0012 Centuries ago, the scholastic hylomorphe, matter [substantiates] form, occupies the slot of what is for a rational intellect.
The positivist rule dissolves this hylomorphe and precipitates another dyad, a noumenon [cannot be objectified as] its phenomena.
The noumenon is the thing itself.
Phenomena are observable and measurable facets of the noumenon.
The original hylomorphe gets shuffled into the noumenon.
Why?
The positivist intellect has a rule.
0013 Here is a picture.
0014 I ask, “What is it to be a human being?”
Obviously, the relevant answer points to the noumenon.
So, I should look to metaphysics.
0015 But, the positivist intellect says, “No metaphysics is allowed.”
Scientists are only interested in the observable and measurable facets of matter [substantiates] form, as well as of body [substantiates] soul. They are not concerned about the noumenon. Their observations may be mechanically modeled. Their measurements may be mathematically construed. Their models rely on the lingo of specialized disciplines.
Scientists engage in empirio-schematic judgments, the what ought to be of the Positivist’s judgment.
0016 Okay, if this makes sense, then the dyad, expressing what is for the Positivist judgment, provides a way to appreciate the mirroring of the question raised by Jeff Hardin.
0017 The distinction between a noumenon and its phenomena is valuable because it allows scientists to study phenomena, while ignoring the metaphysics associated with their noumenon.
So, while many inquirers ask noumenal questions, “Where did we humans come from? What went wrong? What is the cure?”, the scientific answers are based on clues concerning what would be the observable and measurable facets of hominin evolution as witnessed by a disinterested observer.
0018 Here is an association between modern versions of theological & biological anthropology and what is for the Positivist’s judgment.
0019 What do scientists look for?
Evolutionary scientists look for clues. Then, they analyze those clues with specific models built by empirical scientists and geneticists. The clues turn into observable and measurable features of the evolutionary record that may be then analyzed according to models proposed by biologists and natural historians. The result is a narrative of hominin evolution.
The evolutionary record is a product of scientific inquiry. It is expressed as a narrative.
0020 This conclusion is implicit in Hardin’s treatment of human natural history. He presents a narrative.
What does this imply?
Human evolutionary sciences are forensic sciences. They rely on theories by the empirical and natural sciences. They are devoted to producing a narrative describingwhat happened, in accordance with the positivist rule.
0021 The empirical sciences have it easy. They assume that the subject of inquiry is real, because they encounter the things themselves.
Empiricists know that the thing itself cannot be reduced to its observable and measurable facets.
0022 The forensic scientists have a more difficult time. They assume that the subject of inquiry ought to be real, but the thing itself is no longer present. They must construct a narrative about what the subject of inquirymust have been, as if it could be observed by a disinterested observer. Clues are studied in order to ascertain the phenomena that would have been observed. Then, these forensic-built phenomena are subject to an empirio-schematic judgment.
Hardin addresses this construction in a section on science and human origins.
0023 The rational mind must wonder, “Is human evolution nothing more than a narrative that scientists build from phenomena rigorously constructed from various clues?”
If that is true, then the noumenon of human evolution can be objectified by its phenomena, violating the structure of the Positivist’s what is.
0024 Is this rather disorienting?
Obviously, we cannot appreciate human evolution as a noumenon, because the thing itself is no longer present for direct examination.
So, the evolutionary sciences formulate what the phenomena of human evolution must be.
They end up providing a narrative.
Yet, this scientific narrative cannot give us an appreciation of what it is to be an evolved human, even though our sense of what is it to be human evolved.
0025 Even worse, what if humans evolved to pay attention to noumena?
Such a proposal explains why classicists and believers come up with hylomorphic descriptions of things and people in the first place.
Such a proposal accounts for why a narrative is relevant.
0026 The unsettling end to the prior blog shows where Jeff Hardin’s discussion can go.
Hardin poses one question. A second question mirrors the first. The transit from one question to the other turns everything backwards. One question reflects phenomena onto their noumenon. The other reflects a noumenon onto its phenomena.
Scientists study phenomena. Their data makes sleepiness great.
Humans pay attention to noumena. Our attentiveness is likely innate.
0027 We want to hear a narrative about the thing itself. Forget about the empirio-schematic judgments about its phenomena.
Evolution, as a forensic science, offers a data-driven narrative. But, it’s really a projection of models onto the thing itself. So, the story from phenomena inherently violates the dyad of what is in the Positivist’s judgment.
So, it will never satisfy. It will never offer me a way to appreciate who I am.
0028 I am a tarnished image of God.
The Bible offers a narrative, which many call “special revelation”. Special revelation captures our attention. Reading the words bring us into awareness of the thing itself.
0029 Hardin offers the following picture.
Hardin argues that the narratives of the evolutionary sciences provide constraints on interpretations of what it is to be human from Genesis.
0030 The following is a particularly important application.
0031 In the next blog, I will look at the same argument in the mirror within the heart of Hardin’s essay.
0059 Our current world is fallen, yet civilization constantly rises from the ashes of prior self-destructions.
The Bible depicts a cycle of formation, deformation, and reformation.
A new approach to the psychological and the social sciences ought to move in tandem with Biblical interpretation.
