Truth unfolds in time through communal processes.
I’ve realized there is possibly a very clear example of what this means in an area where I’ve perhaps misspoken a little. Maybe I’ve simply been in error. In any case, I’m also willing to claim that new truths might emerge in time through various processes, new truths not emerging from some mystical source but rather emerging as a result of the decisions God makes as He tells this story I call a world — the universe seen in light of God’s purposes or, equivalently, in light of moral order.
The issue I’ll consider now is human rights. (See Natural and Inalienable Rights.) I’ve never felt good about denying we have some sort of absolute rights in this mortal life, though I’ve never been comfortable with those who treat those rights as if they were absolute in the sense of a metaphysical truth such as the law of non-contradiction. It’d be nice in some sense to argue that we have all those supposedly inalienable rights declared by Jefferson (though the original Lockean trio of life, liberty, and property makes more sense).
In that earlier article, Natural and Inalienable Rights, I also spoke in somewhat apocalyptic terms. When the Son of God took on a human nature, being born as Jesus of Nazareth, we were adopted as His brethren, gaining some of His divine privileges, though men and their institutions remain what they are and don’t have all that much respect for these privileges. Of course, that’s not an argument against human rights of the Lockean sort just as large-scale, modern disobedience of the Fifth Commandment is no argument against that prohibition of murder.
So, we go from apish men with inborn moral behaviors and attitudes to mannish apes with some awareness of themselves to…?
When and how do we become creatures with some sort of inalienable rights appropriate for the sort of morally responsible and self-aware creatures that few seem to be? Is there some magical moment when the human brain or perhaps human social relationships reached some threshold level of complexity? As a Christian, I’d certainly advocate the idea that something was sealed when the Son of God became man and adopted us as His brethren. In fact, I’d suggested that was the only solid basis for this inalienable rights business in my article, Natural and Inalienable Rights, and perhaps in other places. I now consider the divine privileges that Jesus Christ gave us when He adopted us as His brethren to be separate from human rights as defined by modern thinkers. Those human rights seem to involve empirical matters and can be discussed in the same way that formal political relationships have been discussed by Aristotle and Hobbes and others.
If human rights exist, they’re something that first appeared at a perhaps vague or even “smeared-out” time during the evolution of the human species and the development of civilization. It’s hard for creatures who live for such a small span of years to truly imagine new entities or even truly new aspects of existing entities arising in Creation, but we can at least move in the direction of imagining, for example, living cells arising out of a chemical soup or creatures with true abstract reasoning talents arising from clever apes. We can try to find a way to talk intelligently about the coming of new things or new aspects of thing-like beings. I view Creation as being made of stuff created, in a manner of speaking, before the so-called Big Bang (try to think in ontological or even logical terms rather than strict chronological terms) and I also view a world of things and thing-like beings which develop in the way of a story. God is telling a story in which He, with the help of creatures enjoying or suffering from a certain freedom, can move in unexpected ways or even bring into existence some truly new and creative possibility.
While officially accepting the evidence that man has evolved from a more primitive apish creature, most modern Christians have tended to prefer the pagan myth of a Golden Age which has decayed into the current Fallen Age and they have also preferred to think as if the Creator has the same relationship with His Creation as would a pagan God or gods who use great power against recalcitrant matter which maybe has existed eternally along with them (and is maybe the same as them). St. Thomas Aquinas taught an existentialist view of God — He is His own Act-of-being, the Supreme Act-of-being — but few have yet joined the effort to purge our Christian minds of the view of God as some sort of super-creature, acting upon matter as if literally a potter working clay. God is transcendent, for sure, but He is Creator and not Olympian King of the Gods. By creating, from nothing and in the way of a shaper and story-teller, God works more from inside. I’ve tended recently to speak of being in terms of levels, where thing-like being is a very particularized being which is shaped from more general forms of being. In this way of thinking, God works from the deepest and most abstract levels where He manifests truths out to the particular and thing-like levels of being such as our universe.
The very fact that human beings at some time could claim to have inalienable rights might well tell us that the claim has some validity, but what’s of immediate interest is this idea that something like inalienable rights could arise in history. Then again, how could it be otherwise? We can’t posit our apish ancestors to have always had rights. Inalienable rights would be like the opposable thumb in that they appeared as the result of evolutionary development.
This seems a bit strange, but I’ve been struggling hard for nearly 20 years to reshape my mind to correspond to reality and I’ve perhaps had to deal with stranger and more radical ideas than this:
Can it be true that a human being of higher moral awareness and self-awareness might have those inalienable rights though a human creature from the Old Stone Age didn’t have any such rights, though the two be almost genetically twins?
Let’s see if we can apply a particular and plausible meaning to the allegory of Adam and Eve:
Did all human beings gain a supra-animal status when Buddha and Jeremiah and Socrates had first walked the earth?
Physicists like to explore extreme conditions of high-energy (or equivalently — high density) because they’d like to discover ‘new physics’. As they view matters, the universe is a boring place, frozen into a certain condition soon after the expansion had begun from an extremely dense state. A different realm of thing-like being had come into shape and it was very cool and stable and a story could begin, a story of galaxies and even huge clusters of galaxies coming to be from small concentrations in a remarkably homogeneous observable universe, a story of first generation stars which burned fast and exploded to produce waste products such as oxygen and iron and magnesium, a story of organic chemicals coming to exist in many regions and of life coming to exist on at least one planet made of many of those waste products of first-generation stars.
We live in that world of apparently stable physics — though we certainly don’t have anything like a complete understanding of that physics. We have a tendency to see this world of rocks and flesh and blood as being “the way it has to be.” Over the period of years allotted to individual men or even to tightly bound generations of men, the world certainly seems pretty stable in some fundamental ways. Nothing new appears under the sun — during the periods of time easily handled by the human mind and imagination. Men are what they are, rocks are what they are, and ocean and sky are pretty much eternal.
In fact, things — including living creatures — have stories. They develop over time. The more thing-like, the more empirical, the entity or its aspects, the more we can assume it to be the result of a story. A story also introduces the possibility of new entities or new aspects of old entities appearing, perhaps as a result of new relationships between an old environment and an existing line of creatures or new relationships between existing entities when changes (such as the growth of technology and the consequent growth and interconnection of human communities) raise new possibilities.
God didn’t create this universe all at once at the “time” of the so-called Big Bang. He still has the freedom to introduce new things under the sun. Moreover, we can participate in this ongoing creation, helping to raise at least the possibility of a better world.