There’s a question which has bothered me for a while:
How could the ancient and Medieval thinkers have seen clearly so many truths about human nature and the rational nature of this universe (though they didn’t have this modern concept in quite this form) when they had such an incomplete view of basic physical reality?
In fact, many of their specific views were wrong. even their most basic views of physical matter or forces, of the nature of the planets and stars, of life and of many basic aspects of the substance of human nature. Yet, great thinkers produced great insights, such as that of Aquinas that the human mind forms in an organic way in response to its environments.
Part of the answer is that coherence matters greatly even if the thinker has inadequate or even wrongful knowledge about his environments and what lies beyond those environments. In this context, I think of coherence as substantial agreement with the body of knowledge as known in that age and place, where knowledge most certainly includes empirical knowledge.
There are obvious examples of coherent and surprisingly valid theories coming out of incomplete or defective factual knowledge of reality. An example of a good theory arising from incomplete knowledge would be Newton’s theory of gravity. Sometimes, popular science books will discuss Newton’s theory of gravity as being an approximation to the more powerful and more ‘exact’ general theory of relativity. Not completely wrong but not the best way of viewing matters. Newton’s theory is locally indistinguishable from Einstein’s general theory of relativity. So long as we don’t look too far in space-time and don’t look at objects of immense or highly concentrated mass, we see a universe in which gravity is described very well by Newton’s theory. (There are a few other problems such as the orbit of Mercury around the Sun, but the list of problems remains short.)
The extraordinary success of modern physics and mathematics in describing our universe gives us hope that we can develop a more coherent general understanding of the universe. Most who discuss human knowledge look horizontally, so to speak, being impressed or not by the expansion in our ability to predict events in the heavens and by our amazing technology but often they remain convinced that the abstract truths drawn from Creation by traditional metaphysicians and theologians remain valid and complete. In fact, those truths remain valid in the limited sense that they are coherent in and of themselves though not able to describe the universe as understood in the light of modern physics and mathematics.
Coherent in an age that believed that matter had a stable existence, if only at the level of unseen atoms, traditional ideas of this universe are incoherent now that we know matter is held in existence by events and constraints understood very well in formal terms by quantum mechanics. Matter is not what Aristotle and Augustine and even the modernist Kant thought it to be. For that matter, time and space are not what they thought them to be, being rather a single structure of space-time best described for now by those non-Euclidean geometries of gravitational theory. Most traditional ‘proofs’ for the existence of God rely on an understanding of infinity which is invalid in this age when even freshman college students might learn how to prove that there are infinities which are ‘bigger’ than the ordinary infinity of {1,2,3,…}. Yet, I think there are some deep truths in those proofs that might be recovered by a new generation of theologians and philosophers who are educated in transfinite set theory and other branches of modern mathematics and science.
Let me try to form a more explicit hypothesis of what’s going on. The following is a description of the levels of created reality as found in my current views:
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The most basic level of created reality is the Primordial Universe which is the abstract stuff which God created from nothingness. This abstract stuff is a manifestation of the truths God chose for Creation.
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From that Primordial Universe, God shaped this particular universe as a totality in a more limited way. Seen in light of God’s purposes for this universe, it becomes morally ordered and I then refer to it as a ‘world’. With this terminology, our world isn’t necessarily unique. For example, God could have created a separate world for the resurrected.
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The stuff of this universe is shaped into things and living creatures which also have existences separate from the universe. Alternatively, we chould say the universe has a nature of its own and isn’t just a collection of things or a container for holding things.
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Living creatures are interesting in their own regard as highly specialized thing-like beings but I’m mostly concerned with man, in fact, mostly with those aspects of the human organism labeled ‘mind’ or ‘moral nature’.
Levels 3 and 4 are at least partly reachable by our senses. Ancient thinkers and even some poets of prehistorical peoples had intuitions that something existed which is at least similar to Level 2, but it was Einstein who first defined the universe in rational terms — the Aristotelian cosmos was described by way of a sort of indefinite inclusiveness. Einstein expanded human reason so that it could better deal with that Level 2, this particular universe, and he did so by also expanding human reason more deeply and more broadly into Level 1, a level of being spoken about in dream-like or poetic terms by some like Plato and ignored by many others, even some known as metaphysicians. With quantum mechanics and many developments in mathematics, reason broadened still further and expanded more deeply into that Level 1, the realm of abstractions. In my way of thought, those abstractions are a level of being, a level as real as our own flesh and blood.
I repeat: We have the great opportunity of developing a more coherent understanding of the universe. But this is not a matter of simply trying to fit a new view of created reality into some sort of pre-existing, general-purpose human mind. We have to begin shaping our minds by responding properly to God’s Creation, to the vast piles of modern empirical knowledge and to those many piles of traditional knowledge which remain valid. It’s not the case that modern empirical knowledge is true or false according to whether we can fit it into the categories and relationships which we’ve inherited from earlier generations of thinkers. It’s our minds which are true or false according to whether they are shaped to the demands of modern empirical knowledge. Even the ultimate truths that the transcendent God revealed to us will become false if our minds remain shaped to views of His Creation which are incoherent.