V. A Sound Grounding in Christian Metaphysics
Veriphysics does not pretend to religious neutrality. The Enlightenment feigned neutrality and wound up demonstrating its impossibility. A philosophy always rests on a foundation; the question is only whether that foundation is acknowledged or concealed. The Enlightenment’s concealed foundations, autonomous reason, mechanical nature, the separation of fact and value, proved incoherent, if not outright satanic. Veriphysic’s foundations are explicit, sound, and Christian.
This is not an fearful retreat from reason into the dogmatic faith of the fideists. Veriphsyics holds that faith and reason are intrinsically complementary, not contradictory. Reason investigates reality while faith provides access to truths that reason alone cannot reach. The two do not conflict because they cannot conflict: truth is one, and any apparent contradiction between the deliverances of reason and the revelations of faith merely indicates an error somewhere, committed somewhere in the reasoning, in the interpretation of the belief, or sometimes in both. The medieval formula remains valid, as philosophy is the handmaid of theology, not because philosophy is inferior but because both serve the same mistress, which is Truth.
The Christian grounding provides what the Enlightenment could not, which is a foundation for the very concepts the Enlightenment wished to preserve without it. Consider truth. The Enlightenment wanted to establish its truths, attempted to distinguish true claims from false, knowledge from opinion, and science from superstition. But on the sole basis of Enlightenment premises, even the existence of truth becomes problematic. If the mind is merely matter in motion, why should its operations connect to reality? If reason is autonomous, what prevents it from constructing whatever happens to suit its purposes at the moment? If nature is value-free, what makes truth even relevant, let alone valuable? The Enlightenment helped itself to the concept of truth while undermining the conditions of its possibility.
Christian metaphysics grounds truth in the Logos, in the divine reason that creates and sustains all things. The world is intelligible because it is the product of intelligence. Truth is not an abstraction floating free of reality; it is an attribute of God Himself, participated in by creatures insofar as they know. The correspondence between mind and world that makes knowledge possible is not a happy accident; it is a consequence of both mind and world being created by the same rational God. We can know because we are made in the image of one who knows perfectly.
Consider goodness. The Enlightenment desired some form of ethics and attempted to distinguish right from wrong, virtue from vice, justice from injustice. But on Enlightenment premises, goodness becomes arbitrary. If nature is value-free, then values are imposed by nothing more than subjective human will. If there is no purpose built into things, then purposes are merely human constructions. If the universe is indifferent, then moral claims are nothing more than expressions of individual preferences, not descriptions of reality. The Enlightenment stole the Christian tradition’s moral vocabulary and built a whole series of rights and claims upon it while sawing off the very branch on which that vocabulary rested.
Christian metaphysics grounds goodness in the nature of God and the nature of creation. Good and evil are not constructions but realities. They are material features of the world as God made it and as we encounter it. The moral law is not arbitrary command but expression of divine wisdom, built into the structure of things, discoverable by reason, confirmed by revelation. To know the truth about human nature is already to know something about how humans should live. The fact-value distinction dissolves: facts about what things are entail facts about what things are for, and things are for their proper flourishing.
Consider meaning. The Enlightenment wanted significance. Its philosophers did not embrace nihilism. They wanted human life to matter, wanted projects worth pursuing, wanted a story that made sense. But meaning evaporates on Enlightenment premises. If the universe is matter in motion with no inherent purpose, then human life is an accident in an indifferent cosmos. If history has no direction, then there is no narrative, only events. If we are mere vehicles for immortal genes, then our only purpose is to propagate them. And if death is final, then nothing we do in this lifetime ultimately matters. The Enlightenment wanted the fruits of Christian civilization without the root of it; it is now discovering how those fruits wither when they are cut off from the root.
Christian metaphysics provides what the Enlightenment could not: a universe in which meaning is not projected but discovered, in which human life matters because human beings are created and loved by God, in which history is going somewhere because it is governed by providence, in which death is not final because the Creator of life has conquered death. These are not comforting illusions but truths—truths that ground the very concepts the Enlightenment wished to preserve and could not.
Veriphysics does not impose these truths dogmatically; it proposes them as the best explanation of phenomena that the Enlightenment cannot explain. Why is the universe intelligible? Why do mathematical structures describe physical reality? Why does consciousness exist? Why do human beings persistently seek meaning, justice, and transcendence? The Christian answers to these questions are coherent, comprehensive, and supported by two millennia of philosophical development. The Enlightenment’s answers are ad hoc, fragmented, and self-undermining, when it manages to provide any answers at all. The choice between Christian metaphysics and Enlightenment metaphysics is not faith versus reason, but rather, solid and coherent reason versus incoherent irrationality.