This discussion briefly explores the deep compatibility between faith and reason by engaging with the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena, while affirming the reality of change over time in a participatory understanding of creation and evolution.
The key question for contemplation: if God can see all things, then what does He see?
Then, the key premises that support the discussion are:
1. Change over time is real
2. Angels are real, therefore, forms exist.
The Kantian sphere of the noumena is a genuine gap between things as they appear and things as they are. Helpful scriptures: 1 Samuel 16:7, Luke 24:13-35, 1 Corinthians 13:12, and Revelation 19:12.
The human body is a filter through which the senses work. This is a limitation. The human eye, as a natural detector, can see only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Therefore, just on this basis, we can see the possibility that the appearance of a thing may differ from the thing-in-itself.
The thing-in-itself does therefore occupy a transcendent place, one that can be crossed in various ways according to the kind of thing. In this context, a thing is defined as an event in spacetime. A thing that exists truly is an event that can be experienced as a phenomenon. The thing could be an inanimate object or a living being. As an object, the thing exists in reality — that is, it exists independently of mind.
A creator of a pot would hold the concept of the thing-in-itself in mind prior to its existence; therefore, the concept already has potentiality waiting to be actualised by its formation and existence. The concept is the beginning of an unfolding process of actualisation. In the example of the pot, the creator knows the pot more fully than someone who merely comes across it. For the observer, the pot in the mind has a bigger gap between the concept (as the first grasping of what the thing is — the mirror of its appearance from our experiencing and sensing) and what the thing is in itself.
We can therefore say that the encounter between a person and the thing-in-itself differs according to our experience of the life-cycle of the thing. This would be true for the pot or a plastic bag. The concept of the plastic bag as a useful thing to carry goods would be different from the concept held by the person fishing a plastic bag out of the ocean. We already have, then, in the experience of concept and actual being, differences based on our particular location in space and time.
As the book ‘A Catholic Replies to Professor Dawkins’ states:
“Unless an agent has an end, there is no reason for its action to occur, and so it will not occur. Just as an arrow cannot fly in a given direction unless it is first pointed in that direction, so sodium will not react with water to produce sodium hydroxide unless this end, rather than some other, has been assigned to it. If it had no end, it would not act.”
While agreeing with the general point, I want to clarify or unpack the last sentence. If sodium and water had no specific geometry or particular spatial, electrostatic, or electron configuration, they would not act when they meet. It is the coming together of sodium and water that produces sodium hydroxide. Yet the fact that this happens at all (naturally or artificially, e.g. in a science lab) is by design as stated.
The fact that we exist now and are looking back — the very fact of our being here — means that all that came before was necessary. This necessity began with the design of the universe; the shape or geometry of things in the beginning set in motion and determined the kind of things that exist now, how they move, live, and have their being. The problem of randomness is a problem of knowing. As limited persons, sensing the universe through the filter of our bodies and souls, the position of all things now is not knowable to us. Thus we say the motion of a gas is random because it is not possible for us to exist between the particles, to assess every microclimate, cause, and effect that could predict the individual motion of tiny things. This is why, for example, we use the average effects of particles on a system. But what is impossible for us is possible for God. Between the smallest and the largest of things, He is able to know them all.
As the motion of heavy objects is caused by gravitational fields, this again supports the plan of the designer that things would move in such a way, and that this was necessary. As this remains a fact, it could be argued that the end or telos of all things is in God because, by His very nature — omnipotence and omniscience — this would rightly be so. The deeper necessity of what is, is simply because we are now; the fundamental geometry of things set in motion structures all of reality.
In Thomistic terms, the telos is love, in the sense that love is defined as ‘all things working together with and for each other’. This permits both mechanism and free will. The original design of the universe by the First Cause has determined the geometry and motion of all things; therefore, sodium and water do not act by any inner tendency but because the nature of matter and the universe determines the mode of all things being in the universe.
Out of Love comes life.
A law of nature, then, is an observed pattern according to which things act. Matter does not have free will, but if I want something to roll, I design a ball, and so on. Laws of physics, as we know, describe the way things behave, not why. The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection — this is the orderliness according to which light was given to move and behave within its own boundedness.
The gap between forms is, I am, and I am not. I am this kind of thing; I am not that kind of thing — which is essentially describing our finitude. I can be located as a specific point of being in relation to what is other than me. God, the infinite and eternal cause of Himself, is the “I AM WHO I AM”. Our God, who is everywhere, cannot be located except in the person of Christ, who entered fully into the experience of existing, as fully human and fully divine (Hebrews 2:9). Yet He now exists, present in the tabernacles of the world, precisely because He is beyond the bounds and our constraints of time and space — God unchanging, God who is everywhere, and mysteriously with us and within us — for He is a God of the living, not of the dead.
Human beings, as agents created in the Imago Dei, have free will; otherwise, love cannot be true. We can choose not to be moved by the wind; we are free to move with it or against it.
Being created according to a kind under this framework is about compatibility, and randomness is impossible. That matter by its own doing formed an intelligible universe, or that chemicals happened to form a language to code for complexity on their own, is not just unlikely, but impossible. As Professor John Lennox has discussed in his book ‘God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?‘ — the mathematical probability of a blind mechanism leading inanimate matter to code for life is so remote it simply cannot explain any of the complexity we see now.
Returning to the question: if all things are visible and known to God, then what does He see? If God is love, then He created the universe with love, for love, and through love — this spacetime of incalculable beauty. Matter in itself must open a ground of our being here, a place from which all seeing is transformed as it moves. The motion of things, the reactions and transformations, must reveal a kaleidoscope of colours, patterns, and sounds of tremendous beauty — a transforming movement through space and time. Sacred souls are full of light, yet our eyes, as natural detectors, see only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Love is our nature too. Love is difficult because of sin. God created all things to be beautiful, and we were never meant to think we could judge or measure it.
