Basic relationships and not complex things or ideas are the true Platonic Reals in the sense of being the basis of created being. So to write. So to speak, if I were discussing these matters with a like-interested friend over some good whiskey or stout or port. If we were to try to imagine a realm of Platonic Reals, we shouldn’t try to imagine even the building blocks of concrete being, such as electrons and quarks. We should try to imagine relationships, or forces, that bind and that repel.
Something of this sort should have been proposed, often and perhaps in various forms, as a result of the work of Darwin and Einstein and their followers and productive opponents, but too many—including myself just ten years ago—reflexively opposed any sort of thinking that smelled of metaphysics. I’ll assume metaphysics to be a legitimate way of building upon empirical knowledge, including that built by evolution into our brain operations, and move on.
I developed a worldview, including a metaphysics, or understanding of what-is, over a short period beginning about 2005. Some would be upset by the explicit Christian nature of my viewpoint, but I am a Sacramental Christian who was received into the Roman Catholic Church and receives Sacraments in that particular sacamental and Sacramental Church. Of course, my worldview is that of a Sacramental Christian. Perhaps the basic idea, relationships are primary and stuff secondary, comes from my sacratmental religious beliefs, my belief not only in the Sacraments such as baptism and the eucharist but also my belief that God is present in all that He creates; if God were to absent Himself from me, I would cease to exist. The same could be said of the computer monitor in front of me and all the earthworms outside which are probably retreating downward as a late winter arrives.
Even when it comes to the core of my own self-identity, encoded if vaguely by modern people of the West as `personhood’, I think in terms of relationships—we are born as human animals and begin to take on the characteristics of a person by way of our responses to God or at least to His Creation.
Relationships create stuff. Stuff doesn’t come into existence and then start forming relationships.
In Biblical terms, the world came into existence because God first loved it. God didn’t create the world and then choose to love it.
Put this together with the empirical discoveries that complex things don’t come directly into existence in this universe but rather evolve and develop from simpler things. Put it also together with the facts which led to my belief that relationships are primary: some empirical discoveries and some speculations tell us that there is a strange form of very abstract being (roughly: the wavefunction of quantum physics) from which the concrete stuff of this universe is shaped and continues to be shaped.
Behind evolutionary theories and quantum theories and modern mathematics and all of that, there are big piles of empirical facts, sometimes having been organized well enough to be labeled `facts’. There are many powerful and fruitful theories and less well-established speculative understandings of some crucial aspects of this concrete world. There is much to work with and somebody such as yours truly will be off to the races in trying to make greater sense of it all.
This is the sense I’ve made of created being in the greatest of possible contexts, all of Creation:
- God manifested some truths as the fundamental form of being.
- Under the guiding hand of God, those truths interacted so as to create more complex truths and other forms of abstract being.
- Also under the guiding hand of God, these various complex truths, abstract being, relationships mainly, interacted to produce concrete being of the sort found in this universe and in our own bodies and environments.
Just a couple of comments on each of these three items.
I’ve claimed and argued for the idea that our modern empirical knowledge tells us that relationships are primary over (concrete) stuff. The truths manifested as the raw (abstract) stuff of Creation are relationships.
The evolutionary and developmental nature of complex things in this universe, galaxies as well as the surface of the earth as well as elephants, seems to be such a basic truth as to imply that complex forms of abstract being were the result of similar sorts of processes. Thinking in this way also seems, at least to me, to make it easier to form concepts and even images of being as it becomes richer and more complex.
Concepts of concepts, images of what is so abstract as to be beyond images even when we try to understand how the concrete being of this universe is related to the entirety of being, some of which is quite abstract and yet perceivable to some extent. We do the best we can and it be remarkable how much sense we can make of:
- intertwined space and time;
- matter seemingly forming as the result of the `collapse’ (a philosophically loaded term) of some form of abstract being which we `perceive’ as mathematical formulas and I think those formulas to be as close as we can come to a type of abstract being;
- moral and social creatures which evolve by way of truly nasty processes at least amoral and possible to perceive as immoral;
- abstract ideas about infinities far larger than the number of numbers and yet ideas which arise in minds generated by those complex things called “human brains”;
- abstract mathematical ideas so interwined with concrete, thing-like being;
- and so on.
Go up to the first list and its first item: God manifested some truths as the fundamental form of being. Let me raise a claim from my book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand. A world or a person (think of `human person’ as being analogical to the only true persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) have three fundamental characteristics: unity, completeness, and coherence. I would conjecture that these three characteristics correspond directly to truths manifested by God as part of the raw being from which all of Creation is shaped.