Rational Scientific Theories from Theism

0. Discrete and Continuous Degrees

A knowledge of degrees is like a key to lay open the causes of things, and to give entrance into them. Without this knowledge, scarcely anything of cause can be known; for without it, the objects and subjects of both worlds seem to have but a single meaning, as if there were nothing in them beyond that which meets the eye; when yet compared to the things which lie hidden within, what is thus seen is as one to thousands, yea, to tens of thousands. The interiors which are not open to view can in no way be discovered except through a knowledge of degrees. For things exterior advance to things interior and through these to things inmost, by means of degrees; not by continuous degrees but by discrete degrees. 

Continuous degrees is a term applied to the gradual lessenings or decreasings from grosser to finer, or from denser to rarer; or rather, to growths and increasings from finer to grosser, or from rarer to denser; precisely like the gradations of light to shade, or of heat to cold. 

But discrete degrees are entirely different: they are like things prior, subsequent and final; or like end, cause, and effect. These degrees are called discrete, because the prior is by itself; the subsequent by itself; and the final by itself; and yet taken together they make one. There are atmospheres, from highest to lowest, that is, from the sun to the earth, called ethers and airs that are separated into such degrees; they are like simples, collections of simples, and again collections of these, which taken together are called a composite. Such degrees are discrete (or separate), because each has a distinct existence, and these degrees are what are meant by "degrees of height;" but the former degrees are continuous, because they increase continuously and these degrees are what are meant by "degrees of breadth."  (DLW 184.) 

... without a knowledge of these degrees can anything be known of the differences among the interior powers of the minds of men, thus nothing of their state as regards reformation and regeneration; nor anything of the differences among the exterior powers of the bodies both of angels and men; and nothing whatever can be known of the distinction between spiritual and natural, thus nothing of correspondence. Nor, indeed, can anything be known of any difference between the life of men and that of beasts, or between the more perfect and the less perfect animals; neither of the differences among the forms of the vegetable kingdom, nor among the matters of the mineral kingdom. From which it can be seen that they who are ignorant of these degrees are unable to see causes from anything of judgment; they see only effects, and from these judge of causes, which is done for the most part by an induction that is continuous with effects. But causes produce effects not continuously but discretely; for cause is one thing, and effect is another. The difference between the two is like the difference between prior and subsequent, or between that which forms and that which is formed. (DLW 185)

1. Divine Structure

In the beginning there was God: 
 

Figure 1

God is Life Itself, and this life consists of (1) Love, (2) Wisdom, and (3) Use. All these are within God, and constituent a living being, so God is a person, whom we call the Lord God. 

We can outline how the trinity of Love, Wisdom and Use within God is arranged: 
 

Figure 2

As well as seeing this structure, we should understand the dynamics of how this trinity operates: 

1. Love, anticipating delights of Use, entertains purposes of producing these Uses. Love, having adopted a specific purpose, takes the form of Wisdom.
2. Wisdom, being Love with a particular purpose, entertains the means for achieving those ends. Love and Wisdom together decide on a course of action.
3. Use, being produced by Love acting by means of Wisdom, is the ultimate effect. In this action, Love finds its satisfaction and delight with the results. 
4. This delight returns to Love, and further manifestations of Loves are conditional on the effects already achieved.

These three components are called discrete degrees. Swedenborg goes to great lengths to get us to distinguish such qualitatively distinct degrees from the continuous degrees that we see around ourselves in nature as one thing grades into another continuously. 

A person has a life which is constituted by the operation of will and understanding in producing actions. The state of the will is the love, the state of the understanding is the wisdom, and the action is the use of the will and the understanding. 

Humans on earth are not themselves Life Itself, but are created in the likeness and image of God, who has the structure of Life shown above. That is, we have been created from God, but are now separate from him to the extent that we are not Life Itself, but are the recipients of life from God. We have life, but received life is not divine, only a likeness of divine life. We have the above trinitarian structure as a consequence, and have that structure both as a whole personality, and all the sub-parts of our souls, minds and bodies. Thus, using the above structure, we can see how the structures of heaven, of minds and of nature are produced and animated by life from God. 
 

2. THREE-FOLD STRUCTURES IN THE CREATED UNIVERSE

The created universe contains the likeness and images of Love and Wisdom, and receives Love and Wisdom to the extent that the created thing has the same functional form (use) as that of the source. Everything that exists does so because and only because it has some use. The dependence of reception on functional use is the Law of Correspondence, and derives from the Divine characteristic that "Loves are conditional on the effects already achieved", and will be explained in much more detail below (see also Thompson[1993]). 
 

Figure 3: Three degrees, divine and natural in correspondence.

Let us now concentrate on the creation side of reality, and explore it in more detail. We use new names without capital letters to refer to the received life: 
 

Figure 4: Results in creation of correspondence with the divine.

