Supernatualism vs. Naturalism III

Evolution, be it of organism or of mind, of subatomic matter or of the cosmos as a whole, reflects the pervasive role of process which philosophers of this school see as central both to the nature of our world and to the terms in which it must be understood. Change pervades nature. The passage of time leaves neither individuals nor types (species) of things statically invariant. Process at once destabilizes the world and is the cutting-edge of advance to novelty. And evolution of every level, physical, biological, and cosmic carries the burden of the work here. But does it work blindly?

On the issue of purposiveness in nature, process philosophers divide into two principal camps. On the one side is the naturalistic (and generally secularist) wing that sees nature's processuality as a matter of an inner push or nisus to something new and different. On the other side is the teleological (and often theological) wing that sees nature's processuality as a matter of teleological directedness towards a positive destination. Both agree in according a central role to novelty and innovation in nature. But the one (naturalistic) wing sees this in terms of chance-driven randomness that leads away from the settled formulations of an established past, while the other (teleological) wing sees this in terms of a goal-directed purposiveness preestablished by some value-geared directive force.  "Process Philosophy," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

As a follow up to the discussion in the previous posts about Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism here and here, I want to start fleshing out a theist metaphysic that makes sense for the postmodern mind.  My resources for doing this are the tradition of metaphysics dating back at least to the time of Heraclitus, which carried on through Plato and Aristotle, and then through Augustine through the medieval period culminating in the thought of figures like Bonaventure and Nicholas of Cusa. 

I accept the difficulties involved in trying to make anything with a sniff of Platonism seem even remotely plausible in the contemporary thought world, so my resources are not just premodern thinkers but others, who, following from Bergson, James, and Whitehead, have developed a way of thinking that is both compatible with theism and particularly with developments in modern physics and evolutionary biology.  I reference the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article above for those of you unfamiliar with this stream of thought. I think that this stream, although not particularly well known or widely discussed these days, is pregnant with possibilities.

While I'm sure that a committed naturalist would not be convinced by the case that these thinkers (and I) want to make, I think that it can meet most of the objections that they pose.  But beyond meeting their objections there is the positive challenge that comprises three fundamental tasks: first, to absorb the data the naturalist understands to be true without necessarily accepting his interpretation of these data; second, to absorb ideas from the Judaeo-Christian tradition about creation and the meaning of history; and third to bring it down to earth to provide a robust, compelling framework for practical living in the world--for personal as well as social ethics, for ideas that give human life its sense of joy, meaning, and purpose. 

I would argue that any narrative that plausibly achieves all three has to be taken seriously, even by secularists.  Taking seriously" does not mean acceptance.  So for instance, while I am not a Buddhist, I take Buddhism seriously. I do so because I think I can learn from Buddhists. And while I have not the intention to convert Buddhists or secularists to Christianity,  I would hope, some at least would enter into dialog in good faith, which means that they too would expect to learn or gain something from the exchange. 

The merger of Hellenistic and Jewish worldviews in Christianity became the cultural "operating system" of the West.  Thought systems that exhibit such longevity, persistence and which have had such a world historical impact should never be trivialized.   And secularists often don't recognize how much they are indebted to that tradition.  They might counter that they recognize what is valid and have rejected what is silly, superstitious, and otherwise retrograde.  I would argue they are still blinded by Enlightenment rationalist prejudices that close them off to still-dormant possibilities that that lie within that OS.

I have no illusions that the kind of thinking that I want to promote here is marginal now and may very well continue to be. But one thing is sure, religion will continue to be a social force in one form or another into the distant future, and so even secularists have a stake in promoting good religion rather than the noxious kind that we see all around us today. Humans, being what they are, will always be attracted to bad religion.  But my argument is that the best antidote is not the abolition of religion altogether some secularists argue is the only way forward and which is impossible anyway, but rather the promotion of good religion. And a good form of Christianity meets the three criteria listed above.

My argument since the beginning of this blog has been that as the habits of mind and prejudices associated with Enlightenment rationality continue to erode, an opportunity presents itself for a  new presentation of a Christian metaphysics that is equal to any other plausible explanation about how the world works.  The resources for presenting such an explanation are there; my purpose in this blog is to use those resources to present a narrative that non-academic specialists can understand.  That doesn't mean that it will be easy; only that my goal will be to talk about these ideas in a more down-to-earth idiom striving wherever possible to use natural English rather than technical jargon, or when technical jargon can't be avoided to define clearly what it means. It remains to be seen whether I can do that effectively.

The Judaeo-Christian tradition is eschatological, which means it is future oriented; it sees history as having a goal or a telos.  Most Christians think that the goal is to get off the earth and into the spirit world or heaven.  I think that the Christian goal is to care for the earth, which is an organism, like a plant, which grows until it flowers, fruits, and seeds. The biblical metaphor for that flowering is the New Jerusalem, and fruiting/seeding the resurrection of the dead. I have no idea what either of those metaphors mean in concrete terms, so I chose to understand them by means of another metaphor: The earth as an entelechy,  an organism which is both stable and in constant change, but the change has an underlying pattern, a logos with a telos, so to speak.  Christianity is where Greek thinking and Jewish thinking converge.

