“[T]he universe is not a finished work. Every mind within it is in the position of the audience sitting in the theater and seeing the play for the first time. Or rather, every one of us is on the stage, performing a part in a play, of which we have not seen either the script or any synopsis of the ensuing acts.”
Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
Nifty Shades of Gray
When I informed my family and friends that I was completing my graduate studies in Materials Science[1] and heading to law school, the reaction was universal. Everyone wondered how difficult it would be to transition from a field where things were black and white to one where things were only shades of gray.
It’s a common misconception to think math and science are predominantly directed to producing answers capable of objective determination as either correct or incorrect. While my experience has been that math and science are rigorous and exacting beyond all other fields, the difference between them on the one hand and law or philosophy on the other is a matter of degree and not of kind. Advancing the frontiers of math and science is no less messy, no less ambiguous, no less political, and no less subjective than for any other field.
Perhaps people get the impression that math and science are different because so much time and effort must be invested in learning the specialized language and rules before a person can start doing the work. But make no mistake, the work is frustrating, exhilarating, surprising, and rewarding, just like all meaningful work.
Failure is the rule, not the exception, exacerbated by the brutal and unceasing fixation of the scientific method on attempting to falsify any hypothesis. Only by surviving all possible attacks can a new scientific statement be regarded as potentially true, and even then sometimes only under certain constraining conditions.
If you think about it, you will realize that you are much more likely to find a lawyer who believes that practicing law can produce certainty than to find a scientist who believes that practicing science will produce certainty, but that only goes to demonstrate who is the better salesman.
Science isn’t meant to operate on confident eloquence or masterful argumentation so much as surviving a process of attrition. Science instills the discipline of attempting to falsify, over and over. Results that seem correct are not deemed correct until they are tested.
What many people don’t appreciate, and what some scientists seem to forget, is that the rigor and certainty of science resides in the process and not so much in the results. When science is rightly centered around the process, it is more apt to learn from failure, and thus to find true value in failure.
The practice of law thrives on assertions, the truths of which are determined just as much on style points and forum shopping as on objective standards. Moreover, there is very little value to the client in learning valuable lessons from failure, unless the failure was the opponent’s.
Practicing law demands the appearance of certainty in an uncertain environment. Science welcomes failure as it slowly peels back the layers of the unknown.
The Fruits of Failure
Welcoming failure becomes more poignant as it becomes more practical, for example when the principles of science and engineering are used to invent. Invention and innovation require faith[2] in the same way fish require water – without it the inventor may flop around and gasp for a while, but never thrive.
Attempting to create something new and surprising is an effort destined to fail much more often than to succeed, and if it succeeds it often does so in unexpected ways. What sustains the inventor is the faith that the effort will bear fruit in the form of a solution (whether to the problem at hand or to some new problem discovered in the process).
But more than faith in a solution, what lifts and propels the inventor is faith that the failure will be fruitful. Whether they realize it or not, this is spiritual faith. The same faith that assures us of a Creator in whose image and likeness we were made also sets ablaze our creative passions, because our Creator wants us to create in cooperation with Him (unlike the god Zeus who punished Prometheus for starting humanity down the path of scientific discovery).
It is our nature to create because it is our Creator’s nature. Creative activity is one way, and perhaps the most direct way, that we emulate our Creator and participate in the ongoing Creation.
“God created man in his own image and likeness, i.e. made him a creator too, calling him to free spontaneous activity and not to formal obedience to His power. Free creativeness is the creature’s answer to the great call of its creator. Man’s creative work is the fulfillment of the Creator’s secret will.”
Nikolai Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man
In being created with the ability to create, we glean an inkling of two things: God’s will and God’s love.
First, the Creator’s will is for mankind to create so that we may participate in the fulfillment of His plan. God doesn’t need our help, but like a good father, He wants us by His side all the same, collaboratively working His vineyard. He prefers that our hands do His will.
Second, the Creator desires to serve his creation because he loves it. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”[3] God sends us into the world so that our ability to love and to do His will is perfected in the test. But He also recognizes that we are unable to become perfect without Him, and so in His infinite love our Lord becomes our servant and our sacrifice.
One may ask of an accomplished artist – a playwright let’s say – whether it bothers her when an actor flubs the beautifully-written lines, as if the actor was some kind of interloper. Similarly, one may ask of God whether He is bothered by our constant fumblings. But such questions misunderstand why a creator creates, implicitly assuming that the old saying applies: “If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.”
