The Problem of Knowledge

Articles on “Christianity and Science” often retread the same ground again and again. The intentions are laudable, no doubt. But anyone interested in the topic has doubtless had their fill over the years of debates about intelligent design and evolution, the age of the earth, examinations of the fossil record and so forth. When it comes to the intersection of theology and science (and I will throw philosophy into the mix, too), there are, in fact, more fundamental questions to answer. Debates over scientific questions largely amount to disputes about the interpretation: how do we best make sense of all we know? But before such arguments can even begin, the serious student of science, theology, and philosophy must ask: how is it that we are able to know anything about this universe of ours–much less talk about it–in the first place?

As I was walking with my daughter this morning, we were talking about this essay and how hard it is to compress everything I wish to say into the space available.^[1] It is a tall order to try to relate Christian faith, philosophy, and the natural sciences to see how in Jesus Christ “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). While the world manifests a wide range of intelligibility to human science and understanding, human speech invariably runs into limits. This raises questions for us: in what sense are limits good and in what sense not? Are there limits to human knowledge, to the intelligibility of things to the human mind? What limits should there be on an unbridled technology that conceivably could destroy us? Do these matters have anything to do with the truth of being? And what does philosophy have to do with it?

As we walked on, my eye fell upon an acorn in a sunbeam by the path. I stopped and picked it up. How insignificant the poor acorn seemed, so very small, but quite specific. As I rolled the acorn in my hand, my scientific mind went to the vast complexity and detail within it. Its cells and genome contain a wealth of molecular information connecting it to untold past generations and giving it the potential to become a giant oak, generating countless new acorns and new oak trees. Any being, this acorn included, can only be what it is by being delimited—this is what enables a thing to be precisely the individual thing it is and nothing else. Yet no thing is ever itself alone—it participates in an order of being that vastly surpasses it, enabling it to be. To say the least, the acorn needs the right conditions of soil, water, temperature, and light to fulfill its end as part of a larger order.

Humanity faces a civilizational crisis in the twenty-first century, arising from the loss of a sense of meaning in our cosmos other than that which human beings make for themselves. By reductively limiting how we perceive the whole, we have ironically lost a sense of proper limits to knowledge and action that open us up to meaning. This is due in part to an “atomization” or fragmentation of knowledge in the modern mind and to a “turn to the subject” in early modern philosophy that severed the connection between the individual subject and meaning in the external world. It is also due to the various sciences, being modern themselves, disavowing the seeking of meaning or purpose in the natural orders they study. Consequently, technology drives the world at an ever-increasing rate of change, motivated by a desire for control with few moral or ethical limits on the scope of what it can do.

The great twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988), reflecting in a public lecture in 1963 on what science has taught us, spoke of science’s self-limitation in investigating only the “how” of things but not their ultimate meaning. He pointed out that the sciences do not tell us what is good or bad or what we ought to do. In other words, ethics lies outside the competency of the sciences as they are now practiced. Feynman concluded:

What then is the meaning of it all?  What can we say to dispel the mystery of existence?  If we take everything into account, not only what the ancients knew, but also all those things we have found out up to today that they didn’t know, then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know.^[2]

Feynman was not a believer, yet expressed his great admiration for “Christian ethics—the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual, the humility of the spirit.”^[3] He clearly acknowledged that he did not know how to put science and religion together: more specifically, how to put the scientific spirit of adventure together with a motivated Christian ethic based on love. But Feynman saw the importance of a proper grounding for ethical human action and raised this question: “How can we draw inspiration to support these two pillars of Western civilization so that they may stand together in full vigor, mutually unafraid?”^[4] Such inspiration will take more than “science.” Feynman wisely saw that it required both humility of intellect and humility of spirit. I would argue that the rich tradition of philosophical thinking within the Christian world has the depth to address “the mystery of existence” in a compelling way such that theology and science can “stand together in full vigor, mutually unafraid.”

To engage in philosophical thinking is to engage in metaphysics, which literally means “beyond physics.” Traditional metaphysics was concerned with the study of “being as being,” where “being” includes the entirety of “what is,” nothing excluded. Here let us simply take “metaphysics” to mean those foundational principles that lie beyond what any science can establish but that we cannot help but have about what we think is real. Neither specialized science nor ordinary living can do without at least a tacit metaphysics that gives a “plausibility structure” to guide thought and action. As D.C. Schindler so powerfully put it in one of his essays: “praxis is always and without exception rooted in and expressive of theory.”^[5] The linguistic root of theory, θεωρία, theoria, pertains to “seeing,” a receptive beholding of what is. What we do turns on what we envision the truth of the world to be.

