Traction on Reality

Part I: Surveying the landscape

Every single human being has a view of reality. It is impossible to function without one. And it is that understanding of the world we all assume that informs the answers we give to the most foundational questions we can ask: Who am I? What sort of world is this? and What sort of world should it be? Without some sort of answer to such basic questions, we couldn’t function as persons or have meaningful relationships. And so, from the very beginning of our lives, as infants, we start gathering data trying to make sense of the world we find ourselves in. And very soon, with the help of family and culture, an understanding of the world starts to form and continues to develop over the years.¹

This publication is an invitation to continue exploring this world we live in, making sure our understanding of the world corresponds to the way things actually are. Obviously, there are many different versions of reality out there, and they can’t all be right. Some must be closer to the truth than others, and some are simply false. So, how are we doing? How much traction on reality do we really have? And how do we gage that: how do we sort out what is true and real from fantasy and misinformation, reliable sources from questionable ones?

I started Wayfinders to gather resources that help answer those questions, to get more and more traction on reality, and help us find our way in the world.

We human beings are unable to survive, and certainly cannot thrive, unless we can make meaning. If life is perceived as utterly random, fragmented, and chaotic—meaningless—we suffer confusion, distress, stagnation, and finally despair. The meaning we make orients our posture in the world, and determines our sense of self and purpose. We need to be able to make some sort of sense out of things; we seek pattern, order, coherence, and relation in the dynamic and disparate elements of our experience. —Sharon Daloz Parks

So how, then, do we make sense of life and reality—of “the disparate elements of our experience”? What is reality?

In a word, reality is everything: all that exists, all that is true, and all that is real. It includes us (the persons asking the question), the world of which we’re a part, and the ultimate order-of-things (reality as a whole, and what it all means).

In what follows, we’re going to explore the nature and structure of reality from two perspectives: an objective view that allows us to map the various aspects of reality into a coherent whole (insofar as we’ve come to understand them), and a subjective or experiential view that enables us to see and navigate reality as agents within it.²

Mapping Reality

If we ask the experts (philosophers, in this case), they would say that reality is comprised of three basic domains: nature (organic and inorganic matter), sentient minds (humans and animals with conscious mental states), and culture (the product of the interplay between sentient minds and nature).³

However, if we ask religious believers and others, many would say there’s something missing in that list: namely, the spiritual dimension of reality. In fact, in some traditions the spiritual dimension is a whole world in its own right, including a supernatural realm with its own populations, histories and situations.⁴ If we accept the spirit-realm (however we conceive it) as an aspect of reality, it’s probably best to think of reality as consisting of two broader dimensions: the physical and the metaphysical, each with its corresponding domains.

In this scheme of things, the physical comprises nature, sentient minds and culture (since we know that sentient minds and culture emerge from the physical),⁵ while the metaphysical comprises all that does not emerge from the physical, including the spiritual and the supernatural, but also questions about the ultimate order-of-things and the meaning of life.⁶

These are the broader contours of reality that we’ll assume in this project, except that we won’t assume the reality of a spirit-realm until we tackle that question later on. The opposite is also true: we won’t assume that the natural world is all there is until we examine the evidence available with open minds to whatever we find.

Intellectual Hospitality

Of course, as a Christian I’m already committed to a biblical view of reality.⁷ But I also assume, just as science does, that there’s only one reality. A reality accessible to all, wherever we come from. In this publication I am meeting the reader in that world. A world that is contested territory but that is also common ground. Wayfinders embodies an ancient way forward: to welcome all truth as God’s truth, wherever we find it. My invitation is: come and see. My request is: show me, I want to see. Such open-mindedness calls for humble and fearless intellectual hospitality from all involved. It’s what it takes for real traction on reality.