A good creator’s primary concern is not about dominating the creation; rather a good creator’s primary concern is with loving the creation. And to fully love a creation, the creator must separate the creation from herself, which necessitates letting go of total control and allowing the creation to be interpreted and, if capable, the freedom to act on its own accord.
The playwright’s lines aren’t meant to exist in isolation, but to be interpreted and spoken by an actor and to be heard and re-interpreted by an audience. Only then do the lines have the possibility of revealing their intended meaning. To realize their intended meaning, the lines must be put at risk of misinterpretation and misuse, even perversion, else they be put on a shelf with no chance of communicating anything to anybody.
“Unless the author permits them to develop in conformity with their proper nature, they will cease to be true and living creatures.”
Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
A Curious Collaboration
True creation means separating the creature from the creator, thus allowing the creation to discover its true nature by free choice. The paradox lies in that the creature can realize true freedom only by choosing to receive the grace to follow the eternal will of the creator rather than the creature’s own will.
This is the curious collaboration of free will with predestination.
There is an intended nature, a natural law, that the creature must discover and follow if he is to be free. To reject his own nature and rebel against the natural law is to accept bondage.
Indeed, this is how we know that the creature called man has free will – because man does things that violate his own nature and that fail to uphold the natural law. Sinfulness is irrefutable evidence of free will. No other creature shares with man the ability to act against its own nature.
The fact that we have free will is the expression of God’s desire for us to co-create with Him. That is our calling. That is life’s purpose. The fact that we are continually called upon to act, and that we proceed to heed that call, before we are capable of acting perfectly is evidence of the necessity of faith in a higher power that will work to perfect our feeble attempts.
Ready, fire, aim!
Freedom results from redemption. Indeed, evil is not overcome by destruction or abolition, but by redemption. And redemption is a creative act. Redemption is creative because it frees the captive not merely to be free but to follow their purpose.
Redemption is not a choice between two alternatives – a right and a wrong – but instead unleashes a great adventure of discovery and signals the creation of something new. Thus, the proper approach to confronting paradox is not one of solving a problem, but one of participating in a new creation.
In that sense, the creative discovery and invention that pushes the frontiers of science is less about finding certainty and more about collaborating with our Creator.
We think we want all of life’s mysteries to (1) have a single right answer, (2) be completely solvable, (3) be solvable by us (that is, without appeal to the supernatural), and (4) be finite (that is, have a beginning and an end). None of these are true. They are not true for science, they are not true for human relations, and they are not true for spiritual life.
That is why we must learn to embrace paradox.
Freedom to Worship
As we’ve seen, embracing paradox involves humility. One of the dangers of being a creative creature is in being constantly tempted to admire our creations and claim them as our own. As we do so, we turn them into idols.
Chapter 44 of the book of Isaiah talks about the folly of idol worship. We cut down trees, and from the wood we make shelter, make furniture, make fires, and with the leftovers we carve idols. What folly, observes the prophet, to worship the wood that we also burn to cook our meat!
In the same way, it is folly to worship the results of our own creative efforts. Our proper orientation is instead one of humility, offering the fruits of our creativity (the work of human hands) back to God in thanksgiving and sacrifice.
When we create to glorify God, we are working in concert with our intended nature and live in freedom. When we create to glorify ourselves, we are working against our intended nature and are enslaved by a master of our own making.
It all began at the beginning when Adam and Eve perverted something good by using it against God’s instruction for their own designs. By desiring the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve presumed that evil was something that could be known – that evil was an entity in its own right. This mindset led them to behave in a way that called evil into being as a thing, rather than what it really is – a mere negation of the good.
Negation cannot be known on its own, but only through experiencing the absence of what it negates. The cautionary tale of the Garden of Eden is not about the dangers of seeking knowledge, but rather about the dangers of playing God.
We think we can improve the good and tame the evil, not realizing that in the attempt to elevate ourselves we subvert God’s will and invite evil to creep into the void. But recall that redeeming evil is preferred over preventing evil because redemption is a creative act that produces more good.
Could this be God’s plan – to take the evil we introduced into the world through our pride and to redeem it, ultimately creating a greater good from the redemptive act? If this is the plan, then we must keep on creating, even at the risk of its distortion and misuse, and trust that God will use it for good.
