Question and Answer

The way we shape up a question shapes up the answer. Some questions hardly require insight. If I say x = 2 + 2, then I can move automatically to x = 4, but so could a computer.

In the nursery there are questions about the meaning of words. A child learns about 6,000 words by the time he or she is six. It must be a considerable preoccupation to learn about three words a day. Alongside names, there is learning to string them along in sentences and the little one knows he has got something right by the way the adults respond. Through meanings, values, obligations, feelings, we move into a commonsense world which is also historically conditioned. The history of a people has phases of advance or decline. Chastity may be an essential virtue, or permissive ways may seem to be the challenging norm.

The world of commonsense opens to the world of food and drink; farming and cooking; religion and law; television; radio and DVDs; books and opera; working; earning; getting a pension for one’s old age; driving the car and getting it through the MOT; getting a passport. Everywhere there are practical questions and answers to be found. We enter a world which is related to us and which we contribute to. If it is a world of values as well as meanings, then it is a world of right and wrong, a world of obligations and so a world of feelings, of merit or blame, a world in which we live with a clear or guilty conscience. In this world it is worth noticing that if an obligation is not technically specific, it is ineffectual. Some people live in a world where they might kneel down beside the bed to say their prayers but they say them in bed. Some live in a world where they ought to do so, and either do or do not do so.

I think what I have said so far applies to primitive culture as well as that more developed state we recognise as civilisation. Here there are different tasks and skills and rewards, and politics and law sort out right order. With the primitive culture, personal reality is tied up with the corporate structure and its leader – so when David weeps for Absalom, the solders mourn with him, even though they had been happy when Absalom was killed. So ‘The Flag’ in America or ‘The Crown’ in Britain provide a primitive sense of unity in a society grown mega efficient and quite oblivious to an individual story.

Through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the discovery of mind and the power of the question were released, and the result was a set of categories that could belong to answers to questions. So predicates to subjects were a matter of substance, quality, quantity, relation, action, passion, place, time, posture, and habit, giving dynamism to explain any changes in things were four causes, efficient, final, material, and formal. For Aristotle, the world was perhaps eternal, so he did not, as Aquinas did, have God as what one might call the existential cause. “God made all things, visible and invisible, out of nothing”. (Lateran Council 1215).

The advantage of a theory of causes is that it allows one to answer the question “Why?” with “Because”. “Why?” looks for a reason and “Because” gives the reason for any regular occurrence. The world of chance was for Aristotle not a matter for explanation. Why does a cow have horns? – it is its form. Why is it skinny? – poor matter i.e. poor grass. Why does the farmer keep it? To sell it to the butcher (final cause). Why does he whack it with a stick? To get it to go through the gate (efficient cause).

So for Aristotle everything could be explained up to a point. St Thomas could broaden the field with creative causation with providence, with the supernatural understood analogously to the natural, so that theology became a science which made use of Aristotle’s philosophy as a handmaid. The system sort of broke down before God’s infinity. One can ask what is the form of a cow? but the form of God is simply to be: “I am He who is”. Form as we know it in creatures is a limiting thing – so cows don’t have wings.

Physics broke the mould by asking not about ‘form’ but about the wider aspect of things, about how things relate to each other, how with two bits of matter a force arises between them called gravity, the force depending on the amount of matter and weakening as things are further apart according to not just the distance but the distance squared. Mathematics gets brought in to expound the matter. Restriction to observation and experiment is the rule brought in by the Royal Society, 1660. We enter a world which knows more and more about physics, geology, botany, biology, and the physical aspect of psychology. Such knowledge has made use of probability theory as well as mathematical laws. Upon analysis it is seen to deal with correlation rather than causality. Its capacity is limited by the limited power of telescopes and microscopes. Over the next hundred years or so, one might find it heading asymptotically to a sort of limit. Empirical science one might suggest, with technology, marks our world as modern, with population moving from 1 billion in 1800 to 2 billion in 1900 to 6 billion now. The question one asks in empirical science is “What is the relationship of A to B?”. It is not a question found in Aristotle. It gives a world controlled increasingly by man. Since God is not part of scientific method, there is a tendency in modern culture to agnosticism or even atheism.

Our notion of questions set off in the nursery with words and their meanings. It moves into a commonsense world and then, with Aristotle, into a scientific world much making use of logic. Modern empirical science makes use of logic, but the stress is on method and on a collaboration going on with different sorts of experts all focussed round a new emerging question. Is swine flu changing its spots? Is global warming due to CO2? The detachment with which a question is considered should be maintained even if the answers are apocalyptic – else how should the world of commonsense trust the judgement of scientists?

History proceeds by a different method from the natural sciences but, since the 19th century, it has aspired to a similar status in the world of thought to that of the natural sciences. The Germans, with Geisteswissenschaften, distinguished a new object, the reconstruction of the constructions of the human spirit. History moves beyond the mere facts in their particularity and beyond reliance on reliable testimony, to a collaborative effort which assembles all the evidence about a particular matter. So, while I don’t suppose it has happened yet, one might find an historian using psychological theory and investigating William the Conqueror’s relation with his mother to understand the 1066 behaviour. With historians too, we find collaboration and cooperation around a particular question. Since the object of study is human, the rich human development of the historian is needed for the master. What I have said about history applies to the social sciences in general, I think.

Theology, having with Thomas Aquinas (of 1274), relied on Aristotle, finds itself with a new question, since Aristotle is not the basis of modern science or modern history. What sort of philosophy should it base itself on now that Aristotle has, in an important way, been superseded? The second Vatican Council (1961-1964) did not answer the question, but in an implicit way recognised it, for I think it only quoted Aquinas once. Here is a great question for the Church, which just begins to dawn. God forbid that it should take schism and heresies for it to become clear but maybe current lapses alone make the point. It is essential that the proclamation of the gospel should be clear to everyone, to scientists, to historians and to the multitude influenced by a science dominated culture.

Emergent probability is the realisation that things are in development, even surprising development. It relates not just to the empirical but also to conscious discoveries and artistic achievements. It relates closely to Providence and to hope which sees the endless future of man and his world as in God’s hands. Hope enables one to take on poor situations with a love which is redemptive and so constructive.

Dialectic understanding is that there are different stances in the world and so there is the clash of truth and error. There are positions and counter positions; bias, dramatic, egoistic, group or general, justified itself by some ideology. The conversions, psychic, intellectual moral and religious, give the positions which are assailed by counter positions. The counter positions show up in history rather than science but they crystallise themselves in philosophy. Here the more fruitful option seems to be “develop positions” rather than “reverse counter positions” for such reversal might be very long and tedious.

Conversion to love – in the family, in the wide world, and to godparents, a context of value in which facts are reassessed and in which deliberation seeks the action which expresses and fosters love. Such love itself needs to be explained as far as possible, and the teaching in the community which has long sought to live by this area, given the material for such explications; so Christian faith sees the source of such love in the gift of the Spirit given by Jesus to the Church. Faith and Theology find a vital root in reflection on conversion.

Augustine is credited with saying “Love and do what you will”. He actually said “Love God and do what you will”. We might add, “and act in the real world which you have come to know through all your questions and genuine answers”. Your loving action should then fulfil the petition! “Thy Kingdom Come”.