2 January 2017

What's it all about?

I've just finished reading Evolution's Achilles' Heels (Robert Carter, ed.); much there of interest, of course (with the usual detractor websites springing up). The last chapter was the most interesting for me, but the least well done. It is entitled "Ethics and Morality" and gives a fair tour of that topic, but one that ends up, despite a disclaimer, tending to make Christianity look like a system of ethics; back to the past of 'do this...don't do that' Christian life.

It is far more, of course: the challenge of the Bible to the modern world is that of how one structures the world. The World's basic or first philosophy could be characterised as simple materialism, which courts the naturalistic fallacy: that one can somehow derive an 'ought' from an 'is' (the world is thus, so therefore you ought to do 'x'), and must contend with not only a biological information code (whence 'information' in a materialist world?), but an immaterial language that makes the code meaningful as a crucial constituent of it materialism. The Bible's first philosophy is what might be called 'theistic personism'. Basic to it all is that God in community of persons (the trinity) is, loves, and acts with wisdom. This makes our shared echo of his personhood unavoidably basic to being (i.e. ontologically basic).

This feature of the Real drives all else. It gives the person significance over and above material; whereas the materialist world makes the person derivative of an arbitrary material assemblage with no claim to any particular value, status or substance.

Love between persons is therefore the fundamental aspect of us as persons in community (and in existence) and 'information', wisdom and communication are sourced in this: not 'epiphenomena' of matter, but real in their own right.

The 'ethics and morality' chapter should have built on this, with the point made of us not being able to live consistently humanly (and raising the question of the source of that value) being isolated by our own will from basic being (God) and needing to rejoin community with him through his extension in love towards us to become whole.