If things have no intrinsic meaning to many modern people, it is because they have lost a sense of being. Moderns no longer care to pose the question of being at all—they accept things as “just there,” a given brute fact of the world. If things have no natural meaning and if we must assign our own meaning from our own subjectivities, then the “logic” of the “immanent frame” of secular modernity^[6] is all too easily driven to a hermeneutic of suspicion fueling a will to power. The technological mindset of the immanent frame has a logic that is indifferent to any transcendent order beyond the “horizontal” frame of this world. This “logic” drives an increasingly irrational and conflicted public square.

Such matters may seem far away from my opening meditations on the knowability of the universe, and the place of a single acorn within it. But really, they all hang together. If the acorn is not knowable, then nothing is. If the acorn is knowable, then so are all things. All of this rests on the question of being.

The Truth of Being Kath’ Holon

If we are to recover a sense of being, we need to see the whole of being in all its splendor and depth. As D.C. Schindler points out, human reason is essentially καθ’ ὅλον, kath’ holon, “according to the whole.”^[7] The human mind is open to the full range of being as a whole and grasps both its universal abstract aspects and its instantiation in concrete individual things. But the modern scientific mind has lost a sense that we live in an “implicate order” where individual things get their meaning from a transcending and enfolding whole that enables each thing to be and make sense within the greater whole.^[8]

Scientists need to remember the simple fact that the world is intelligible, even if not all is fully understood. This then prompts us to ask: why is science possible in the first place? Why are there human beings with minds that desire to comprehend the cosmos–and furthermore who possess language with which to express their comprehension?

I would suggest that Thomas Aquinas’s (1225-1274) articulation of creation ex nihilo is a key to answering these questions well. This philosophical notion concerns what the world is, not the details of how the cosmos goes about its cosmological or developmental processes studied by the sciences. To my thinking as a scientist, there is nothing that physics has discovered about the universe that conflicts with Aquinas’s metaphysics of creation.

Josef Pieper says that in Aquinas “the notion of creation determines and characterizes the interior structure of nearly all the basic concepts in St. Thomas’s philosophy of Being;” that is, “nothing exists which is not creatura, except the Creator Himself.” ^[9] Anglican theologian Simon Oliver puts it this way: “God and creation do not share ‘existence’ or ‘being’ in common because God is existence itself, in which creation participates… God exists essentially (per essentiam), creation exists by participation (per participationem).”^[10] “Participation” is a philosophical term that characterizes the entities in the created order: for a thing to participate is to receive its being or existence from another that possesses being essentially, which is only true of God.^[11] To receive being by participation is to be caused.^[12] The relation is fundamentally asymmetrical: whereas creatures are “like” God (to Aquinas, all effects bear some “likeness” to their causes), the being of God is infinitely dissimilar from the being of creatures. Oliver explains that “God’s relation to creation is more intimate and immediate than relations between creatures–precisely because of the sheer difference between God and creation.”^[13]

Perhaps the deepest mystery of the cosmos is its being–that there is something rather than nothing. The second deepest mystery is that the human mind finds the world intelligible, that so much is accessible to our self-transcending minds. As Aristotle put it and Thomas Aquinas reaffirmed, “in a sense the soul [ψυχὴ, anima] is all existing things.”^[14] To me this is one of the most remarkable sayings in all of Aristotle or Aquinas. The human mind (“intellectual soul” to Aquinas) and reality are attuned to one another. Philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) expressed it beautifully: “There is a nuptial relation between mind and being.”^[15] We can truly know the world in all its vastness—all existing things! —even if incompletely. There is a sense in which all things can take up residence in our minds and be spoken forth in language, in principle intelligible to all. Albert Einstein recognized this mystery of the intelligibility of being, the mystery of the conformity of being to our minds, when he wrote: “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility… The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”^[16]  Our minds “take hold of” reality in an active and miraculous way and render it intelligible.