It is sometimes mistakenly thought that what we are ultimately after is consensus, so that a single hold-out spoils the whole enterprise. What we are truly after, however, is our own best understanding of a common, ontologically independent reality. Although that judgement is rationally made only in social dialogue with others, if we are truly seeking to be rational about our beliefs, it is each of us, ourselves, whom we are each ultimately trying to convince. ​Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier and Douglas Porpora

Inhabiting Reality

Now, given that we ourselves are part of reality, let’s also explore it from within—through the lens of our experience in the world.

Let’s break it all down into three main realms or domains: the existential (all that pertains to ourselves as individual persons and agents in the world), the situational (what’s going on in the world, the nature of things, and how the world works), and the normative (the ultimate order-of-things, or the larger Story by which we live our lives—whether that includes spiritual realities or not).⁸

It is also widely recognized that reality is relational in nature, that everything is connected, and everything affects everything else.⁹ So we’ll approach our three categories in relational terms, breaking things down in terms of our relationship to ourselves, our relationships to others (and to nature), and our relationship to life itself and our place in the universe.

Life in our skin

Let’s start with the existential domain, which is our personal experience of life in all its complexity. It includes not just our experience, but also the actuality of everything that is part of me as an individual. Let’s call it life in our skin.

Life in our skin includes obvious realities like our bodies and all that goes on in our consciousness, but also more elusive ones like our sense of self and purpose. In this aspect of things, we ask everyday questions like: How am I solving this problem? or Why am I feeling this way? But also bigger questions like: What do I want? and Who am I?

Notice the focus on our subjective experience, given our perspective now from within reality. But our judgement on that subjective experience should be grounded on clear understanding of objective realities: human nature (physiology, sex, health and fitness, language ability and creativity, mortality and spirituality), personhood (identity formation, gender, self-transcendence), and human being (agency, freedom and responsibility, behavior and motivations, vocation, reality construction), etc.

Life on the ground

Another aspect of things is our relationship to the rest of the world and our participation in it. Let’s call it life on the ground.

In this aspect of things, we ask questions like: What can I expect of others? What do others expect of me? How are we doing? What do we want? Similarly with nature. We have a lot of power over nature, but we also depend on it. So, what sort of relationship should we have with it? What can we expect of it, and what should it expect of us?

I find it helpful to engage this whole aspect of reality through the rubric of freedom and responsibility: the freedoms we humans have (or want) to pursue what we consider good and desirable, and the many responsibilities we share to protect and enable those freedoms in any given society.¹⁰

Clearly, this isn’t the only way to approach life on the ground. We don’t have to talk about freedom and responsibility to talk about the stuff of life—much less about space, time and matter in all their particularities. I approach it this way because it seems the most promising way to explore reality from within, learning about the stuff of life and how the world works in the most meaningful way possible. Freedom and responsibility are this meaningful and this promising because they help us frame our lives in relation to the good—in relation to the ends toward which we live. Few things are more meaningful than getting clarity on that.¹¹

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason, the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. —Aristotle¹²

Life in the world

Finally, there’s the “normative” or metaphysical dimension of our experience, where we ask the big questions of meaning, faith, and God. Let’s call it life in the world.

​This aspect of reality informs everything else we believe and do. If life is a Story, then what’s the plot? What’s going on? And why are we here in the first place?¹³ Ultimately, it depends on where it all came from, on why there is something rather than nothing, and whether or not Someone made the cosmos, as some of our traditions claim.

ONE REALITY

My approach here is to recognize and assume that reality is one, in agreement with both science and theology.¹⁴ This means that whatever we believe about the ultimate order-of-things needs to square with our experience on the ground. That is, we should be able to recognize in our experience of life that which we have come to believe through other sources about the nature of things. Let’s unpack that a bit.¹⁵

MEANING AND ULTIMATE MEANING

Because reality is one, we’re able to build our worldviews both bottom-up and top-down. We draw our beliefs both from what we learn through our own experience (bottom-up), and from what we have received through other sources about the nature of things (top-down)—be that philosophical or religious traditions, family and culture in general, or the schools we went to. The question is how well those sources help explain our experience. To the degree that they do, they help us be at home in the universe.

