Here is a quote from a book which has influenced my thinking in the theological realm as well as in the scientific realm:
A Theologian, Eric Mascall, in his book Christian Theology and Natural Science, wrote […] that
the point is that, although a physicist knows the objective world only through the mediation of sensation, the essential character of the objective world is not sensibility but intelligibility. Its objectivity is not manifested by observers having the same sensory experiences of it, but their being able, through their diverse sensory experiences to acquire a common understanding of it.
I think this emphasis on intelligibility as the clue to reality is very much to the point.
[From The Quantum World by J.C. Polkinghorne.]
I have taken up this sort of an approach while developing an understanding of all Creation and of its relationships to its Creator. I often refer to this understanding, at its highest level, as “a Worldview”. It is something that is developed from knowledge drawn from a great variety of fields, ultimately knowledge reflecting a great many aspects of Creation—in its abstract forms of being as well as in its concrete forms of being.
Much of what I have done—the studies I have pursued, the lines of thought I have pursued, the words I have put together on paper or on my weblogs—was motivated by the strong belief, call it an `intuition’ if you will, that Creation is of a whole. Our knowledge of God is through Creation: revealed knowledge in somehow put into brains of flesh and other forms of knowledge come to us through our responses to the world around us.
- God speaks to us through our own ears and He sometimes seems to implant revelations in our minds.
- We speculate based upon both those revelations and also the knowledge gained by our responses to empirical reality.
- We develop scientific knowledge of that empirical reality, disciplined understandings which contain abstractions as well as empirical facts and rules.
- We develop practical knowledge in a way very much similar to our development of scientific knowledge.
But this knowledge isn’t truly separable into the categories which seemed best during my efforts to understand all that God has created; nor is it truly separable into any other such categories; the ways of thought so natural to `good students’ has its uses—especially for teaching those early in the process of understanding Creation or any of its particular realms; the ways of thought needed for a greater understanding is, to play off a comment once made by Einstein, `unscrupulous opportunism’.
I borrow from modern mathematics to develop qualitative ways of thought to understand the Body of Christ, a huge collection of individuals and yet one entity. Such ways also provide tentative, and very dangerous, ways to speak of the Holy Trinity—three Persons and, yet, one God.
There is much knowledge that we can derive from the Creation in which God has placed us, the Creation he has given to our stewardship. As created being has various forms, so too has knowledge of those various forms of created being, with that knowledge—in a good civilization—feeding into an honest and true understanding of Creation as a whole. To be sure, any understanding is partial and imperfect—as are we in this mortal realm.
And yet I haven’t described what this `intelligibility’ really is. It is not making sense of Creation in terms of some predetermined categories—one example being the idea that physical objects are well-formed, impervious so that there is no `overlap’ in interactions with other objects, where `objects’ includes quanta of energy and objects which are local `concentrations’ of fields. See these two past essays of mine which provide short discussions of philosophical and scientific analyses of the basic `disunderstanding’ of the facts and theories of quantum realities:
I’ll give a very simple overview of what is going on in this field of quantum mechanics as understood by five thinkers:
- Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, who need no introduction,
- Kurt Hubner who was a German philosopher of science, author of a book I’ve read several times—Critique of Scientific Reason where he discussed the Einstein/Bohr debates about the meaning of physical reality and proposed a new view of the true ideas being discussed and obfuscated by those two great thinkers (I agree with Professor Hubner’s analysis),
- John Polkinghorne who is a physics professor at Cambridge University (England) and then felt a calling to the Anglican priesthood, being ordained in 1982 and then returning to Cambridge as a chaplain and then President of Queen’s College, has dealt intelligently—if inconclusively—with the development of an understanding of physical reality in light of quantum mechanics; in particular, he wrote a book accessible to many intelligent outsiders to theoretical physics; this book, which I’ve relied on heavily to develop a similar but different understanding from those proposed by Polkinghorne, is The Quantum World, and
- Eric Mascall, quoted in Polkinghorne’s book and requoted at the beginning of this essay, was an Anglican priest and theologian of tendencies describable as catholic or Catholic—that is, he was a high-church, Sacramental believer and priest and theologian.
One of the essays referred to above, Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality, starts as such:
Years ago, I read about this famous debate in which Bohr spoke of objects coming into existence as quantum waves ‘collapsed’ because of an observation. Einstein refused to believe this could be and spoke as if he were defending common sense.