Since created things have images of divine life by correspondence, we say that there is divine influx into those things. There is continual influx into all creation that is responsible not only for things coming to be, but also for their sustained existence from moment to moment (see Thompson[1991]). 

We know this three-fold structure from Swedenborg by the other names of interior mind, exterior mind, and the natural world, or, most simply, soul, mind and body. The three stages can be also be viewed as 'ends', 'causes' and 'effects', or 'affections', 'thoughts' and 'actions' as more appropriate for minds, or some combination of these to claim a neutral language. We will see below the needs for these different sets of names. 
 

Figure 5
 

3. RECURSIVE STRUCTURE

'Recursive' means that the same rules apply to the whole as to each sub part. This arises because God is equally present in all of us, and in each part of us. (Of course, the functional forms of the whole and the parts are very different, and hence by the Law of Correspondence the received lives will be very different.) This means in particular that the interior mind, the exterior mind and nature all have themselves a threefold substructure and subdynamics that arise because they are all created and sustained in the image of a trinitarian structure within God. My main purpose of this present paper is to elucidate this recursive trinitarian substructure in the external mind and in nature (Thompson[1988b]). An internet illustration of recursive substructures may be given using nested frames. 

Let us therefore take the creation structure of the 'units' in Fig. 5, and determine the substructural 'thirds' that should be present: 
 

Figure 8: The 9 created degrees with brief systematic names and systematic numbering.
 
 

Now we must think ourselves what each of these substructures means, using our own knowledges and experiences (and revelations where necessary) to identify all of the individual parts: 

• In the third column, 'effects' are clearly physical events, but 'effects of thoughts' and 'effects of ends' are not so easily identified. The 'effects of thoughts' appear to be scientific laws which define the natural means for the production of events, and the 'effects of ends' appear to be the first principles in nature that allow it to receive controlling influx from God (Divine Providence) and from minds (for the connection between minds and nature).
• The second column is the easiest from the psychological point of view, if we work backward from 'effects' being physical events. 'Thoughts of effects' are clearly sensory impressions in the mind, and 'thoughts of thoughts' are an indication of the kinds of logical abstractions and self-awareness that come with scientific and philosophical knowledge. 'Thoughts of ends' are more advanced processes, in which we consider and deal with moral and ethical knowledge of loves and purposes. These three stages are called by Swedenborg the 'sensual' mind, the 'scientific' (external rational) mind, and the 'internal rational' mind, respectively. 
• In the first column, we can use Swedenborg's investigations of the heavens, and there we learn that people in the 'celestial heaven' work with the purposes of loves (ends of ends). Those in the ''spiritual heaven' work with the development and purposes of the understanding (ends of thoughts), and those in the 'spiritual-natural heaven' are work with the spiritual qualities of specific human actions (ends of effects). The three different heavens all desire, think and see content in these three different discrete degrees.

Figure 8, version 2: The 9 created degrees with Swedenborg's terminology for the first 2 columns.

Let us take this process even further. The human mind is obviously complicated, and we must determine what we can deduce about its structure, and see if we can relate our deductions about the exterior mind with what has been seen and theorised by psychologists and philosophers in the past. We will look at the 3 subdegrees for each of the 3 degrees in the exterior mind. 

 The general pattern to be followed with these 'A of B' structures ('AB' in numerical form) is that the content in each case deals with degree B, and is appearing in level A. That is, content is present in level A that either comes from (or deals with) degree B. Note that the word 'of' does not itself determine the logical order of connection, since we speak both of 'parent of the child' and 'child of the parent'. Further information is therefore required to ascertain the meaning of the 'of' connective in 'A of B'. In this paper, I choose the order that the first degree given is what first appears, and that later degrees describe what is 'hidden', namely the details of either the aim or content or origin of what first appears. For that reason, the numerical point is inserted after the first number, so that the fractional numbers act as qualifiers, in accordance with standard mathematics. I allow above 'aim or content or origin' in order to allow whatever causal or logical connections are demanded by the degrees under consideration. These are: (1) affections for (aims), (2) thoughts about (content) and (3) effects from (origins). 

The wording with the triply-nested 'ninth' structures follows the same principles, so that 'ABC' in numerical form is written as 'A of B of C' , and is an abbreviation for 'A of (B of C )'. If B comes from C and then A comes from B, this is 'A from (B from C)', which means that content is present in degree A that appears to come from degree B but in fact originates in degree C. 

To start with, we hence look at the 3 subdegrees for each of the 3 degrees in the exterior mind. We look therefore at the 'ninths' within the 'thirds' already discussed: 
 

Figure 9: The 9 created subdegrees within the exterior mind.