Now, this distinction between bottom-up and top-down sources also helps to differentiate meaning (sensemaking in an immediate context) from ultimate meaning (sensemaking in light of an ultimate context): meaning we can draw bottom-up—and, in fact, we create meaning ourselves (that is the stuff of culture)¹⁶—while ultimate meaning we have to receive from others (culture, religion, philosophy), which always requires a measure of trust. As such, ultimate meaning is always received by faith.¹⁷

FAITH AND GOD

Since ancient times, humans have believed that the world is not just physical but that there’s a spiritual dimension to reality. Most have believed that there are spiritual forces or gods out there, and that they have a lot to do with what’s going on in the world. Many have believed that there’s only one God, and that he created all things. You know the three major versions of that belief: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

If it is true that there are spiritual forces and gods out there, then who or what are they? And what do they want? And if it’s true that there’s only one God, creator of “the heavens and the earth,” then who is he? And what are his intentions for the work of his hands? What can we expect of him, and what does he expect of us?

Today many find it difficult to believe there’s any such thing as a spirit-realm, or gods, or a creator of all things. However, all the options available to answer questions of ultimate meaning have to be taken by faith. So, even if we’re atheists we still live by faith, because we have to trust our theories about why we’re here, and such theories are philosophical in nature—certainly beyond the domain of science.¹⁸

THE GOD OF THE BIBLE

And what about the God of the Bible? Isn’t he said to have shown up from time to time and made himself visible, or otherwise revealed himself through miracles and other supernatural phenomena (e.g., Gen 32:24–30; Exod 3:1–6; 1 Kings 18:20–39; Matt 1:23; Luke 1:1–4; John 20:30–31; Acts 5:12–16)?¹⁹

That is true, but the God of the Bible remains a spirit (John 4:24), so he’s still not something or someone we can empirically account for, as we do with the natural world. And as atheist writer Bruce Sheiman explains, even our understanding of the natural world requires a measure of trust; so it naturally takes another measure of trust (on top of that) to believe in spiritual realities.²⁰

So it does take faith to believe in God, just as it takes faith to believe anything about the ultimate order-of-things. We can, however, look for historical evidence regarding the claims of the Bible, and see if that narrative-world actually squares with our experience.

CONCLUSION

So, in the end, there’s actually no way around it. Wherever we come from, we all have to answer questions of ultimate meaning—whether explicitly or implicitly, intentionally or not. And how we answer them determines how we deal with questions of freedom and responsibility. And how we handle our freedoms and responsibilities determines how well we live our lives.​

Our ways of being in the world necessarily assume basic beliefs, whether implicit or explicit, about our place in the ultimate order-of-things. Actions guided by such beliefs are causally efficacious: they necessarily impact, for better or worse, on ourselves, other people, human culture and the natural world. The complex morphogenetic interplay of causal mechanisms across different domains of reality activated by such efficacious beliefs need not detain us here. It is sufficient simply to note that, for good or ill, beliefs generate change. This being the case, there would appear to be a moral, intellectual and spiritual imperative to strive to bring our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality and the meaning of life, and the actions that follow from them, into conformity with the way things actually are via an ongoing pursuit of truth and truthful living. Or, should we prefer existential rebellion against the ultimate order-of-things—as in Ivan Karamazov’s infamous decision to rebel against a God whose existence he does not question—to do so reasonably, responsibly and attentively. —Andrew Wright²¹

So what? —Let’s shape our future

Finally, I want to say a word about the values and presuppositions we share in our societies today.

We all seem to be feeling unusually puzzled by one another these days, aren’t we? We certainly live in turbulent times. The world is changing very fast right before our eyes: ecologically, socio-culturally, technologically, geopolitically. It is high time for serious reflection about the sort of world we want to live in, and about what we can do—both personally and collectively—to steer our lives, our cultures, and our world in that direction.