Grasping the meaning of being entails grasping what we call its “transcendental” aspects–truth, goodness, and (in many reckonings) beauty. The transcendentals are “unbounded,” without limit–they apply at all levels of being, from God right down to the smallest insect, and down further still. To Aquinas they speak of all being, created and uncreated, and thus speak to the “meaning of it all.” Schindler says: ^[17]

What is at issue in the transcendentals, in short, is the most basic meaning of things and so man’s fundamental relationship with the world, with himself and others, and with God. … [T]hey transcend even the borders of creation itself; they describe not only the being of all creation, but also the being of God, which is infinitely different from created being. … [In] the transcendentals there is an inseparable connection between the particular and the universal, which is to say that it is ultimately not possible to affirm (or indeed: to deny) that any particular thing is beautiful, good, or true in a proper sense without implicitly affirming (or denying) that the property belongs to the nature of reality as such.

To make this concrete: I can only truly affirm the goodness or beauty of the acorn in my hand at the beginning of this essay if these are real properties of being as such–is there really are such things as truth, goodness, and beauty. Otherwise, I am just playing with words. Aquinas helps us to see even an acorn kath’ holon.

Aquinas on the Truth of Being

Aquinas addresses the transcendental aspects of being at the start of his Questiones Disputatae de Veritate. He asks specifically, “What is truth?”^[18] His answer demonstrates that truth is clearly far more than the correctness of a proposition—it implicates all of reality. Joseph Pieper says that “St. Thomas’s doctrine of truth can be grasped in its proper and profoundest meaning only if we bring into play this notion of creation.”^[19] Ironically, Thomas’s question is the same one posed by Pontius Pilate to Jesus standing before him, who had just said “for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice” (Jn. 18:38). Being is not without its witness.

Aquinas tells us “that which the intellect first conceives as, in a way, the most evident, and to which it reduces all its concepts, is being [ens]. Consequently, all the other conceptions of the intellect are had by additions to being.”^[20] Truth is not the same as being but is one of those predicates that may be said to “add to” being inasmuch as it expresses a mode of being not expressed by the term “being.” There are two ways such a mode can add to being. One mode can express a certain manner of being, such as substance, which “simply expresses a special manner of existing, namely, as a being in itself.” A second mode of being “is one that is common, and consequent upon every being. This mode can be taken in two ways: first, in so far as it follows upon every being considered absolutely [ens in se]; second, in so far as it follows upon every being [ens] considered in relation to another [in ordine ad aliud].”

Of the second mode of being, the first way can be said positively or negatively. The positive refers to the essence of a thing, the negative to its undividedness (ens indivisum), expressed by one [unum]. Thus, an existing thing is a single definite what-it-is unity. Next comes the transcendental relations of one being to another. A being (ens) is an aliquid, “something,” distinct in some way apart from others, an individual, yet it is not alone—it is related to other beings. The true and the good express relation “according to the correspondence one being has with another” (secundum convenientiam unius entis ad aliud):

This is possible only if there is something which is such that it agrees with [convenire] every being. Such a being is the soul [anima], which, as is said in The Soul, “in some way is all things [quae quodammodo est omnia].” The soul, however, has both knowing and appetitive powers. Good expresses the correspondence [convenientiam] of being [entis] to the appetitive power, for, and so we note in the Ethics, the good is “that which all desire.” True expresses the correspondence [convenientiam] of being [entis] to the knowing power, for all knowing is produced by an assimilation [assimilationem] of the knower to the thing [res] known, so that assimilation is said to be the cause of knowledge.

This is a key paragraph. One being can have a convenientiam, a “coming together” or agreement, with another being only to the extent that “there is something that agrees with [convenire] every being.” There is a being that does precisely that: a knowing being with a “intellectual soul,” which, as Aristotle says, “in some way is all things.” Here Aquinas speaks of the human anima (soul), which has both knowing and appetitive powers. The “appetitive power” is directed towards the good (even if our appetites can be sinfully misdirected). The “knowing power” is directed to the true.^[21] It is precisely in the “agreement” (convenientiam), or “similarity, likeness” (assimilationem), between the mind or soul and a thing (res) that accounts for what it means for something to be “true.” Aquinas says: “This agreement is called the conformity of thing and intellect [concordia adaequatio intellectus et rei].”^[22] Aquinas tells us that while truth primarily resides in the mind, it also is not improper to see it in things, since things conform to the mind of God. ^[23]

Aquinas also recognized that truth has many dimensions. Another way of defining truth “is according to the effect following upon it. Thus, Hilary says that the true is that which manifests and proclaims existence. And Augustine says: ‘Truth is that by which that which is, is shown.’”^[24] This sense of truth as disclosure, whereby a thing manifests, unconceals, or reveals itself relates to the sense of the Greek word for truth, αλήθεια, aletheia, derived as a compound word from “a-”, meaning “not,” and the verb lanthánō, “to lie hidden.” Things truly reveal what they are to our minds—they become “not hidden” in some respect. This is the irony of Jesus before Pilate—he was manifesting the truth right before Pilate’s eyes, but Pilate was blind, and the truth remained hidden to him.

