[This is the first in a series of some number of articles on this subject—Love and Stuff, which will be defined over the course of the series. The past eight months of so began with writer’s burnout, went into a streak of sinus infections, followed by flu in early July. I’ve also endured a rapidly developing cataract that messed up my vision in unusual ways starting around March of 2019. I can’t yet predict when I’ll be fully back on track, but I’m on my way.]
Years ago—perhaps 12, I had planned on writing a book titled: Love and Stuff. The basic theme for the book can be stated in a simple way though the underlying ideas are complex and complicated and sophisticated:
Relationships are primary, starting with God’s love and extending to relationships involving Creation and all its creatures. These relationships are primary, create stuff and shape stuff in various ways—`developmental’ and `evolutionary’ are perhaps the two most important (or only?) such ways though we Christians have to be open to God’s direct intervention in a way which might seem instantaneous or `miraculous’. This is different from the basic assumption of most human thought that stuff exists and then it begins to form relationships with its own stuff and with other stuff.
I tend to think of this human intuition that stuff exists and then forms relationships as being `pagan’ or `paganistic’—not implying insult but rather in acknowledgment of the great pagan thinkers, ancient Greek philosophers and Hindu theologians and Chinese philosophers and others, who developed magnificent and insightful ways of thought based upon that understanding of being. Despite my admiration of those thinkers, I’m arguing for a change of our understanding of being to that of St Thomas Aquinas—a radical existentialist in the teaching of Etienne Gilson. I find Gilson’s viewpoint to be quite compatible with my understanding of creation from the viewpoint of empirical science and of mathematics.
But let’s go back—in terms of human knowing. We’ll start with existing stuff and temporarily put aside the question of the ultimate nature of the stuff we directly perceive. My contention is that stuff interacts in ways that actually change the stuff with which it interacts—the various bits and pieces and things and living creatures which are stuff. I’ve found this idea stated, perhaps as a dogma or perhaps in a more cautious and speculative manner, in two different contexts which are fundamental to two different fields of human thought:
- in the formulations of quantum mechanics (but various areas of modern science in general), and
- in the ideas taught in the writings of the Johannine school—the school of St John the Evangelist.
In both cases, we seem to have `stuff’ which is, at very most, partially explained but mostly assumed as if having necessary being—the electrons and photons which interact in strange ways in quantum mechanics and the higher-level forms of being which are of primary concern in the teachings of St John and his early disciples. In each case, in very different ways, we can penetrate to a deeper understanding of being though scientists and theologians alike—but for a few—refuse to speculate in ways that are radical and provide possibilities of deeper and more complete understandings of created being and of divine Being. In both cases, there is—or seems to be—something of the pagan view (with no insult intended):
- to empirical scientists and likeminded philosophers and theologians, matter exists though processes described by quantum mechanics, electrons and quarks come to be from something unknown, more abstract, and more formal; and
- to Biblical scholars and likeminded philosophers and theologians, matter co-exists with divine beings (or even one divine Being) and divine beings can impose their will upon that matter with lesser or greater effectiveness—with absolute effectiveness for Christians and some other religious believers and with lesser effectiveness for most pagans and for some Jews who seem to take literally the hints in the Hebrew Bible that men, at least Jacob, can outsmart God.
We can go beyond that in both cases, seeing that both quantum mechanics and Christian theology contain bright pointers to deeper layers of being—more abstract and closer to something which might be called `primordial being’.
Quantum Mechanics
Many have read about such mysterious `quantum’ phenomena as virtual particles (which arise from the `vacuum’ which is not nothingness) and a particle which might not have even so much as firm existence or non-existence until something interacts with it. This sort of thing is a consequence of the formalisms (systems of mathematical equations) of quantum mechanics, which formalisms describe relationships. (So far as I know, there are three such formalisms: those of Heisenberg and Schrodinger which were developed in the 1920s and that of Feynman which was developed in the late 1940s.)
There are ongoing efforts to discover particles (or even forces/interactions) which are more elementary than those currently known. For example, the weirdly-named quarks are considered to be a fundamental constituent of hadrons such as protons, neutrons, and mesons—see Quark. The electroweak interaction is “the unified description of two of the four known fundamental interactions of nature: electromagnetism and the weak interaction.” Quarks make up a variety of particles, the electroweak interaction makes up two interactions.