In biblical faith, the end game of God and of history is shalom—what the New Testament calls fullness of life. It’s an expansive vision of human flourishing that all humans are invited to participate in, and to help bring it about with God’s blessing. But the God of the Bible never forces anyone’s hand to get with the program. Not getting with the program—which entails loving God, loving neighbor, and caring for creation—does have consequences, but not because God punishes those who disagree with him. It’s because this is his world, and he made it so that it functions best and thrives in this particular way.²²

There is violence in the Bible that needs to be explained, yes, but it can be explained, and without compromising the biblical teaching on God’s goodness and his love for the world.²³ It’s a bit complicated so I won’t explain it here. But the key to understanding God’s dealings with the world is precisely his unrelenting commitment to our free will.

Of course, that’s where I’m coming from. But regardless of where you’re coming from, and what the end game is in your traditions and worldviews, I know this much: we agree enough on some very basic principles and values to get almost the entire world in 1948 to sign The Universal Declaration of Human Rights—arguably one of the most beautiful and most promising achievements in the history of humankind. Again, I think so.

Not everyone agrees, I know. But here’s the deal. We can come together in our communities—as, thankfully, many communities here on Substack and elsewhere have been doing—to try to understand where the mayor players affecting world affairs today are coming from. To try to understand the basic premises and presuppositions in their worldviews, whether those worldviews are internally coherent or not, and what their end games are. Then we’ll know what we’re working with, and what we want to do with that. Of course, some social and political forces in our world don’t have a coherent worldview at all—and they probably know it, but they know exactly what they’re after: usually money and power. Others are similarly confused, but they just want to feel safe, live meaningful lives, and do whatever it is they want. And then there’s everything in between. In any case, if we at least understand where they’re coming from, we would be able to talk with them—rather than past them, and potentially have meaningful dialogue or debate, so long as they’re willing and able to do so.

But we also need to understand where we are coming from, the basic premises and presuppositions in our own worldviews, and whether our worldviews are internally coherent or not. Without such clarity and internal coherence, any endorsement or campaign to promote the values we cherish will lack a strong foundation to back it up.

If the solidarity of mankind is to be based on something more solid than the justified fear of man’s demonic capabilities, if the new universal neighborship of all countries is to result in something more promising than a tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else, then a process of mutual understanding and progressing self-clarification on a gigantic scale must take place. —Hannah Arendt (1957)

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1. See, for example, Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams: Mentoring Emerging Adults in Their Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Faith, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011).

2. Sociologist Christian Smith explains the need “to replace the too-dominant image of humans as primarily perceivers of reality with the image of humans as natural participants in reality.” The prevalent “background view of the human condition … supposes humans as cut off from the real … as somehow exiled from the true reality within which they live, primarily because of the alleged epistemic limitations of language.” He explains that “this belief in our inescapably alienated condition was set up for us in part by Immanuel Kant’s key distinction between ‘noumenal’ reality and ‘phenomenal’ reality—a disastrous move driven by a desire to preserve morality in a world of Newtonian determinism—that is, between things ‘as they really are in themselves’ and things as they merely appear to us. Noumenal reality no doubt exists out there, this account supposes, but we humans have no good access to it because all of our knowledge is limited by our restricted capacities of empirical perceptions. The only world we can ever reside in is the world of appearances. We are separated from the world as it really is by an unbridgeable epistemic chasm.” But “quite to the contrary, we humans are fully participants in reality, a reality that is not identical to us but still fully ours. We emerge from, consist of, belong to, and are intricately connected with the totality of reality, material and otherwise. … Because we belong to and participate in reality, because we ‘indwell’ reality, as Michael Polanyi said, rather than merely observing it, over the years we develop a profound ‘tacit knowledge’ of what reality is and how reality works. ‘We know more than we can tell,’ Polanyi observes. ‘It is not by looking at things, but by dwelling in them, that we understand their . . . meaning.’ Thus, the real we seek to know is therefore not fundamentally concealed or removed from us. We are more than intimately part of it. It composes us. We participate in its natural operations. We are thus terrifically well positioned to know and understand it.” Christian Smith, What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 170–71, quoting Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1983), 4, 18.