We are creative creatures, having been made in our Creator’s image and likeness. The true nature of a creative creature is to freely accept the Creator’s gifts and guidance so that the creative works, made in collaboration with the ongoing Creation, may be offered back to the Creator who re-gifts them to us in superabundance.
This is our perfection. This is our up-building strange loop.
Minding what Matters
So, if our nature is to create in imitation of our Creator, how do we know our Creator’s nature? The long answer is the exercise of this entire blog. The short answer is through our creative minds, which were themselves fashioned in the Creator’s likeness.
But we must proceed with some caution and not rush in where even the angels fear to tread. Sir Arthur Eddington called the mind “the weaver of illusion.” The mind purports to be the ultimate arbiter of reason, logic, and reality while at the same time being our primary source of inanity, irrationality, and delusion. But it’s what we’ve got.
The mind makes sense of things by analogy – we think in a series of metaphors. Thinking in metaphor does not imply imperfection in either our thoughts or in the things we are trying to understand, but instead reveals the desire to grasp a higher meaning.
In concluding that there is no higher meaning, the atheist must minimize the analogical and attempt to collapse everything into the same flattened level that has no supernatural or spiritual dimension. One result is the often-repeated atheist’s critique that it is man who has created God in man’s image, not the other way around.
The atheist is partially correct in that man has sought to anthropomorphize his entire environment and existence, resulting in what I refer to as flattening the meaning out of existence. By denying the transcendent, the atheist is forced to overlook is all the ways God has revealed Himself to us – chiefly among them Sacred Scripture, but also including the design of the universe, our conscience, the natural law, and the law written on our hearts.[4]
To guard against this nihilistic fiction and preserve meaning, we have no choice but to embrace analogical thinking. After all, how can we accurately describe an existence that transcends our own when our language is stuck down here with us?
While analogy is indispensably and unavoidably desirable, analogy will ultimately break down. After all, there is no such thing as a perfect analogy – if the analogy was perfect, it would exactly coincide with the thing being described, and thus cease to be an analogy. As Chesterton quipped, “Saying something is like a dog is another way of saying it is not a dog.”[5]
When an analogy is stretched too far, the error reveals itself in the attempt to translate it back into the literal. For example, because fatherhood on earth was patterned after God’s eternal fatherhood, but is not the same, the two have an analogical relationship. When we apply what is peculiar to fatherhood on earth directly to God – its temporal nature (it has a beginning and an end), its genetic substance (it passes along some traits and not others), its biological emanations (no comment), and so forth – we risk mischaracterizing God’s fatherhood as being limited in similar ways.
Analogical thinking recognizes that, while there is not complete unity in the things being compared, there is something meaningful and important that they share in their essence.
We don’t often think about the “real world” of our earthly existence as being the analogy for the supernatural spiritual world, but it makes sense to think of it that way when you recognize which came first.
Our universe, our relationships, our institutions, our creations, our thoughts and feelings, are all patterned after supernatural things that preexisted. We are the approximation. We are the less real.
It is an impossible task to draw analogies that hold together under pressure for things in this world (that we cannot get outside of) to things in the supernature world (that we cannot get inside of). Yet all is not lost. Before the analogy fails, we can still glean important meaning, and indeed we are meant to do so.
We gain insights and make errors about God from exploring His Creation in the same way that we gain insights and make errors about Shakespeare from reading Hamlet. At the very least, we can learn much about the capabilities of the author, as well as his opinion of and expectations for us, his actors and his audience.
What is clear is that our Creator wants a personal relationship with us. Like a good father, he wants us working the vineyard shoulder-to-shoulder with Him.
As creative creatures, we express our relationship to our Creator (or lack thereof) in three realms: in our discovery of the secrets of the natural world, in our unnatural attempts to dominate the world and each other, and in our yearning to understand the mysteries of the supernatural.
In the next three posts, we will explore how paradox shows its beautiful face in each of these realms.
[1] Materials Science is the interdisciplinary study of materials and their properties, particularly in their solid state. It combines principles of physics, chemistry, and engineering.
[2] Lanny Vincent, Prisoners of Hope
[3] John 3:16
[4] See, for example, Jeremiah 31:33, Hebrews 8:10, Romans 2:12-16, 2 Corinthians 3:3, and Ezekiel 11:19.
[5] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man