Everything is Created

Here’s the thing. Everything you see was created by a mind.

Everything in nature, the nature of nature, is a matter of choice, like looking at an artwork.

There’s no necessity behind any aspect or characteristic of anything in nature.

Everything you are familiar with in the physical world could’ve been different.

This fact is destabilizing to some people. To me, it reveals the mind of God mixed with the consequences of a fallen world in which nature itself fell.

There are certain things that really must be the way they are, such as mathematics and logical deductions, and we call these necessary truths.

But all necessary truths are metaphysical.

All things in the physical world we call contingent truths, because they were contingent on their creator, and could’ve had another characteristic.

The rose could’ve been blue.

There’s a simple test that bears out what I’m describing:

We can imagine a blue rose without a mental impossibility occurring, but we cannot imagine 2+2 =7.

We can imagine a rose without thorns without doing damage to any necessary truth, because there isn’t one that makes roses have thorns.

None of this is controversial with philosophers, such as philosophers of science.

You see, in science, all scientific results or observations, are contingently true - true in the small “t” sense. True in a working hypothesis kind of way.

What is a hard necessary truth, is that science is always tentative and provisional; always subject to change, revision, or scrapping altogether.

Science isn’t an accumulation of unalterable facts, as its modern press relations would have us all believe.

Science is, at bottom, purely a way to describe a choice, and that choice (why this characteristic and not another?), in nature, is, at bottom, a mystery

You would have to go to the creator to get the answer as to why things are this way and not another way.

Just as science can tell us a lot about pigments in paint and how they form their colors, but you’d have to go to the painter to ask why they chose to paint that particular scene, and why those particular colors when they could’ve chosen any other combination of scenery and hues.

I’m writing this partly to put the scientific endeavor in its rightful ontological place. With scripture we get special revelation. With nature we get general revelation, and that general revelation is what’s described by science.