3. This breakdown is originally from Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). See the helpful summary by Ilkka Niiniluoto, Critical Scientific Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 23ff. My wording is adapted from Andrew Wright, Religious Education and Critical Realism: Knowledge, Reality and Religious Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2015), 202.

4. This is certainly the case in the narrative-world of the Bible.

5. For a helpful explanation of the idea and reality of emergence, see the interdisciplinary work of sociologist Christian Smith: What Is a Person?, pp. 25–42; see also Elly Vintiadis, “Emergence,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed July 11, 2020, https://www.iep.utm.edu/emergenc/.

6. For now, I am also including all the topics traditionally and currently assigned to “metaphysics” under my use of that term: ontology, categories or being, first causes, unchanging things, universals, modality, substance, the space/time relationship, the mental/physical relationship, etc., since most of it is abstract in nature. I have noticed various and conflicting understandings of the scope of metaphysics in the literature. For example, some consider ontology part of metaphysics, while others consider metaphysics part of ontology. And some argue we don’t even need metaphysics at all! I personally don’t find this branch of philosophy very helpful, though we do need categories for all the stuff it covers. At this point, however, I am simply using physical/metaphysical as convenient terminology to distinguish the physical and what emerges from it from what isn’t physical and doesn’t emerge from it. If in the end this usage tuns out to be problematic, I might use “spiritual” (in a broad sense) instead. For a helpful explanation of metaphysics in philosophy, see Peter van Inwagen and Meghan Sullivan, “Metaphysics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2020 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/metaphysics/. See also Achille C. Varzi, “On Doing Ontology Without Metaphysics,” Philosophical Perspectives 25, no. 1 (2011): 407–23, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2011.00222.x.

7. For my breakdown of a biblical and Christian approach to reality, see Inhabiting Reality: A Christian Approach. The biblical Story is reality-based—not mythological in nature (though it does include ancient “mytho-history” as one of its various genres)—so it allows us to engage this world we all inhabit from many angles, without needing to step out of the biblical Story of the cosmos.

8. This way of breaking things down is not intended as an ontology: these three categories are not intended as domains of reality per se, but as domains of the human experience of reality. Regarding my sources, there were various approaches to reality that influenced the development of this framework. The most obvious is probably theologian John Frame’s tri-perspectivalism, as explained in his book The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1987). In his approach, all knowing has three aspects or perspectives: the existential, the situational, and the normative (the normative being God’s word or law). However, as philosopher Esther Meek explains, “knowing God’s law need not be the only way to construe the normative with respect to knowing God. It may be, and has been so widely in the Christian church throughout the ages and the world, knowing the definitive story.” Esther Lightcap Meek, Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 162, n. 27 (emphasis added). I am clearly taking the “normative” perspective in the broader sense of “the definitive story” or the big picture, where we ask the big questions of meaning, faith and God. Other sources I could mention include Abraham J. Heschel, a Jewish theologian and philosopher, who says that “the self, the fellow-man and the dimension of the holy are the three dimensions of a mature human concern.” Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 139. Similarly, Dutch Catholic priest Henri Nouwen speaks of “the three movements of the spiritual life,” which are “our innermost self,” “our fellow human,” and “our God.” Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1986), 13. Protestant theologian David Ford also discerns these three domains: he calls them the “interiority-inside view,” “the middle distance” (or “ordinary face-to-face”), and the “wide-angle overview.” Ford, The Drama of Living: Becoming Wise in the Spirit (London: Canterbury Press Norwich, 2014), 51ff. By the way, at some point I'd like to explore how this three-tier framework that has emerged for me relates to the findings in studies of semiotics. “A paradigm oriented to a categorical theory of sign processes” (Stefan Alkier) would seem potentially useful for a framework driven by meaning and sensemaking. See, for example, how Stefan Alkier describes reality from within that framework: “reality, by which life, feeling, and thinking are determined, encompasses all three dimensions of experience: the first level of emotional, precritical perception; the second level of empirical-historical facts; and the third level of interpretation constitutive of meaning, which opens up connections.” Stefan Alkier, The Reality of the Resurrection: The New Testament Witness (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013), paragraph 8, Introduction. Kindle ed (emphasis mine). This seems to me another way of looking at reality from within.

