Most of what we study is invisible, intangible, not even a thing. That isn’t a criticism; rather, I believe this is a profound realisation that shows how scholarship assumes a more-than-material world.
Of course, people do study particular things. Some theologians study the dealings of God with people and nations (some even claim to study God!); a biography focuses on an individual person, geologists may study the Earth and its history, and geographers investigate particular regions. There are other examples from cosmology and history too – but I believe that most of what goes on in these disciplines is rather different, and more like the rest of academia.
Most scholarship is about abstractions. These may be types of things: fundamental particles, chemical compounds, rock formations, species, personality types, functions, languages, texts, management styles, churches, and so on. We can extend the list with higher-order abstractions like numbers, forces, software, nationalities, religions, etc. Things of a certain type may provide data for research, but then they aren’t studied for their particularity.
The other group of abstractions we study comprises properties of things. Size, speed, mass, genome size, colours, complexity, meaningfulness, power, ethnicity, kinds of value, etc. are ultimately relational subjects. Higher-order concepts like laws of nature and theories in all kinds of disciplines tend to refer to them as part of more general relationships that pertain among things. Even when geologists study the Earth or cosmologists the Solar System, the main focus will be the types and properties of (say) rocks or planets, and laws that govern their relations.
I’ve made some ambitious generalisations that may gloss over the intricacies of what we and our colleagues actually study. But this general view casts fresh light on the nature of reality. What makes all these abstractions possible and useful? They are human inventions, after all: scholars and other people have come up with them (and you’d have trouble claiming that more than a handful have been revealed through Scripture). But it seems that they latch on to something real. Let’s start with maths and physics. To be sure, some philosophers of maths are nominalists (so integers are just words we use in a fixed sequence, and algebra is a game with made-up rules) – but still it turns out that many mathematical conjectures are either provable or disprovable. Then many mathematical concepts turn out to describe physical relationships. And while some physicists think their science shows most of everyday experience to be illusory, physics does comprise an enormous web of laws that seem to be reliable descriptions of real laws of nature. Then there are descriptions (‘models’) of particles like electrons and protons that seem to be absolutely the same everywhere they occur. The physical sciences are firmly founded on an invisible law-order: a side of reality that isn’t a thing yet holds for all things. There’s more to God’s creation than meets the eye!
Biologists see important variation within species, yet individuals still develop with remarkable consistency from single cells, often into complex organisms with advanced behaviours – not least humans. Now, a contemporary education in biology (like I had) tends to be materialist, emphasising that organisms are programmed by their genes, and that genetics is complex biochemistry, which in turn is applied physics. Moreover, all the complexity of their genomes has arisen over aeons by the action of natural selection upon random mutations (a kind of numerical algorithm). I believe such materialism sells biology short. But we can at least say that each genome acts as a law for a kind of organism. When textbooks call DNA the blueprint of life, they’re hinting at its role as carrier of non-physical information.
We may need to move to the realm of software to help our biologist friends see that information exists on the law-side of reality. A piece of software is an algorithm that doesn’t depend on any particular physical medium. As a programmer conceives a sequence of commands, he types it on a keyboard and it appears on a screen, while a memory device records it in binary code. It may be transmitted by microwaves to a copy in the Cloud or a local network, and backed up on a magnetic disk – then also explained to colleagues, each of whom forms a concept of it in their own mind. It isn’t a thing that exists anywhere: it’s a law that dictates operations.
Our software may in turn be part of an AI system that processes prompts and generates all kinds of impressive artefacts. This reminds us that we ourselves think and reason with laws and principles. This doesn’t exhaust our mental life, of course. But reasoning and creativity are law-guided at least in part, and it’s to this extent that they can be imitated remarkably well by the generative AI systems being developed so dramatically in our time. They too are algorithmic: laws rather than things.
I believe there’s much to be celebrated in creation’s law-side. It grounds our thinking, behaviour, language and tools; it enables creativity, culture and care. Yet neither the materialist worldview that surrounds us, nor the constructivist ideologies that often obscure it in academia, can handle it. Materialism and its allies may seek to collapse the law-side into inscrutable ‘tendencies’ or ‘propensities’ of things, yet they fail to dispense with the persistent distinctiveness of types of things (each with characteristic propensities). Constructivism and its postmodern allies may direct us to the fallibility of science and its connection to social power, yet fail to account for the reliability and persistence of people’s engagement with creation’s law-side throughout all ages and societies.
Johannes Kepler wrote that the laws of nature “are within the grasp of the human mind; God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts”1. While no-one can know the mind of God, the ubiquitous laws we discern do seem to reveal God’s powerful word for his creatures. There’s much more to explore here!
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- Letter (9/10 Apr 1599), in: Baumgardt & Callan (1953), Johannes Kepler: Life and Letters, p.50 ↩︎
[Views expressed here are his own.]
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