Any efforts to predict the state, or `nature’, of the entity being formed by and in response to that dynamic process will work until it doesn’t, that is, until the orbit moves and a new point shows up on the Poincare section which, as you might guess, is a section through a space of states or phases of a dynamic process; the section is a plane through that abstract, mathematical space and shows where the orbits pass through. Conceptually, Europe moved to a new `orbit’ when the Middle Ages became the Renaissance and to another `orbit’ with the Enlightenment and so on. The analog of that Poincare section is a snapshot of Medieval men and Medieval communities. We also create snapshot views of men and communities in our own age or—more plausibly—in our own culture in our own age. We idealize those views, thinking that men were ever like us. Surely, those Neolithic human beings must have been like us but without knowing so much. To which I respond that the human mind itself came into being as human beings responded to their environments in such a way that they began to generalize and eventually to think in truly abstract ways. I might be wrong in conjecturing a human mind with abstract reasoning powers appeared around 500BC, but, if so, it’s an error in detail. In fact, it’s doubtful that even most well-educated and intelligent thinkers have adopted abstract modes of reasoning, other than being able to recycle the thoughts of great and long-dead thinkers: see my essay, The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding, for my discussion of what was wrong in the thoughts of the very intelligent and well-educated Puritan leaders of New England during “the war known as King Phillip’s War, a war waged by some of the Indian tribes against the European settlers and some Indian allies.” In that essay, I explain:
The details of the war aren’t at issue here except for a general background understanding. My interest lies in an important stream of thoughts and attitudes of New England European colonists which showed itself during the period of King Phillip’s War, a stream which I think to represent a failed intellectual maturing process on the part of highly educated and intelligent men in confrontation with alien cultures. Instead of moving towards a proper abstraction that would have allowed a defense of their own culture but also an understanding of the human good in a different way of life, the European settlers raised their particular way of life to a self-righteous ideal. A conflict of cultures was seen as a war between God’s servants, the White settlers, and Satan’s slaves, the Indians. This stream, which may have been nascent in Puritan thought from the time they first stepped into that wilderness region of the New World, developed fully during the lead-up to the war as the Puritan leaders dealt with the growing resistance of the Indians to the expansion of settled ways of life.
In many of those troubled times—including our deeply troubled age, human communities and the individuals which were formed by and in response to their environments were suddenly (on historical time-scales) moving through a different region of that space of the phases which are different human possibilities. A very complex space indeed.
Categories do seem to work during times of stability. Think of categorical reasoning as being cheat-sheets to the nature of a complex world ever revealing itself. I referred to these sorts of cheat-sheets from a slightly different angle in the essay, Enriching Our Moral World: Simple Is Digested Complexity.
What we now know of reality, manifested thoughts of God, would lead us to language different from traditional metaphysical language; we need a language (and underlying concepts) of evolutionary and developmental processes rather than a language which implies that we in the midst of this grand story can see the `true’ structures underlying evolving life and developing social and moral structures and relationships. We need to be able to speak of that state space and the complex orbits we travel through it as individuals and as communities rather than speaking only of those snapshots, those Poincare sections.
Engineers and physicists and other scientists long ago learned that their systems, a testable piece of machinery or the solar system, are dynamic and the current state of those systems are snapshots—useful in their own way but dangerous if taken as accurate descriptions of either past or future. They provide such descriptions only when seen as moving images: a snapshot of Neolithic men and communities followed by a snapshot of the period when agriculture seems to have been invented in what is now Turkey followed by a snapshot of one or another early civilization supplemented by one of an area where civilization failed to develop and so on to the 21st century.
We should, of course, remember that this crude moving image has to be built up over various cultures as well as over time for, say, the eastern Mediterranean civilizations. These snapshots and the moving images they can help to generate must also include matters of individual intelligence and of communal intellect.
In other words, all human capacities for knowledge and understanding have evolved and developed and we can see those same capacities developing over time and across cultures if we apply our imaginations to our historical knowledge (wherein I include anthropological and archaeological knowledge).
We humans evolved in such a way that our brains can shape themselves to encapsulate reality as we actively respond to it with mind and heart and hands; that reality includes the human past or at least our best knowledge and understanding of that past; it even includes speculative knowledge and understandings of human possibilities for the future. Yet, we bring to these tasks of knowing and understanding specific ways of thinking, intuitions from our evolutionary past and also ways of thinking as individuals and as members of communities.
As a Christian trying to respond honestly to God’s world, I believe that the necessary if not the sufficient rules of metaphysics can be drawn from the simple constraint that created being at all levels of most abstract to most concrete must not be in conflict with what we know of concrete being. In principle, we can only know of metaphysics what God has put into this particular Creation and, in fact, we can only know what has become known to men by a particular point in history.
The individual intelligences and communal intellects of Western, Christian Civilization have been driven forward for 1500 years or so partly by the battles between those most ready to learn from God’s Creation and those most convinced that God’s Creation is something we were called to bring to order. The first are convinced in one way or another that we are called to shape our minds in response to reality and the second think reality is to be ordered by transcendental ideas accessible to at least some human minds. This is clearly an oversimplification—many have mixed beliefs, part Plato and part Hume in a manner of speaking.
I’m clearly on the empirical side. After all: What reason do we have to believe that human beings, a species which arose in this concrete realm by way of evolutionary and developmental processes, can access transcendental truths?