9. Sharon Daloz Parks, for example, speaks of “the relational dimension of all life” (Big Questions, Worthy Dreams, 101); Similarly, Charlene Spretnak speaks of “the deeply relational nature of reality.” Spretnak, Relational Reality: New Discoveries of Interrelatedness That Are Transforming the Modern World (Topsham, ME: Green Horizon Books, 2011), 1; Timothy Jennings speaks of “the law of love” in all creation. Jennings, The God-Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life (Downers Grove: IVP, 2017), 24ff; Stanley Grenz describes the biblical metanarrative as “The Story of God Establishing Community.” Stanley J. Grenz, “The Universality of the Jesus-Story” and the “Incredulity Toward Metanarratives,” in No Other Gods before Me?: Evangelicals and the Challenge of World Religions, ed. John G. Stackhouse Jr. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), under the heading “The Christian Claim to Universality,” Kindle ed. See also Iain McGilchrist, “God, the Brain, and Paradox” (The Laing Lectures 2016, Regent College, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, March 9–10, 2016, https://www.regent-college.edu/lifelong-learning/laing-lectures/laing-lectures-2016). For the best presentation I know of from a biblical perspective, see Terence E. Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005): “Israel’s God is a relational God who has created a world in which interrelatedness is basic to the nature of reality. … The world of the Hebrew Bible is a spiderweb of a world. Interrelatedness is basic to this community of God's creatures. Each created entity is in symbiotic relationship with every other and in such a way that any act reverberates out and affects the whole, shaking this web with varying degrees of intensity. Being the gifted creatures that they are, human beings have the capacity to affect the web in ways more intense and pervasive than any other creature, positively and negatively, as we know very well in our own time” (chap. 1, under sec. “A Relational Creator and a Relational World,” Kindle ed.).

10. Now, in this publication we will also engage in theoretical reasoning about matters of fact. But it’s clear that theoretical reasoning leads to beliefs about the nature of things and how the world works. Those same beliefs naturally inform our practical reasoning and our common sense, including the bigger questions of freedom and responsibility. And because it is meaning we’re after—not just isolated facts—we’re going to subsume theoretical reasoning within practical reasoning, allowing us to zoom-in to assess data as usual, but always in service of the bigger picture and our place within it. See, Hilary Bok, Freedom and Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Wallace, R. Jay, “Practical Reason,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/practical-reason/; and See Iain McGilchrist on the need for more of this in the world: “The Divided Brain,” RSA Animate, 2011, 11:47, https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain. See also the work of Viktor Frankl, especially, Man’s Search for Meaning, 4th ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, Rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2000); and The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy, ed. Alexander Batthyany (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010). “Different academic disciplines seek to interrogate different strata of reality: broadly speaking, natural science interrogates nature, psychology interrogates sentient minds, and social science, the arts and the humanities interrogate culture. The basic principle of the hermeneutical circle requires parts to be understood in relation to wholes and wholes to be understood in relation to their constituent parts, in an ongoing dialectical process. … In a world of increasing academic specialisation, questions of the totality of reality tend to be occluded by questions about its constituent parts. In the history of Western thought, accounts of the totality of reality have traditionally been provided by the disciplines of metaphysics and theology. The positivist insistence that neither [of these two disciplines] provides meaningful knowledge by virtue of the unverifiable nature of their truth claims served to further occlude questions of the whole. The critically realistic assertion of the potential truth-bearing nature of both metaphysics and theology opens the door to a recovery of retroductive explanations that take the hermeneutical circle seriously.” Andrew Wright, Religious Education and Critical Realism, 202–203.