Since truth consists in a conformity or agreement between an intellect and a thing, things are known in one way by the creative divine intellect and in another way by human beings with an intellectual soul. Created things are thus between two intellects, divine and human. Created things are real and have natures precisely because they are creatively thought by God. That is the source of the truth and intelligibility of being. According to Aquinas, while the divine intellect “measures” all things, the human intellect “is measured by” natural things and can only “measure” artifacts made by human beings.^[25] Thus, God is the ultimate “measure” of the truth of all things, not man.

Pieper tells us that it is because beings are creatively thought by God that they have an inner clarity and intelligibility. Things are knowable because they are created. But Pieper also reminds us of the fact that a human being can never know how God creatively thinks being, since this is on the side of the unknowable divine essence. Consequently, all things have a certain unfathomable depth to them that gives to all created being an “unknowable” dimension. ^[26] Something in them remains hidden even as they positively reveal themselves to us. This is an essential feature of created being itself and underlies Aquinas’s philosophical and theological apophaticism, which is most definitely not like a modern radical skepticism that denies we can know God or things. We do know things and their truth, but never fully, for the full truth of any being, like the being of God, is bathed in an inexhaustible light that exceeds our comprehension. This gives us a deeper sense of the meaning of John Calvin’s famous description of creation as “a theater of God’s glory.”

Schindler points out that the logic of our technological culture is instrumental power and pragmatic control. Those in the grip of such a mindset are incapable of philosophy proper, incapable of asking about or seeing what is truly real. Such a mindset denies the reality of the transcendentals, reducing goodness, truth, and beauty to subjective feelings without ultimate meaning. The technological mind sees the world as a given, a datum to be exploited. In stark contrast, Schindler says: “The truth of things, transcendentally speaking, is a display of their intrinsic meaning, which is to be affirmed for its own sake; it is not a mere set of facts, a collection of data to be recorded in relation to some project or other. Our most fundamental relation to a world as beautiful, good, and true is love.” ^[27] God’s creative act is expressive of his very nature as Triune love. Simon Oliver says: “the difference between God and creation is not a random and inscrutable difference; it is a participation in, or trace of, the eternal differences and relations of the Godhead. … God’s act of creation is not simply a result of the divine will, impenetrable to reason. It is an expression of the very nature of God himself … an expression of God’s eternal nature as self-donating love. The real relation of creation to God is a participation in the real relations of the persons of the Trinity.”^[28] Creation is an intelligible gift of love, a donum, for the sake of our being here, imaging God and participating in the created order.

Conclusion

We return then to our opening considerations. Before our scientific-theological debates begin, how is it even possible to know the universe we debate, and to find sensible language that is adequate to the task? How can we understand how an acorn fits into the rest of the cosmos? And how can we avoid sliding into a Nietzschean world devoid of real value?

I have sketched out, all too briefly, that the most intelligible response to these questions lies in the same place: the truth of being, specifically as articulated by traditional Christian metaphysics. This very metaphysics makes us aware of an unfathomable mystery to being that limits our understanding and requires a humility of intellect and spirit in seeking the truth of the world. Yet, this same metaphysics enables us to make sense of the knowability of the universe, of Maritain’s “nuptial relation” between mind and world, in a way that no materialistic scientism could ever do. When the reality of such a nuptial relation becomes apparent, we find ourselves drawn into the reality of being kath’ holon, and find the acorn sat snugly within a vast tapestry of reality, in which it truly participates in a truth, goodness, and beauty shared by all things. And the reality of such truth, goodness, and beauty calls us to rightly ordered love and away from a world run according to the will to power. The truth of being confronts us, again and again.

