God, Intelligent Design, and Other Things that Cannot Not Be
You may ask yourself, "that's strange. Why isn't Bob converting to Catholicism?" Well, perhaps I will someday. First of all, it's impossible for us to do it at the same time. Also, frankly, if I had my druthers, I think I would prefer something like Byzantine Catholicism, which seems to combine elements of Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism, which would be ideal for me. But it's not as if you can find one of those on every corner. Plus, it's a real commitment. You don't just run down the aisle and say "hallelujah, I'm saved." Look at Mrs. G. She has to attend 8:00 AM mass every Sunday for a full year before she even gets her decoder ring next Easter.
Anyway, at the end of yesterday's post I mentioned several books by the philosopher Errol Harris, which were instrumental in helping me to arrive at a total cosmic vision with no annoying shirttails hanging out the back. In reviewing his corpus, it looks like in recent years he might have taken a lurch into environmentalism and one-world government, but I cut him some slack, because I think he's like 100 years old.
Now, here is a man who has nothing whatsoever to do with the contemporary "intelligent design" debate, but was writing about these things in the 1950s. In this regard, I was totally convinced of the truth of what is now called ID way before it became a hot topic. The bottom line is that there are at least a dozen inviolable metaphysical reasons why reductionistic Darwinism cannot possibly be true, in that it cannot give an even minimally coherent and comprehensive account of human reality. The reasons are principial, not "accidental," meaning that they must be true. I first discovered these metaphysical principles, and only afterwards made the surprising discovery that these same principles are fully embodied in religious tradition, only given in symbolic and esoteric form.
To cite just one obvious example, Darwinism presupposes a certain very specific type of universe, and this is a universe that exhibits ontological wholeness rather than logical atomism. In other words, life presupposes wholeness; wholeness could never be built "from the bottom up," but must be woven into the very fabric of being. And wholeness is one of the necessary attributes of God, and therefore creation.
Another way of saying it is that ordered totality is logically prior to natural selection. It can only operate on existent wholes. Natural selection is really the progressive unfolding of a principe of order that is present not just in the organism, but in the cosmos. After all, to say "cosmos" is to say "ordered totality." Obviously, the ordered totality of biological organisms can only occur in a cosmos that is itself an ordered totality.
I should point out that Whitehead made similar arguments along these lines in the 1920s, recognizing that quantum physics revealed the nonlocal, organismic wholeness of reality; you could say that nonlocality is an artifact of wholeness, or that wholeness necessitates nonlocality. Either way, there is no way to eliminate the wholeness.
I would go much further than this, and say that the reason human beings have access to the Whole on the subjective plane, is that this interior space also obviously exhibits properties of wholeness. In fact, the human mind is quintessential in this regard, seeing as how a healthy mind instantaneously synthesizes literally countless synaptic connections to facilitate the emergence of a simple "I" or "I AM." There is a metaphysical reason why "I AM" is the name of God, as "I" refers to the prior space of ontological wholeness, while "AM" is its deployment in time and space; the former is nonlocal, the latter local.
Conversely, on the human subjective plane, pathology (mental illness) always involves some disturbance in the experience of wholeness. Words such as "schizoid," "schizophrenia," "bipolar," "paranoid" -- each of these categories describes a mind that is fundamentally at odds with itself. In fact, psychosis can often be conceptualized as a mind that his been torn into persecutory "bits" that cannot be synthesized, just as autism can be seen as a mind that cannot experience intersubjective unity with another mind.
Likewise, at the other end of the spectrum, the total unity of mystical experience speaks for itself. Such an experience would not be possible except in a cosmos that is fundamentally shot through with wholeness, so that each part is not just embedded in a network of relations, but has the whole within it -- the same way each part of the body contains the DNA of the totality.
That was brief. The Boy is starting to stir. Let me just throw in a few notes that I placed at the end of Harris's books. It is possible that they are at least partly his words, not mine.
"Time = the serial self-articulation of the whole."
"God's reality cannot be denied, as any such denial must rest on grounds which only God's reality can provide."
"Every proposition is contingent, but in order for this to be so, there is one fact that must be necessary, and that is the existence of the completed system."
"If we reason at all, it is on the basis of a systematized experience revealing the totally systematic nature of the Real. The perfected whole of knowledge and reality is, therefore, the necessary presupposition of all reasoning and proof. The denial of this reality is self-refuting. Without God's existence, all rational discourse is undermined."
"Natural selection sneaks in a principle of improvement by the 'selection effect' of the environment; however, this adds nothing, since all change is initiated randomly. Random = homogeneous, and there can be no homogeneous continuum."
"What the scientist takes on faith not even the philosopher can prove, for no proof of the ultimate rationality of the object of our thought is possible which does not assume what it has to prove."
Oh well. I can't possibly do justice to this subject in such a short space of time. Maybe I'll return to it later in the week.