11. After the religious and political wars of the sixteenth to eighteenth century in Europe, societies started leaving behind ultimate conceptions of truth and the good as the ends toward which they aimed, since they saw in these strong beliefs the root cause of all that bloodshed. The good, from then on, was to be defined and pursued by the sovereign individual in the private sphere only. The role of government became simply to provide the contract and institutions within which individuals could freely peruse their own ends. See, for example, Ken Kersch, American Political Thought: An Invitation (Medford, MA: Polity, 2021), 227. But how’s that working for us? Perhaps it is high time we start imagining other possibilities.

12. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Andesite Press, 2015), p. 3 (1094a 1–2).

13. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–88); David Wood, ed., On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1991), chap. 2: “Life in Quest of Narrative;” and Ted Turnau, Popologetics: Popular Culture in Christian Perspective (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2012), chap. 1, sec. titled “The Trunk: The World-Story.” Kindle ed.

14. See, for example, Graham Priest, One Being: An Investigation into the Unity of Reality and of Its Parts, Including the Singular Object Which Is Nothingness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), where he explains “what it means for all things to be one” (p. xvii). See also Andrew Wright, Religious Education and Critical Realism, 202: “Our best (currently) available retroductive account suggests that we participate in a single reality that is constituted by the totality of all that exists, once existed and potentially might exist. We experience and explain this reality as stratified, emergent, transfactual and causally efficacious. Though everything is interconnected in a thick web of causality, the fact that higher strata are irreducible to the lower strata from which they emerge requires us to recognise the existence of distinct-yet-related domains of being.” All I mean though is that there’s only one reality, however complex. A colleague once objected that this couldn’t be because there may be many universes, not just one. I answered that if there are many universes, then that is reality. It remains one. As Andrew Wright explains: “To the best of our knowledge, everything in reality is ontologically related. If alternative realities other than our own exist then they must be ontologically related to our reality, even if that relationship is a negative relationship of absolute disconnectedness” (ibid., p. 214).

15. I elaborate on this in Inhabiting Reality: A Christian Approach, sec. “The Lens of Our Experience.” This is where we would engage the resources of worldview studies, asking worldview questions that help us put the narratives we inhabit on the ground (and also challenge and sharpen those narratives). But here we’ll keep the focus broad in order to capture the whole. On worldview studies, see David Rousseau and Julie Billingham, “A Systematic Framework for Exploring Worldviews and Its Generalization as a Multi-Purpose Inquiry Framework,” Systems 6, no. 3 (September 2018): 27, https://doi.org/10.3390/systems6030027. From a Christian perspective, see Brian J. Walsh and J. Richard Middleton, The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1984); and Ted Turnau, Popologetics, chap. 1, sec. titled “The Trunk: The World-Story.” Kindle ed.

16. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor, 1967); and from a Christian perspective, see Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2008).

17. Walsh and Middleton, The Transforming Vision, 35: “Faith is an essential part of human life. Humans are confessing, believing and trusting creatures. And where we place our faith determines the world view which we will adopt… It shapes our vision for a way of life.” See also Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams, 31. Faith, she says, is “a matter of meaning.” She explains: “We reserve the word faith for meaning-making in its most comprehensive dimensions. In other words, whenever we organize our sense of a particular object, a series of activities, or an institution, we are also compelled to compose our sense of its place in the whole of existence. Human beings seek to compose and dwell in some conviction of what is ultimately true, real, and dependable within that vast frame. Either unconsciously or self-consciously, individually or together, and taking more or less into account, we compose a sense of the ultimate character of reality and then we stake our lives on that ‘reality’—the meaning we have made” (32).