Now we have our work set out for us, to determine what all these things mean! Fortunately, however, we can exploit previous logical and psychological investigations, and we have already at hand some 9-fold maps that match up almost exactly with the 3*3 series (2.11, 2.12, 2.13; 2.21, 2.22, 2.23; 2.31, 2.32, 2.33) in the middle of Fig. 9. The reason that psychological theories are directly useful, is that cognitive development of children starts with the simplest degree (2.33), and proceeds via 2.32 and 2.31 to the external rational degree. Piaget, for example, as categorised levels of cognitive development, and we will use his names for stages were possible. The logical patterns are derived from Thompson[1990].

• Thoughts of effects of effects: 2.33 (effects » effects » thoughts) If we reword this as 'thoughts of effects of actions', then we see that this degree contains the sensations and perceptions from the senses. In Piaget's sensorimotor stage (0-1 years) the child is deals with sensations, which are the prerequisites for any cognitive development.
• Thoughts of effects of causes: 2.32 (cause » effects » thoughts) The causes of sensation effects are the objects of the world., and this degree allows ideas of constant and permanent physical objects. 
• Thoughts of effects of ends: 2.31 (ends » effects » thoughts) After ideas of objects, the next stage deals with the processes and events undergone by these objects, so the child has ideas for sentences, and of simple relations between objects. Piaget calls this the preoperational stage, 2-6 years, as containing what he calls preconceptual and intuitive components.
• Thoughts of causes of effects: 2.23 (effects » causes » thoughts) This degree is the simplest in the external rational. Piaget has identified how rationality begins at ages 7-11 with the concepts of 'reversible operations', and calls this the operational stage. Conceiving of operations is the simplest way of thinking of causes of effects. Reversible operations are the logical prerequisites for any concepts of numbers, series, one-to-one correspondences and sets/classes. The operations, however, are all tied to concrete effects.
• Thoughts of causes of causes: 2.22 (causes » causes » thoughts) This degree clearly contains the beginning at typical ages of 12-16 of reasoning about causal chains and of theories of causes of event sequences. Piaget showed how at this stage operations can be considered as formal objects of thought, so that abstract plans become possible.
• Thoughts of causes of ends: 2.21 (ends » causes » thoughts) This degree was identified by Gowan[1972] as the creative stage, as an extrapolation of Piaget's cognitive levels. This degree allows the formulation of meta-theoretic notions, of thinking about theories, and discussion of the meaning, ends, interpretation and application of formal theories as if they were individual cognitive entities. These processes in late teenage years (e.g. 17-25 years, say) therefore enable thought about goals/ends as such, and indicate in interest in philosophical (or ideological) questions that go beyond formal problem solving of degree 2.22.

• Thoughts of ends of effects: 2.13 (effects » ends » thoughts) The cognitive content of this degree must be the discrimination of the practical effects of different ends/purposes as arising from different loves in degree 1. This occurs, according to Swedenborg, from following ones conscience, since the conscience leads to practical discriminations without giving the underlying reasons for the differences. This comes from influx from the spiritual-natural degree 1.3. Gowan[1974] called this the 'psychedelic' degree because it allows the intermittent input of psychical material that is normally unconscious, but this is not the best description of the normal modes of operation.
• Thoughts of ends of causes: 2.12 (causes » ends » thoughts) In this degree, there is progressively more insight into the structure and operation of ends/purposes/loves, as, Swedenborg explains, arising by means of influx from the spiritual heaven 1.2. This leads to progressive reformation of the understanding, what Gowan[1974] calls 'illumination'.
• Thoughts of ends of ends: 2.11 (ends » ends » thoughts) Here there are direct thoughts arising from the full understanding of how ends(loves) arise from other ends(loves), and the full development of this content results in wisdom concerning spiritual matters. 

Figure 10: Identification of the cognitive content of the 9 created subdegrees within the exterior mind, using terminology of Piaget and Swedenborg.

4. DYNAMICS OF CORRESPONDENCES AND INFLUX

In all of the above sections, we have concentrated on the nested structure of subdegrees, and only mentioned in passing how this whole structure is supposed to work! That is, now we need to discuss the dynamical patterns of correspondences and influx. 

First, we should remember that all these patterns originate because of the way Divine Love and Divine Wisdom produce in sequence Divine Use. I quote again from the first section: 

1. Love, anticipating delights of Use, entertains purposes of producing these Uses. Love, having adopted a specific purpose, takes the form of Wisdom.
2. Wisdom, being Love with a particular purpose, entertains the means for achieving those ends. Love and Wisdom together decide on a course of action.
3. Use, being produced by Love acting by means of Wisdom, is the ultimate effect. In this action, Love finds its satisfaction and delight with the results. 
4. This delight returns to Love, and further manifestations of Loves are conditional on the effects already achieved

Figure 12

The created universe receives Love and Wisdom to the extent that the created thing has the same functional form as that of the source. This is the Law of Correspondence. It derives from the Divine characteristic that "Loves are conditional on the effects already achieved". Since different subdegrees have different functions, the correspondences work in different ways. Consider again in Fig 13 the basic 9-fold 3*3 subdegrees from Fig. 5. 
 