0060 Some evolutionary psychologists already stumble in this direction.
For example, today, people are fat, lazy and addicted to sugar.
Is the problem that our ancestors adapt to a world filled with fat-burning, strenuous and sugar-demanding activities?
No, with the benefits of civilization, the pressure is off. We can afford to slow down, take rests and eat desserts. The problem is our current Lebenswelt.
0061 When anyone asks me what I’m doing, I say, “I’m working.”
But, I’m really eating candy.
Yes, I project meaning, presence and message into the word, “work”.
And, my projection is paying off.
My own spoken words create an artifact that justifies my sloth, plus a little extra.
Fat, that is.
0062 Spoken words stimulate the production of artifacts that appear to validate the meaning, presence and message of spoken words.
Doesn’t that sound scientific?
The motif is so versatile.
Augustine proposes that the disorder caused by Adam’s rebellion resides in our privy parts.
Surely, he is on track.
What better incentive to manipulate meaning, presence and message, than to generate artifacts in the service of one’s privy parts?
The current Zeitgeist says, “It’s only natural.”
Augustine’s concept of concupiscence sounds like an orientation that postmoderns want to speak about… er… manage.
0063 What about the disciplines of modern psychology and sociology?
Do they labor as word-smiths, hammering out the spoken words that will address the tsunami of concupiscence-related disorders that currently plague modern society, or do they construct spoken words that thwart an evangelical’s desire to hear a sermon on Original Sin?
After all, lectures on concupiscence are not justified in a Zeitgeist where concupiscence is labeled “natural”.
0064 Surely, secular experts justify various features of our current Zeitgeist… er… regime, just like they previously (and maybe still do) labored to account for various flavors of mercantilism, various strains of fascism, and various manifestations of communism.
These ideologies all build on foundations of spoken words, specialized disciplinary languages fashioned by academically certified agents.
0065 Spoken words can (somehow) create the artifacts that validate spoken words.
The best way to make that happen is with sovereign power.
Spoken words can generate the righteousness underlying an organizational objective that will allow me (and my fellow travelers) to demand sovereign action. Then, the state implements my organizational objective, thereby validating the righteousness that my spoken words advocated.
Try to get around that.
0066 An example?
May I call the current regime: “big government (il)liberalism”?
Some would call it, “the administrative state”.
Big government (il)liberalism is the latest sovereign solution to the nasty consequences of an enlightened disposition, declaring, “Concupiscence is okay, because it is natural.”
“Tolerance” is key.
Big government experts must be tolerant in order to better manage the citizen’s natural proclivities.
0067 So, the word, “liberal” has been perverted from a focus on freedom and responsibility to a fixation on nonjudgment.
The prefix, (il), celebrates this inversion, because managing citizens is the negation of serving them.
0068 Isn’t that what the word, “government”, ought to mean?
If the citizens are going to do what’s natural, then someone must clean up the mess. What does that mean? Someone must control the citizens, in order to ameliorate the mess that they would produce, if left to their own natures.
Er… not someone, something. Something big.
0069 In a world where government is omnipresent, the message comes across loud and clear.
Look at your television and listen to the talking heads.
0070 Our current Lebenswelt is filled with word games.
The same types of word games are recorded in the Bible.
The Bible offers a testimony to the formation, deformation and reformation of the word, “covenant”.
0071 Where, in modern inquiry into psyche and organization, do we see the word, “covenant”?
Is the term, “social contract”, the same?
Oh, the term, “social contract”, is not religious.
The term, “covenant”, sounds more religious.
What is a word game?
0072 A Course on How To Define the Word “Religion”, available at the smashwords website, concerns our current Lebenswelt.
The modern disciplines of psychology and sociology claim to be “not religious”.
Indeed, they purport to scientifically investigate religion, even though they are religions.
Say what?
It all depends on how one defines the word, “religion”.
0073 A Course on How To Define the Word “Religion” offers category-based tools for appreciating the nature of our current Lebenswelt. The term, “religion”, is grounded in the potential of meaning, presence and message. Meaning involves social construction. Presence requires a three-tiered model of our differentiated world. Message entails an actuality filled with unresolvable contradictions.
This course fleshes out a scientific anthropology that moves with theological anthropology, without violating what is in the Positivist’s judgment.
0074 Jeff Hardin calls for theological interpretation of the Bible and scientific inquiry into human evolution to move in tandem.
In doing so, he unknowingly struggles with the Positivist judgment and offers us a post-Positivist alternative.
Here is a picture.
0075 If Hardin’s appeal prevails, then the metaphysics of the Bible offers a noumenon that supports phenomena studied in the human sciences.
Clearly, phenomena alone are insufficient to reveal our particular noumenon. How can changes in settlement patterns, innovation, and all the other little clues to the potentiation of unconstrained social complexity, produce a revelation that humanity is a recent creation by the divine?
Once the thing itself is intimated by the written origin stories of the ancient Near East, particularly the Biblical stories in Genesis,the human imagination may find a path to the hypothesis of the first singularity.
The noumenon, the thing itself, is necessary in order for there to be phenomena, observable and measurable facets. Yet, the noumenon cannot be objectified by its phenomena.