18. Regarding the limits of science, see for example, Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and John F. Haught, Is Nature Enough?: Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

19. I’ll be looking into the historical evidence of all that at Life According to the Scriptures. In the meantime, see my initial reflections on this at: https://www.wayfinders.quest/biblical-events-historicity.html. See also Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel, 2nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015); and N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2019). On miracles, see for example Craig S. Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011); and Craig S. Keener, Miracles Today: The Supernatural Work of God in the Modern World (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021).

20. Bruce Sheiman, An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity Is Better Off with Religion Than Without It (New York: Alpha, 2009), 190: “Faith is the intuition that one is proceeding in the right direction. It is our conviction that the world is intelligible on our terms, and that truth is worth seeking. Faith is also trust in our own experience and powers of analysis. Even our capacity for reason requires that we have faith in its ability to arrive at the truth.” See also Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 50th Anniversary Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Albert Einstein, “Physics and Reality,” in Ideas and Opinions, trans. Sonja Bargmann (New York: Bonanza, 1954): “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible” (p. 292); and Alister E. McGrath, Surprised by Meaning: Science, Faith, and How We Make Sense of Things (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 56: “Both the scientist and the theologian … work by faith, a trust in the rational reliability of our understanding of experience.” This is so even in the most rudimentary aspects of knowledge: “we employ a basic hermeneutic of trust, not just in the external world but also in ourselves in-relation-to the external world” (Wright, Religious Education and Critical Realism, 43). Wright explains that “knowledge does not proceed from an artificial hermeneutic of suspicion, in which we deconstruct our antecedent knowledge and seek to reconstruct it on secure foundational principles. It is because our natural way-of-knowing takes precedence over artificial ways-of-knowing that we have a primal warrant to trust our illative sense and assent to our beliefs despite the absence of full understanding and demonstrable proof, and to continue to do so until such time as a more powerful account of our experiences and of the world we indwell becomes available to us” (43). This is how it works: “We refine our illative sense by immersing ourselves in communities of practice and learning from those whose illative sense is more advanced than ours. In specialist fields in which we have no expertise we have no option other than to trust the testimony of experts, and do so by applying our illative sense to the question of the veracity of the secondary testimony rather than the primary object of such testimony. Provided we have acted reasonably to refine our illative sense to the best of our ability, we have an epistemic warrant to hold fast to our beliefs, despite the absence of demonstrable proof. Thus the ‘ordinary’ atheist or religious believer is entirely justified in holding their epistemic beliefs with certitude, despite the ontological possibility that they may be mistaken, provided they have employed, to the best of their natural ability, judgmental rationality to iteratively test them in the light of their own experiences and the testimony of experts. This does not of course mean that atheists and theists are necessarily correct to hold the beliefs they do, since atheism and theism are ontologically incommensurate; it does however mean that they have a legitimate epistemic warrant to do so” (ibid., 44). This means that “the pursuit of knowledge … proceeds not by way of an artificial hermeneutic of suspicion grounded in an illusory rational objectivity, but by way of a cultivated hermeneutic of trust that proceeds from and through faith to deeper, faith-based understanding. Faith is not a subjective leap beyond objective reason to be tolerated provided it remains firmly within the private sphere; rather it is the necessary public basis of all knowledge, both religious and secular” (44).

21. Andrew Wright, Religious Education and Critical Realism, 204.

22. I’m working on a series of posts on this theme: Love one another, Part I: Love’s story.

23. One of the best sources I’ve found on the issue of violence in the Bible is Old Testament scholar Matthew Lynch. Bradley Jerzak is currently running a series of Substack posts on his work (see below). Another important angle on the subject that’s usually missing in scholarly work is the spirit-realm factor: the role that spirit-beings and spiritual phenomena play in the violence we see in the biblical stories. One source I’ve read that engages these matters head-on is Bible scholar and pastor Stephen De Young, God Is a Man of War: The Problem of Violence in the Old Testament (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2021).

Violence in the Hebrew Bible - Pt 1 - Violent Speech