That's the meaning of Christian eschatology for me.  It's an organic conception rooted in Aristotle's idea of the entelechy:  As the acorn grows to become the oak tree, so is the earth like a seed that has germinated and is growing toward that which it is "genetically" programmed to be. And we humans are the ones charged with the healthful development of the earth, to fight off the diseases that seek continuously to infect and to divert its growth toward its telos.  All that should matter to us now is proper horticulture, not of the harvest.  The harvest, whatever its nature, is too far off to worry about now.

For if we humans are the cultivators (stewards) of the earth--and fi the relative health or sickness of our human culture directly relates to the healthy maturation of the earth, then everything depends on our getting our house in order.  For now more than ever the future of the earth is the future of human culture. 

 

Comments

[Joachim]

Jack –

you win, I take the bait.

“I accept the difficulties involved in trying to make anything with a sniff of Platonism seem even remotely plausible in the contemporary thought world”

It’s not just a question of plausible, it is very much a question of undesirable and outright harmful.

Both the crude forms of Platonism, caricatures of which I have drawn elsewhere, and the more sophisticated forms which you undoubtedly credit yourself with as holding, come in the end, trust me, down to the same thing, the same dangerous idiocy as the crudest of the crude forms.

We can address everything, EVERYTHING, we ever need to discuss in the realm of ethics in the format of one person saying “I think we should do X because …” and another person saying “But I think we should to Y because …”. There is never, NEVER, a need to resort to moral facts, or a telos, or an entelechy, or other external counterpart of correspondence.

Saying “It is a moral fact/ inscribed on the moral order/ encoded in the entelechy/ … that P” introduces a false note of pomposity into the conversation. It is unhelpful, misleading, irritating. Root it out, throw it away, drown it in a lake, and celebrate.

Platonism is wholly unsuited to achieving your aim, if your aim really is to reduce power and violence in favour of benevolent dialogue, and not instead to shore up Christianity. All that Platonism does is to hand the system another club to beat us with. It is IMPOSSIBLE to use Platonism against the system, the only safe way is to destroy the club, to never use these beguiling figures of speech.

Bottomline: Not only can we do ethics, and fully justify ethics, without ever referring to a Platonic Order, but we are much, much better off that way. The further we stay away from it, the better.

P.S. As I said before, a world without much religion – good, bad, or any – is easy to imagine, look at Denmark, look at China. As far as it comes to transition management, I agree that sensible Christianity has great instrumental value, but, to my mind, obviously only instrumental value. The same way a diver would be damaged by coming up too quickly, fundamentalist or tight-laced orthodox believers may need the decompression chamber provided by sensible, relatively liberal Christianity.

P.P.S Kinda like your Gaia riff, but don’t you think the enforcers at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are going to raise some eyebrows ?

P.P.P.S I think Christianity is not the OS, it's just an application running under the OS. The old OS lies deeper, and was largely shared by Platonism, Christianity and the Enlightenment, and we desperately need to complete the switch to the new, emerging OS.

[Steve Allison]

Jack,

I enjoyed this post. What specifically was Platonistic in what you wrote?

[Joachim]

Jack –

here I go again. Last post on this unless you decide to trigger another one.

There really are two sides here. There is the side of institutional Christianity, the kind of Christianity that sold its soul to Constantine in exchange for worldly power. A prime example of a guy on this side would be OLB, who without doubt believes in a Platonic Order, and without doubt believes that he knows just what it is. If you want to put yourself on this, the wrong side of history, the side I fervently hope does not win, then go ahead and defend Platonism. You would, I think, be contradicting yourself and the many right things you keeping saying. You also won’t have my sympathy.

And then there is the side of sceptical reason, where the ethos of fallibilism supports the fragile values of humility, benevolent dialogue, and sanity. I don’t want to make the mistake of claiming the alleged son of God for my side, but this sure looks more Christ-like to me that anything on the Platonist side.

On the emergence of a new OS, which is a very recent phenomenon, less than 150 years old:

Hegel, for example, was a transitional figure between the Enlightenment and the post-Enlightenment that slowly started with Nietzsche and Darwin, and later led to the postmoderns. Hegel was brilliant in the way he historicised and de-linerarised truth, in the way he made our claims to truth face history. Hegel was a disaster when he secularised Christian eschatology and came to the embarassing conclusion that the Prussian national liberal constitutional monarchy was the end of history. His secularised eschatology was then taken up by Marx, and passed on to Lenin. And there you have it, the only purpose the idea of an objective eschatology is ever going to be useful for is to put a nice face on barbarism.

We agree, don’t we, that the Marxist promise of the New Man is a dangerous confusion ? Why then is the Christian promise of salvation – in many of its current interpretations – not also a dangerous confusion ?