For centuries, empirical scientists ignore the noumenon and treat it as an impediment to their struggle for scientific results. That attitude continues to pervade the modern disciplines of anthropology, psychology and sociology. But, it cannot hold.
0076 Why?
Humans innately recognize noumena as sources of signification.
Our lineage adapts into the niche of triadic relations, which includes signs, mediations, judgments and category-based nested forms.
0077 Then, our Lebenswelt changes. We forget who we were. We fashion fairy tales of who we are. These fairy tales include public mythologies of the ancient Near East, written in cuneiform on clay tablets that are preserved in burnt ruins of long forgotten capitals. These public mythologies agree with the stories of Adam and Eve in the Bible. Humans are recently manufactured by the spiritual realm.
Here is a noumenon that cannot be objectified by its phenomena.
Yet, phenomena exist only because of their noumenon.
The noumenon and its phenomena both point to a recent prehistoric change from the Lebenswelt that we evolved in to our current Lebenswelt.
0078 The rule of the positivist intellect cannot contain the human sciences.
Theology and the human sciences must move in tandem.
0079 Jeff Harden follows his appeal with summaries of faithful Christian approaches to human origins. These approaches include models of existential recapitulation, of protohistory, of representative ancient ancestors, of recently, elected representatives and of genealogies, as opposed to genetics.
None of these are adequate.
0080 Why?
They do not fit the fairy tales about Adam and Eve.
0076 In this look at Hardin’s article, another option appears. It appears as a mirror image of his opening question. It asks, “Why doesn’t evolutionary science recognize a twist in human evolution?”
The answer wonders, “Why is our current Lebenswelt not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in?“
The hypothesis of the first singularity is a scientific mechanism that works as an adjunct to theological formulations.
Indeed, we come to a new age of understanding, which the late John Deely, calls “The Age of Triadic Relations”.
0077 Here is a picture of three masterworks and their corresponding periods in human evolution.
0078 My thanks to Jeff Hardin, Chair, Biologos Board of Directors, for his mind-opening essay.
0001 In the December 2018 issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Amos Yong reviews the compilation, Evolution and the Fall, edited by William T. Cavanaugh and James K. A. Smith (2017, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, MI, ISBN: 9780802873798).
0002 The book is the product of a three year initiative asking the following if-then question:
(A) If humanity emerges from nonhuman primates, as suggested by genetic, natural historical and archaeological evidence…
(B) …then what are the implications for Christian theology’s traditional account of origins, especially the origin of humanity (B1) and of sin (B2)?
0003 To this question, I attend.
0004 First, the masterwork, The Human Niche, proposes that the ultimate human niche is the potential of triadic relations (B1). Triadic relations are independent of genes and the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Even though these play roles in the actualization of triadic relations, they do not alter the nature of the relations (A).
Triadic relations explain why archaeological evidence exists in the first place (B1, A). Physical evidences are signs of human evolution, to the beholders, that is, ourselves. Obviously, we are adapted to look for and to participate in sign-processes. Signs are one type of triadic relation.
0005 Second, the masterwork, An Archaeology of the Fall, dramatizes the coming to awareness of a recent twist in human evolution (B1 and B2). Our current Lebenswelt is not the Lebenswelt that we evolved in. I call the transition: the first singularity. The first singularity begins around 7821 years ago. It leaves a fairy tale trace.
0006 The hypothesis of the first singularity (B1 and B2) raises novel questions concerning our current living world (B2). What is this the nature of our current Lebenswelt (B2)?
0007 Ours is a world where we project meanings, presences and messages into our spoken words, then construct artifacts to validate them (B2). The artifact validates our projection, even in the face of unintended consequences. One result is that spoken words, which are at first not deceptive, become deceptive, then wreak havoc until they are reformed.
Does that sound vaguely Biblical?
0008 An example is offered in the masterwork, How to Define the Word “Religion”.
0009 During and after the Reformation, the word, “religion”, labels Christian factions, vying for sovereign power in order to implement their organizational objectives. The factions stand as artifacts that validate the term. The terminology has consequences. Enlightenment constitutions, especially the American, explicitly forbid the federal government from establishing a religion.
0010 The problem?
During the Enlightenment of the 18th century, and during the subsequent two centuries, new social noumena appear, claiming to be “not religious”. The word, “secular”, is coined in the mid-1800s as a label.
What does it mean to identify oneself or one’s institution as “not religious”?
Well, it must mean that the entity does not belong to a Christian faction.
0011 The problem?
These “not religious” individuals (thinkers, leaders and supporters), societies (institutions) and movements (widespread affiliations) behave precisely in the same way that Christian factions do after the Reformation. They engage in social construction (meaning). They seek sovereign power in order to implement their organizational objectives (presence). Their righteousness contains inherent contradictions that cannot be resolved (message).
Indeed, modern “secular” individuals, institutions and movements meet the criteria that defines the term, “religion”, according to the above masterwork.
0012 The problem?
The US federal government has established a religion, contrary to the first amendment of its constitution.
It so happens, that the religion is not a “religion” (a Christian faction).