This is what is going on:
In recent centuries, science has been remarkably successful at building models which reproduce much of nature’s phenomena by way of simple components of fewer types. In general, this has been misunderstood as an ongoing march into nature which will produce a small set of `stuff’ and `relationships’ (forces) which can then be used to build an accurate, and perhaps precise, model of all of nature—those parts of nature we can observe directly and at least some of the parts we can’t observe directly and may not ever be able to observe directly. To use a weak but suggestive analogy: skyscrapers are constructed from `simple’ components, steel-beams and copper wires and wallboard and so on, but a skyscraper is a greatly complex thing—to build and to maintain and to demolish without damaging nearby structures. A theorist knowing only about those steel-beams and copper wires and wallboard could not design a skyscraper—it has taken prolonged and complicated learning processes for architects and engineers, steelworkers and electricians, to build those skyscrapers scattered across the earth.
For background on my claim that relationships are primary over stuff, see one of my earliest and shortest blog posts: Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality. In this series, I plan on expanding on this matter or, perhaps, pulling together various expansions I’ve made over the past 13 or so years.
For now, I’ll address one specific, related issue: the `fear’ of some mathematicians that modern, very abstract mathematics is showing hints that the quantitative and formal structures of mathematics may rest upon a foundation of qualitative and less-formal forms of thought—or forms of being in my expanded and updated version of the radical existentialism of St Thomas Aquinas.
There seem to be qualitative transitions in going from one `type-level’ of being to another—where the scare-quotes indicate I can’t quite define what these `type-levels’ of being are though I can warn that naive use of both `type’ and level seem quite relevant. By `type’, I mean primarily—but not exclusively—qualitative vs quantitative. This speculation about mathematics perhaps resting upon qualitative foundations first appeared in my writings in Adopting Mathematical Reasoning in Non-quantitative Fields of Thought. I’ll be addressing this issue by way of pulling together various lines of thought developed over the past six or seven years or, perhaps, pushing those lines of thought further.
So it is that I’ve speculated over the previous 13 years from both a mathematical and empirical perspective that relationships are primary over stuff and that there are some other insights of modern mathematics and empirical science which have not been properly, or deeply, understood. Much of mathematics and empirical science should be re-interpreted in radical ways consistent with what we know of our universe and all that lies above, below, and around it.
So far as my reasoning processes go, these theological and empirical speculations about relationships engaged in a dance of sorts with my speculations bringing thing-like being back through the abstractions of quantum wave-functions and back to some sort of being in which mathematics itself has become qualitative rather than quantitative.
God the Creator as Viewed Through the Gospel of St John
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
“[Christ] was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”
Christian theologians and philosophers and preachers and poets and others have put strong interpretations upon these ideas of St John and his followers. I’ll not say much in this essay but to endorse the interpretation that God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, created what is not Him from nothingness—what doesn’t exist in a somewhat weird way of speaking. Furthermore, we Christians see in this act-of-being, this act of creating, something important in the relationships of Father and Son and Holy Spirit:
The Father commands that Creation come into existence, the Father commanding in complete communion with the Son and the Holy Spirit; Creation came into existence and continues to do so with ongoing acts-of-being, through the Son and using the Son’s Being as the source of created being, the Son giving of Himself in complete communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit; and the Holy Spirit played some special role sometimes described in terms such as “breathing life into the world and its things and its living beings,” again done in complete communion with the Father and the Son.
`Communion’ in the above paragraph indicates the sort of relationship described in conventional Christian (Trinitarian) theology: Father and Son and Holy Spirit remain individual Persons, yet are one in Being or Divine Nature. This is the same that is intended for those who enter the Body of Christ as friends of the Son of God and the act of communion, consumption of a consecrated host (Body of Christ) or consecrated wine (Blood of Christ), can be part of the process of entry. It all depends upon the intentions of those receiving communion.
This all points, again, to the existence of a transcendental God who created what is not Him and then set to work sustaining that `what’ and shaping it to His purposes, which purposes included the evolution of a species of living beings who bear a special resemblance to the Son and are capable of forming such a relationship with Him that we can enter into the Body of Christ where we remain individuals and, yet, we are fully part of that Body, sharing His life and His nature.
I’ll move on in upcoming essays to start elaborating the above ideas and to discuss them in various ways, including those of theology and philosophy and mathematics and physics and evolutionary biology. I will try to produce an outline of a reunderstanding of the Bible and the Christian theologies drawn largely from the Bible, of human history, of human arts and literature, of mathematics and empirical science. More fundamentally, this reunderstanding will be of the true being of all that is Creation or part of it. At the heart of my effort will be a strong belief that the most primary relationship of all is the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for each other—and I would add the love Each feels for Their unified Being, Their love for their divine Community. Given that God chose to bring into being much that is not God, though coming from God, the next most important relationships are the love and loves God feels for Creation and for the individual bits of stuff, the things, the living beings, which are of Creation.