Unity of Truth
When Daniel Hightower set out to answer the question "What is Knowing" he would eventually have to consider the question of truth.
So what is truth? There seems to be a whole lot of versions running around. Daniel Hightower deduced that there had to be around six billion of them at the moment, and this led him and his friends to consider and devise his EAP Theory and the Lens Pole. But today, the idea of truth has fallen out of favor.
A physical scientist will tell you that truth is the objective of his discipline. If you ask him he will plead that this is all he is about. But is he, really?
The character of Daniel Hightower presented as a man without education came to some pretty interesting conclusions regarding this topic. But then he is the product of the mind of C.H.Pinkerton who is an actual scientist.
For myself and the rest of the regular folks out there I will summarize a few key points that are illustrated much better in the Cosmic Fly Swatter without giving up any of the novel's drama. And please forgive me if my descriptions on this topic are simplistic and incomplete. They are not intended to be scholastic.
Since, as Daniel is fond of saying "ex nihilo, nihilo fit," nothing comes from nothing; it would be best to start at the beginning. Some scientists today are bent on using the advancements in quantum physics to claim that, "nothing comes from nothing," is an out of date old aphorism that should be discarded. And they claim this inspite of overwhelming evidence that everything has a beginning and an end, and that nothing truly comes from nothing. But this, in itself is another topic that is covered in more detail in the book.
Suffice it to say then, that Western Physical Science had its beginnings originally in Ancient Greece. The Greeks were fascinated by the idea of uncovering the nature of being. They were concerned with what was real and the how and the why of things. They asked a lot of questions and speculated with a lot of ideas. The ideas of the atom and multiple universes were just a couple of the things that sprang up way before the modern scientists rediscovered such notions to their own giddiness.
There was a fellow named Plato, who reasoned that there must be a reality that is the ideal of what we can actually see. What we are seeing are the physical accidents of a more pure form of things. He wasn't necessarily talking about randomness when he used the word accident. He was talking about incident. For instance there is a pure and perfect form of a man and the fact that any individual possesses attributes such as being six foot tall, with brown hair and blue eyes is simply the manifestation of accidents to the pure form, they are incidental.
What has this to do with Unity of Truth, you ask. Well scientists today don't like Plato very much. He throws a wrench in their carefully cooked pie. You see in Vienna before WWI and again before WWII, a group of mega brains were meeting regularily while old Adolph was across the border cooking up his plans, and they called themselves the Vienna Circle. There was Bertrand Russel (the British Philosopher) and a bunch of others and they didn't let anyone in that didn't accept their view of Logical Positivism. Now you can look this up and find a more academic understanding of this idea. But these guys didn't like the idea of metaphysics (beyond physics). They went so far as to claim that anything that is not empirical and experiential physically is either non-existant or meaningless. They also attacked ordinary language as being the root of the misunderstanding of reality. In short if it cannot be measured with a proverbial tape measure it is not real. So they had no use for Plato. Plato reasoned that there was more than meets the eye. Logical Positivism lingers in all the physical sciences to this day.
The problem is that if you are really after the "Truth" you must deal with all things, not just what is convenient for your research. The Greeks did not confine themselves to a narrow interpretation of reality. They were after the nature of all being. And whether western physical science ignores them or not, philosophical questions are the natural course of any honest inquisitive pursuit. Logical Positivism is an attempt to cut off this inescapable flowering of the human mind.
But the Vienna Circle had in their midst a silent traitor by the name of Kurt Godel. He was a Platonist. He didn't let them know this or they would have tossed him out. Albert Einstein said that he got up and walked to his office at Princeton in the morning for the privilege of conversing with his good friend Kurt Godel. Godel was a mathematician, a set theorist. He cooked up a theory called the Incompleteness Theorem. Today some scientists practice a form of Orwellian acrobatics to prove that this theorem supports Logical Positivism. But in truth the theory, reduced down for those who like common sense and lack mathematical prowess, implies philosophically that there are always things outside of any box no matter how big you make it that though they cannot be proved are nevertheless true. Always! In short "...there is always more" as Daniel Hightower is so fond of saying. And outside the box of Logical Positivism there is certainly a whole lot more that may not be proved but is clearly true.
Now Daniel Hightower was after the Unity of Truth so he ventured into sense and non-sense (things not apprehended by the senses), In-sense (personal and unique perception) common sense (something lacking in many physical scientists) and for good measure his own two cents. He travelled in the dimension of metaphysics.
He reasoned that the close affinty of most western physical scientists with eastern philosphy is because of its uncommited nature and the cover it gives to what are the dead ends of their logic. He was certain that since western physical science sprang from western natural philosophy, which sprang from the Renaissance and the Church Doctor's attempts to reconcile Theology with the Greeks, that there had to be a thread. After all, ex nihilo nihilo fit, nothing comes from nothing.
Astrobiology and the Physics of the Cosmos and the Microcosm, must reflect each other. There must be a Unity of all things even if we cannot see it clearly. Not only the how but the why of things is the prize. Einstein was after such a model and it is called the Unified Field Theory. But after all these years scientists today understand only five percent of reality. Their own numbers prove this. All the galaxies and time and space and red-shifts and black holes and red-giants etc. etc. etc. and everything we imagine we are seeing is a tiny fraction of reality and the rest they call "Dark." Dark Matter and Dark Energy are so dark that they have highly paid scientists buried six hundred feet below the earth in a cave somewhere in the Near-East playing ping pong and monitoring computers. These computers are hooked up to specially designed germanium plates that are in a refrigerator. They are waiting for WIMPS, Weakly Interactive Massive Particles. This is what they are hoping the ninety five percent of things they know nothing about are, WIMPS.
Daniel read a lot of books. He wished he had spent his life as a scientist so he could more fully marvel at reality. But being a simple sort, his accumulation of bits and pieces of things forced more than anything else his imagination. In the process he did discover many things about how what we see in the physical reality, also has corollaries in simplest of human perceptions. These corollaries are above and beyond any and all psychologies. He imagined how observable traits of even the smallest particles can be seen as constructs in human observation itself. And he drew closer to understanding what role western philosophy and theology play in the human march. Theology and philosophy are superior sciences by virtue of their subject matters. They are nevertheless less practical sciences than physical science and they have less of "proofs" no matter how much evidence exists in their pursuit. A Unity of Truth cannot ignore any of the questions arising from all science.
There is a page on this website called the Lens Pole and it gives an overview of Hightower's unfinished theory of human perception. Check it out if you are so inclined. But if you must know more you'll have to read the book.
Somewhere in New Mexico, Daniel Hightower obtained a booklet that had a passage in it that forced him to look up the words in a dictionary. He read it in a truck stop in Arizona and it stuck with him, and it gave him direction. It headed him towards a Unity of Truth. It read:
“From all these truths, the mind is led to acknowledge the existence of a truly propaedeutic path to faith, one which can lead to the acceptance of Revelation without in any way compromising the principles and autonomy of the mind itself.”
Imagine That!