And maybe you do already agree. I was very glad to find you saying this:

“All that should matter to us now is proper horticulture, not of the harvest. The harvest, whatever its nature, is too far off to worry about now.”

All I would wish for is that you would stop talking about the harvest and the telos altogether. It is indeed too far off to worry about, and as good pragmatists we should just let it drop. Proper horticulture is what we do and what we are.

There are the multifarious and overlapping purposes that people, individually and collectively, dream about, project into the future they want to create, the purposes that people while living continually test for their viability. By testing their purposes against reality people are in a sense discovering something, but this is very different from accessing an objective or eschatologically ordained telos. Those we don’t need, ever.

Since we are into simplistic polarities, here’s another one:

There are indeed two camps with respect to evolution – a handful of cranks are in the teleology camp, and just about all working biologists in the “No teleology” and “What the hell is an entelechy ?” camp. If the ideas of teleology and entelechy tracked anything real, then one would think that biologists would be hampered in their success by not using them. But that is not what is happening. Biological knowledge is exploding at the moment, and biologists have been finding for almost a century now that they can be much more successful without these ideas than they could ever be with them. What had hampered the biological sciences before the modern take-off was precisely the old thinking in terms of externally given purposes.

The attempt to insert a teleology into evolution was a rearguard action fought, and lost, by anti-Darwinian partisans around the 1880s. In terms of intellectual history the idea of finding a teleology in evolution is as dead as the proverbial Dodo. There is of course always hoping for the all-confounding paradigm change coming out of nowhere that would reinstitute these ideas to their former place of glory. But this would not be a rational hope, based on facts or current trends; it would be a counterfactual, messianic dream.

[Jack Whelan]

Joachim--

Here's the problem from my point of view. I have good reason to take theism seriously, and whether I do it well or poorly, I feel compelled to make it work in an intellectually coherent way with what we know about the world through science. That does not mean that whatever synthesis I (or others) come up with along these lines needs to be legitimated by scientific thinking, only that it would not be contradicted by what has been established as known.

I don't think that ideas like entelechy or teleology have a place in scientific thinking; I think they have possibililities in philosophical reflection. You think they have been once and for all discredited; we'll simply have to agree to disagree about that for the time being.

In any event, the task of effecting this reconciliation is a problem that I have and you don't, and you wonder why I bother. I bother because I am convinced that Christian theism is true and that what we learn from scientific investigation is true, and that both can be reconciled.

You have chosen one side of the polarity; I have chosen to live in the tension between them. The problem as I see it is one-sidedness, and I see your critique about what I am doing as the flip side to what the fundamentalists are doing (and yes, the rigidly orthodox at 'Propaganda Fidei')--they have taken their position, and if you're not for us, you're against us. So you are doing the same from the other side-- if I'm not in your camp, I must be in the other, except I don't realize it. And so the thrust of what you see yourself doing in your comments here is to uncover the fundamental incoherence that lies underneath everything I say.

The mentality of the one-sided is that you can't have it both ways, but for me the challenge is to find a synthesis at another level, and even if I am successful, what I say will always seem incoherent to one side or the other in the polarized camps. I am ultimately unconcerned about what either think; ultimately I can be judged successful only by others who have undertaken the same task to effect the reconciliation.

So whether or not I am incoherent or am successful in this project remains remains to be seen. I don't see your remarks as having demonstrated it. The hostility and anger conveyed in many of your remarks to past posts (not more recent ones) is from my point of view symptomatic of that kind of polarized thinking. (It happens to the best of us, and I am certainly guilty of it, too, but it's a real problem if it becomes habitual, because it reinforces the polarization.) points precisely to the problem that we all need to overcome.) In your view I am the unconscious victim of my own incoherence; in my view, you are the unconscious victim of your own one-sidedness.

So a basic operating principle for me is that it's one-sidedness that leads to tyranny and violence. Insofar as various forms of Platonism manifest this kind of one-sidedness, I would agree that they lead to horrors. As I have stated elsewhere, but apparently not persuasively enough, that's not what I mean by Platonism, even if it is true of the many instances of historical one-sided Platonism.

What I mean by it, and this also is a partial response to Steve's query, is pointed to by the Christian idea that the transcendent world to which Plato pointed was made immanent with the incarnation of the Logos. That the Logos is no longer something that we look for out there somewhere but rather within the depths of the human soul. This is what the gospels refer to when they announce that the kingdom is within, and when they elaborate on the idea in the several 'seed' parables that explain how it grows (or fails to) in the life of the soul.

This idea needs to be developed, and I hope to do so in future posts. But the basic thrust of what I want to say about it is that this Logos is the human entelechy. It is not static and rigid, but rather dynamic and growth oriented. It effects a metamorphosis in the human soul if it is properly cultivated.

Indeed, its germination and cultivation is precisely what the Christianity is all about. The Logos is both a personal interior reality that participates in a larger cosmic reality. That idea of 'participation' is a Platonic notion that I want to work with; it's the key for me in overcoming subject/object splits and other epistemological problems, but more about that another time.