Years ago, I also read “Critique of Scientific Reason” by the philosopher Kurt Hubner. He talked about this debate but I didn’t remember his restatement of the debate:
“Einstein was claiming that reality consists of substances which remain unaltered by their relationships with other substances while Bohr was claiming that it is the relationships which are primary and those relationships bring substances into existence.”
The remainder of my short essay, Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality, is:
Over the past year, I pulled this book out of storage several times to [reread, rewrite in original] Hubner’s discussion of this argument. It occurred to me that this argument puts Bohr’s ‘radical’ interpretation of reality in line with Christian beliefs. Einstein’s seeming common-sense is that of a hardheaded pagan who believes that matter exists eternally and independent of the will of God. God may be in charge in this world, in Einstein’s view, but He couldn’t be the Creator in quite the way that Christians believe Him to be.
How did God Create the world? How did the world and all of us come into existence?
[The world, and indeed, all of Creation came to be] because God loved the world before it existed, loved us before we were conceived.
The world came to be as the result of God’s free-will decision to love it even before it existed.
Pay attention to the line of argument but be aware that time-related language, such as ‘before’ should not be taken literally. That is, it can denote what philosophers would call an ontological relationship rather than a time relationship. The world could, in theory, be eternal when we consider whatever exists on the other side of the so-called Big Bang — more accurately, the beginning of the current expansionary phase of the universe.
Here is the second essay, Shaping Our Minds to Reality, published in November of 2007:
“The wavefunction is the vehicle of our understanding of the quantum world. Judged by the robust standards of classical physics it may seem a rather wraith-like entity. But it is certainly the object of quantum mechanical discourse and, for all the peculiarity of its collapse, its subtle essence may be the form that reality has to take on the atomic scale and below. Anyone who has had to teach a mathematically based subject will know the difficulties which students encounter in negotiating a new level of abstraction. They have met the idea of a vector as a crude arrow. You now explain to them that it is better thought of as an object with certain transformation properties under rotation. ‘But what is it really?’ they say. You implore them to believe that it is an object with certain transformation properties under rotation. They do not believe you; they think that you are holding back some secret clue that would make it all plain. Time and experience are great educators. A year later the student cannot conceive why he had such difficulty and suspicion about the nature of vectors. Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality. If we are indeed in such a digestive, living-with-it, period, it would explain something which is otherwise puzzling. A great many theoretical physicists would be prepared to express some unease about the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics — in particular, about Copenhagen orthodoxy — but only a tiny fraction of them ever direct serious attention to such questions. Perhaps the majority are right to submit themselves to a period of subliminal absorption.” [“The Quantum World”, J.C. Polkinghorne, Princeton Science Library, 1989, page 82]
J.C. Polkinghorne was from the group of theoretical physicists at Cambridge which also included Stephen Hawking. He quickly became a Professor, which is not the same as Professor at an American university but rather somewhat the same as a holder of an endowed professorship. Around 1980, when he was still young, he heard God calling and entered a seminary to become an Anglican priest, returning to Cambridge as a chaplain and administrator after ordination. He’s a clearheaded thinker in the domains of science and theology.
I just want to emphasize the importance of what Polkinghorne is saying from his personal experience in learning and in educating young scientists. I may well go further than he would support.
We do not come into this life with brains which are some sort of wetware general processors. We don’t really process information in the way of a computer or a communications channel. We handle information by reshaping ourselves to what we find when we actively engage what lies around us. Like a totemic hunter making himself one with the bear he hunts, we shape ourselves in some substantial ways to what we find and we can only find what we seek. Learning, in the general and academic senses, is an active process and, moreover, a process in which the mind itself is altered rather than just having new content loaded in. The hunter doesn’t think he can become one with the bear by imagining a bear which accords with his preconceptions. He learns how bears behave over his years as a boy and then begins to think as if he were a bear. The astrophysicist doesn’t think — not for long in any case — to become one with the Milky Way by building a galaxy as if using an erector set. He studies how the universe really is for many years and shapes his mind around the reality that he perceives. When the hunter begins to understand the bear or the astrophysicist the galaxy, then he can begin to enter the story of that entity, to travel along with it through time.
It all begins with a suspension of conscious efforts, a suspension of the will, that the mind, and perhaps other parts of that human being, can be reshaped to accord with reality. You’ve got to be willing to learn the rules of the game rather than thinking you’re entering some sort of game for which you have inborn knowledge of the rules as well as inborn skills that only need the developing. We have inborn knowledge of the general rules of this world, very general skills of the sort needed to function in this world. That’s all.