An urgent task for Christians today is demonstrating how our vast cosmos manifests the truth, goodness, and beauty of God, given how much more we know in the realm of the sciences than we did in the fourth or thirteenth centuries in which so much of our metaphysics was hashed out. Yet–speaking as both a Christian and a physicist of many decades–I am confident that if we draw on the resources of that metaphysical tradition with a humility appropriate to our nature, we will find ample resources for the task.

Paul S. Julienne is retired from his career as a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Joint Quantum Institute of NIST and the University of Maryland. He has published over 280 scientific papers involving phenomena in atomic, molecular, and optical physics and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has a long-standing interest in the interface of science, theology, and philosophy and has developed Sunday school classes bringing an Anglican perspective to these matters.

1. Let me express my gratitude to my daughter, Alicia Bradford, for insightful reading and conversation on this essay. ↑

2. Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All (London: Penguin, 1998), 33 (the lecture was published posthumously). ↑

3. Feynman, Meaning of It All, 48. ↑

4. Feynman, Meaning of It All, 48. ↑

5. D.C. Schindler, “Truth and the Christian Imagination: The Reformation of Causality and the Iconoclasm of the Spirit,” Communio 33 (Winter, 2006), 536. ↑

6. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2007). ↑

7. D.C. Schindler, The Catholicity of Reason (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids: 2013), 3. ↑

8. The concept of an “implicate order” is a foundational idea, often associated with physicist David Bohm (1917-1992). We need not follow Bohm’s particular interpretation of quantum physics to appreciate the power of his idea. Here “order” means “under the aspect of,” so that we could speak of the political order, the order of science, the noetic order of mind, etc. An implicate order is one in which the distinct “things” within it are mutually related within a whole that enables the “parts” to make sense by virtue of a certain priority of the whole. A natural ecological system provides an example. ↑

9. Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays, trans. John Murray, S.J. and Daniel O’Connor (Chicago: St. Augustine’s Press, 3^rd Edition, 1999), 47. ↑

10. Simon Oliver, Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2017), 50, 61; see also the work by other Anglican theologians, e.g., Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine or Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) or Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). ↑

11. That Aquinas adapted the neo-Platonic concept of participation as an essential background component of his thinking has been rediscovered by twentieth-century scholarship. See, for example, Cornelio Fabro, Selected Works, Volume 1, Selected Articles on Metaphysics and Participation (IVE Press, 2016), or Chapter 5 of W. Norris Clarke, S. J., Explorations in Metaphysics: Being, God, Person (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). ↑

12. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.44, a.1. ↑

13. Simon Oliver, Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed, 51. ↑

14. Aristotle’s words, ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστι πάντα, are given in Book 3.8 of De Anima, and are quoted by Aquinas in De Veritate, q.1, a.1, reply. ↑

15. Quoted by W. Norris Clarke, The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 18. ↑

16. The English translation of Einstein’s article appears along with his original German in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, March 1936, with the English title “Physics and Reality.” Einstein’s original sentence is, “Das ewig Unbegreifliche an der Welt ist ihre Begreiflichkeit,” literally rendered “The eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.” The German verb greifen, a root of Begreiflichkeit, “comprehensibility,” means to grab, to grasp, to take hold of. Einstein also used the German words for a miracle, “ein Wunder.” ↑

17. D. C. Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2018), 18, 22. ↑

18. Thomas Aquinas, Questiones Disputatae de Veritate, q.1, a.1 ↑

19. Pieper, Silence of St. Thomas, 48. ↑

20. Aquinas, De Veritate q.1, a.1, reply. ↑

21. How knowledge comes about from sense input through the active and passive powers of the human mind is treated elsewhere by Thomas; see especially Summa Theologiae I, q.79, I; q.84, and I, q.85. ↑

22. Aquinas, De Veritate, q.1, a.1, reply. ↑

23. Aquinas, De Veritate q.1, a.2, reply. ↑

24. Aquinas, De Veritate q.1, a.1, reply. ↑

25. Aquinas, De Veritate, q.1, a.2, reply; to Aquinas “measure” does not mean a quantitative measurement as in the sciences; rather it implies a judgment or distinction of the mind (see Summa Theologiae I, q.79, a.9, ad.5). ↑

26. Pieper, Silence of St. Thomas, 59. ↑

27. Schindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament, 26. ↑

28. Oliver, Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed, 52. ↑

*Image Credit: “Acorn Strength” by Julius Caesar Ibbotson