There is No God, and Matter is His Prophet

With regard to the debate between Ideological Darwinism and St. Thomas, I'm trying to consider it from the widest possible angle -- or at least a new angle -- since we've already circled this goround ad nauseam. So why does it keep coming up? No doubt because we failed to dig down deep enough and pull it out by the roots. Instead, we leave a stump which sprouts new growth the moment we turn our backs.

It seems that some errors will always be with us: not Darwinism per se, but something deeper than Darwinism. (And I hasten to emphasize that we're not talking merely about the mechanism of natural selection, which no one disputes, but rather, the naive and uncritical reduction of everything that transcends the genes back into the genes: spirit into matter, subject into object, truth into reproductive success, wisdom into tenure, etc.)

It seems to me that the Perennial Error that Cannot be Eradicated is a form of immanentizing the Christian eschaton. Ironically, the anti-theism expressed by Henrich could only occur in a post-Christian world (which is still a variant of Christianity).

After all, natural selection wasn't discovered by Buddhists or Muslims. With regard to the former, no intellectual would waste his time focused on the illusory ins, outs, and what-have-you's of ceaseless change. We get it: the only permanence is the impermanent. As for Islam, any changes are dictated by Allah. There is no randomness, including the genetic kind. End of story.

So, the truth of the matter is that Henrich is high up in the Christian tree of Western civilization, enthusiastically sawing away at the branch he's sitting on. But more than that, he's really attempting the chop down the whole tree -- the tree of transcendence -- and return it to the immanent ground of the forest, i.e., a world of pure horizontality.

To help us see the forest for the trees (and vice versa), let's turn to Voegelin. Maybe he's not always as clear as he could be and should be, but who else gets to the root of the problem as he does? He's like metaphysical Roundup. No, literally:

The soul grows full of weeds unless the intelligence inspects it daily like a diligent gardener (Dávila).

Look at the size that menu! Where to begin? This looks like a good appetizer: Evolutionary Theory and Kant's Critique. Let's chew on it and see if it's digestible. Hmm. We may have bitten off more than we can chew:

if the radically immanent theory of evolution were accepted, researchers would have to ascribe to the universal mother, with her generative power, an expedient organization geared to all the creatures that have come forth from her and without which the appropriate forms of the animal and plant worlds would be impossible.

Okay what? I think he means that if you radically immanentize the process of evolution, you end with a kind of de-differentiated Womb of Nature -- perhaps similar to the worldview of paleolithic cave painters. They too noticed how mother earth ceaselessly throws out forms from her womb, which is why they thought they could participate in the process by tunneling down into the earth and putting those images on the walls. Is this what Henrich is doing? Yes, only with banal words and ideas instead of glorious images. No, literally:

Without aesthetic transfiguration all of reality is pedestrian.

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

The work of art is a covenant with God.

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

The laws of biology in themselves do not have sufficiently delicate fingers to fashion the beauty of a face.

So, our cavedwelling cousins were the first to discover transcendence, and their paintings are urgent memos to that effect. They launched us into this vertical space, but people such as Henrich would literally reduce this space to a meaningless horizontal shuffling of genetic material. There's an ap(horism) for that:

Reducing another’s thought to his supposed motives prevents us from understanding him.

In other words, reducing our thought to the selfish motives of our genes obviously prevents Henrich from understanding us. But more to the point, it also prevents him from understanding himself. I realize this is basic stuff, but has it really never occurred to him that he isn't magically immune from his own theory, and that his ideas cannot possibly be true, only genetically useful? Yes, he's only a biologist and not a philosopher, but c'mon, man!

Back to Voegelin, then we have to get some work done:

If this idea is followed to its logical conclusion, the law according to which species develop moves closer and closer to the beginning of the history of evolution, until the first life-form is endowed with the evolutionary tendency for the entire living world, and finally speculation pushes back beyond the first life-form into inorganic matter, from which the former spontaneously originated.

The "explanatory" law that was intended to be immanent thus turns again into a transcendent one, into a law that "precedes" the evolutionary series of life...

In other words, there is no God, and matter is his prophet.

We are far from finished with this subject (we've only just begun), but we'll end this post with a few aphorisms that are as paper to the rockheadedness of ideological Darwinism:

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book.

Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest (Dávila).