 

Figure 13: The 9 created degrees showing the correspondence relations between them arising from influx. The operations underlined are the primary function of each degree.

Here, we show as underlined the primary function of each degree. Degrees 3.1's primary function is to receive influx from subdegrees 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 of the mind. Degrees 2.1's primary function is to receive influx from subdegrees 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 of the soul. Degree 1.1's primary function is to receive love from the Lord, in accordance with His trinitarian substructure shown in Figure 2. The thin right-pointing arrows show these influxes, called receptive influxes. The vertical down-pointing arrows show the normal productive processes. 

The thick arrows connect those subdegrees that are performing similar functions: the 1.1, 2.1 and 3.1 degrees, for example, are all performing similar reception functions. The 1.2, 2.2 and 3.2 degrees all have the function of entertaining and planning means, whereas the bottom line degrees 1.3 and 2.3 have the executive role of carrying out plans. Degree 3.3 is the ultimate effect, whose role is to manifest permanent actions, and to return to the source the delights thereby achieved. 

The two different kinds of influxes result in different kinds of connections between the earlier and later degrees. The thick arrows give rather strict correspondences, in which the functions of those related degrees are kept in rather good one-to-one correspondences. Because the final 'body' degree 3 is permanent, this kind of correspondence has the important function of maintaining many of the prior structures in the soul and mind. The thin arrows, on the other hand, show influx whose aim is to influence and control the reception degrees, and not so much to fix the structure of the source degrees. I call them receptive correspondences or receptive influx. 

6. NATURE AND MIND

Figure 14: The 9 created subdegrees within the natural degree.

Again we have our work set out for us, to determine what all these things mean! Fortunately, however, we can exploit previous logical and physical investigations, and we have already at hand the previous 9-fold of the exterior mind, to which all these correspond in some manner. I will not for now discuss the 3.1 (3.11, 3.12, 3.13) degrees, since these are completely unknown to our sciences. However, physics has already explored considerable detail of the 3.2 and 3.3 degrees and subdegrees, in particular quantum physics. First, we must remember that the intermediate results are not themselves the ultimate physical events, but more the preparation for such events: they provide, for example, the energy, the propensity or the circumstance for the final events. 

• LAWS (3.2): Results of causes of ends: 3.21 (ends » causes » results). In the natural degree, the ends of causes are the general principles that guide the natural laws, such as general invariance requirements, and more specifically the 'variational principles of least action for Lagrangians' that provide the starting point for many modern theories.
• Results of causes of causes: 3.22 (causes » causes » results). The first result of the variational principles are the dynamic laws which govern the propagation of 'bare' particles and quanta, according to formal laws of time evolution.
• Results of causes of effects: 3.23 (effects » causes » results) The next effect of the dynamic laws are virtual events of interactions of particles and quanta. These are reversible events whose role is the production of interaction potentials.
• EFFECTS (3.3): Results of effects of ends: 3.31 (ends » effects » results). The first effect of the interaction potentials are their interplay with kinetic energy, as expressed by the Hamiltonian operator in quantum physics. The operation of the Hamiltonian generates in the quantum context the time evolution of the wave function, as a direct consequence of energy balances.
• Results of effects of causes: 3.32 (cause » effects » results) The wave functions generated by the 3.31 degree describe physical objects and sequences of their behaviour, by means of a residual propensity for selections that may be probabilistic.
• Results of effects of effects: 3.33 (effects » effects » results) The final ultimate events are the selection of actual outcomes from the alternatives within the wave function. How this occurs is the 'quantum measurement problem', not fully solved yet; but note that the 2.33 degree (of sensory observations) corresponds with this selection process.

Figure 15. The 9 created subdegrees within the natural degree.

The implications for physical theory of this pattern are discussed later. 
 

Concluding Remarks

Correspondences of natural with spiritual things are also very useful to us, because we can use them to give a kind of definite and permanent form to our ideas of Love (which otherwise tend to be vague and nebulous). We have, for example, from Swedenborg the idea that "the Divine Love operates by means of Wisdom, to produce outgoing Spirit and actions". This corresponds to the pattern in the physical world, where "physical dispositions (energies and propensities) operate by means of interactions in spatial relations to produce physical effects". Love is like a disposition or physical energy or vibration, but is not identical to anything physical. Rather, we have many metaphors and analogies between the spiritual and the physical. To forget this, is to think physically and naturally of spiritual realities. 

This page is extracted from an accompanying paper to a talk given to the Swedenborg Society, London, on 30 Oct 1999.