Interestingly, codification instils a strict pattern of what is or is not beautiful. Law, as the relation (or line) between aims, seeks to guide all human motion, interaction, and experience. This means law is only necessary where our free choices can err away from the good, the true, and the beautiful.
This means that beauty is a fundamental, primordial harmony of the universe. The universe is a substrate in which transformation reveals to us ‘change over time’.
Time is relative, and to some extent our measurement of it is arbitrary, yet change over time is real. The time is now; we stand always at this edge of what is and what is not. Yet time unfolds as the distance between us, and our motion determines our experience of it. If we forget the clocks, now is where we are. You are somewhere now, and even in stillness a universe in motion causes the sun to rise and set, so things around you would change even if your position relative to your location did not. And if we were to agree on a meeting, we would experience time passing and certain changes through it until we gathered together. Therefore, it must be that only in the present do all things remain united, belonging to the moment that we are.
The sphere of the noumena of a living thing-in-itself begins in the same way as that of an object: a concept that can be grasped and form a mirror at the simplest level. This means that in our common humanity we can ‘expect’ things in the other that exist within ourselves. This works from universals toward particulars. By universals, I mean ontological nature rather than simply the set of all actual beings as they understand themselves — which is where the tension exists between the metaphysical and the event of being.
Only the rational intellect can break this barrier of transcendence by participatory relationship. This accounts for knowing God through divine revelation and our knowing as intimacy with all that is the other human in our lives. Knowing inanimate things means we hold the concept inside our minds, but the object cannot break the noumenal barrier because it cannot relate to us; we only relate to it.
The particulars of a person can be grasped by outward appearance, yet as human beings we cross this noumenal barrier by way of relationship. This breaks down and reforms the concept; the concept of the other is also in motion as we move through space and time, unfolding and revealing itself. God Himself crosses this transcendence by reaching out to us at different points in our human history, but most importantly in the person of Jesus Christ.
If angels exist, then intentional forms have ontological stability. Many people throughout history have experienced these supernatural beings. If all things have their end in God, and their beginning billions of years ago, God’s omniscience means He foreknew that the structure, geometry, and nature of matter would lead to what is now as participatory in the created universe.
The question then is why dynamic change exists at all and why evolution is the mechanism God chose to bring humanity into the universe. As the universe was set in motion and we live on a dynamic earth, change and transformation are part of nature, as time is part of the fabric of space. It could be argued that hierarchy was and remains an essential part of the participation of forms in bringing stability into this dynamic earth and our universe. The non-transformation of some essences and species that survive is evidence of this: stromatolites still exist, as do bacteria and sharks. Evolution has limits, so the essence of some forms remains while others evolve into new pathways of life. This can be likened to the branches on a tree which spread horizontally and vertically.
The physical limitations of evolution can be ascribed to entropy. The horizontal transformations within a form mean, as horse evolution demonstrates, improved efficiency in relation to environmental factors.
Therefore, evolution is real but its mechanism is theoretical. We need not reject evidence; we should simply continue to search together for the how this works.
There remain many mysteries about creation and evolution that do not deny acts of God, or more specifically the fingerprint of God as all things working together with and for each other. The first cell — perhaps a virus is a remnant of such a thing — and the fact of inanimate matter coming together in an ordered way is remarkable. That DNA or RNA is a chemical language is another mystery of intelligible orderliness.
However, we can distinguish between the type of reasoned argument that leads to a correct inference, such as what God was communicating through the Genesis narrative — the unique dignity and direct dependence of life on God (which I believe is true) — yet the mode of this was concealed in an ancient vision that is not a scientific account.
Biological death existed in the prelapsarian state, but not the suffering, sorrow, and spiritual death that we now experience as postlapsarian consequences of the Fall. This is because heaven and earth were once united and God walked with us in the Garden.
Jesus uses concrete examples within our experience to teach us, (John 3:12), and since dinosaurs predate humanity by many millions of years, and birds (which appear in Scripture) evolved from theropod dinosaurs, this provides clear evidence that animal death existed long before man. Fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and gas, which underpin our modern economy, were formed over millions of years from the buried remains of dead organic matter. This too provides clear evidence of the biological death of animals and plants as part of Earth’s natural recycling and sustainability — a system humanity has exploited to its advantage.
Modern science reveals that some empirical truth could be ascribed via the pattern of the stories in Genesis. Jesus taught in parables, and so remaining open to Him, ‘casting all our cares upon Him,’ remains our best hope.
Christ is the light, and we share in this love, without prejudice; He calls everyone, and we have responded to this call. Yet, He asks for humility, a radical acceptance of unknowing so that we may accept one another as brothers and sisters (an undoing of original sin) as one family. Amen.
Notes:
In a previous essay I have dealt with the issue of substances.(Discussion On Life, Truth, Love, and Wisdom – including Actions and Reproduction. – Christian Living). Substance is not simple or linear but a complex series of relations. Metaphysical essence is what truly holds “whatness” together, embracing all actual and potential being across time. A name or a word acts as a unifying sign that gathers these relations into a communicable whole.
I have also dealt with the problem of language and truth in the essay on social facts and natural law. (Social Facts and Natural Law – Christian Living) where I state, intersubjective agreement is necessary for communicable truth (Amos 3:3), yet agreement is not sufficient in itself, as it must correspond to the independent reality of things.