Polkinghorne raises an issue not addressed by St. Thomas Aquinas so far as I know:
“Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality.”
This process has already gone on for three generations or so in quantum mechanics. Is it possible that there are some reshapings of the human mind so radical that it takes generations to build the foundations before the building can even rise? Or is it just that few there are willing to accept reality especially in an age where we’ve deluded ourselves to believe we’re born as some sort of fully formed ‘persons’? How can we be reshaped if we’re already fully formed? How can we need reshaping to suit ourselves for lives as hunters or scientists or God-centered human beings if we’re autonomous agents who merely make decisions or consume knowledge or experiences the way we think to consume toothpaste?
I chose these early writings of mine because they deal with a seemingly well-defined problem of physical science. (Actually, this problem rapidly expanded to cover things like the spooky action at a distance phenomena which Einstein and Bohr moved on to debate about. Forget these complexities for now. Some, but certainly not all, will make appearances later in the book, Love and Stuff, which I hope to publish next year.)
Even when our attention is restricted to a part or a single aspect of the physical world, a properly concentrated effort will lead to a realization that things are actually quite complex, sometimes in the quantitative aspects of what we are examining and (nearly?) always in the qualitative aspects.
For all of his insights, John Polkinghorne missed something caught by Kurt Hubner, the German philosopher of science: Einstein and Bohr were philosophically naive and didn’t realize the underlying problem was that a world once seen in terms of billiard-ball physics, objects impervious to each other interacted at the very surface, was actually a world in which relationships are primary, creating and shaping objects. Bohr’s instincts told him the old attitudes towards being were wrong but he wandered off into a superstitious sort of subjectivism. Einstein did worse: he spent the rest of his years trying to save the billiard balls.
That relationships are primary and stuff the result of those relationships is a fundamental insight into the nature of created being, though not a new one—it can be found in various traditions of Christian theology, including the teachings of the school of St John the Evangelist. The ultimate sort of relationship is the love Father and Son and Holy Spirit feel for each other; the second greatest love is that which God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, feel towards those He chooses as His friends. God also loves all that He created, but not in a personal way, not in the personal form of the mutual love felt by God and human friend. God’s loves for His creatures are the source of created being in ways to be discussed as the book develops.
In very quick and simple terms, I’ll mention a question else which will be of great importance in this book in progress: Love and Stuff: How does everything hold together? I intend this as a modern variant on ancient themes in theology and philosophy and science.
Is the Universe (or the Cosmos or Pan or Creation as understood by Christian understanding) a collection of things and no more or does it exist on its own in some sense, having properties which don’t come from the collection of stars and gas clouds and planets and electromagnetic fields and all that?
I’ll say only this for now: modern abstract mathematics has developed tools for describing and analyzing cases where `local’ entities have certain properties which give basic formation to the `global’ entity but that `global’ entity might have its own properties. See A Universe is More than it Contains for a discussion of a case: a relativistic universe, and ours seems well-described by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, isn’t fully under the law of the conservation of energy though all `small-scale’ regions of that universe might be.
The `abstract mathematics’ I mentioned in the prior paragraph is, at the most basic telling of the story, differential geometry though other ways of mathematical thought are involved at higher levels of scientific work. A similar complexification will occur as these sorts of ideas penetrate theology and philosophy and history and so on.
I have proposed that qualitative understandings of this sort of mathematics can be used to better and more precisely describe the Body of Christ (or any complex human community) where the individuals remain such but the community is the collection of those individuals plus more. This sort of thinking could be used, dangerously to be sure, to also develop a more precise, less handwaving Trinitarian theology. This two uses of modern mathematical ideas are, in fact, the central theme for this book—though there is much else going on.
The point I wish to make here very clearly is: we have crippled our intellects by separating various sorts of studies of Creation and its `parts’, especially man, into fields of knowledge. We could energize and begin to advance in the way that the Christian West was advancing for centuries if we start to use knowledge of God’s Creation and of God in His few revelations to us across these boundaries which are good for many efforts to understand what-is but often hurt—as in recent generations when theologians and philosophers have retreated from a proper use of knowledge gathered in the more successful fields science and mathematics—history and some other fields have also advanced but without yet adopting true mathematical thought, only some quantitative tools drawn from mathematics.