Why Are You Bothering With All This?

I HAVE BEEN ASKED why I've been going through the rather challenging exercise of attempting to make something of a transcription of the dialogue between Rupert Sheldrake and David Bentley Hart about fields as formal causes.  In some ways, especially in trying to transcribe the philosophical language of Hart, it is the most difficult transcription I've ever attempted.  

I suppose I'm asked that because I am a political blogger, the intent of my blog being to explore the reasons that the "left" at least among the English speaking People has been in the political wilderness so continually when it has better positions for a majority of People to the side that serves the few, the wealthy, the oligarchs and the parochial bigots, the "right".  

Well, these issues raised within the issues of materialism, atheism, scientism, are ultimately and entirely relevant to politics and have been since at least the late 18th century when would-be secular governments tried to form without reference to God, that resulting in the United States and the catastrophic blood bath of the French Revolution and its decades, centuries long aftermath.  I have come to realize that the vulgar materialism of the "right" is intrinsically related to the intellectual materialism of the secular, so-called "left."  In fact, I think they are identical though held by different camps who are sometimes at odds with each other.

But it's even a complex relationship because there is a more genuine "left" that is not materialistic and not atheistic and not scientistic.  The last one, at least, on a theoretical level, many on that "left" are unwitting adherents of scientism through badly thought out habits of thought derived from a romantic view of science. Thus the romantic view of such figures as Darwin and Einstein and, I'd argue, even going back to Spinoza.   

Many of the same kinds of unwitting habits of thought complicate things in thinking about the political "right" in so far as they nominally associate themselves with the ultimate refutation of the very vulgar materialism they embody, Christianity.  I could go into detail but I can make it a lot simpler, if the "Christians" of the American right REALLY took the teachings of Jesus seriously, they could never support the politicians and other cultural figures who pose as "Christian nationalists" because everything about them contradicts the Gospel of Jesus.  They reject doing to others what they would have done to them, they despise the poor, the destitute the stranger among us, they absolutely reject genuine charity to the poor, the destitute, the widow, the orphan the stranger among us, those who are sick, those who are in prison.  That rejection by the "right" is matched by the rejection of the materialist-atheist-scientistic "left" of the ultimate motivation in practicing those, motives that cannot be found in their ultimate oracles of materialism, atheism and scientism, The Law and the Prophets and, in the most radical form of all, the Gospel of Jesus.  And in doing that, they alienate those who could likely be convinced of the rightness of changing their ways, in no small part through snobbery and entirely beside-the-point insistence on alienating them, arguing from Scripture for those things.  It is one of the reasons that, for a time, before the appalling papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI installed hypocrites into so many bishoprics and as Cardinals, inspiring the neo-integralist crop of priests who are ascendant now, there was a vital and active Catholic left, one which my mother was a member of, out of which liberation theology manifested on an intellectual level.  

Unlike with the complicated presence of scientism on the left, there is Scriptural precedent for identifying the defects of the "Christian right" in that Jesus recommended that "by their fruits you will know them."  The products of  right-wing "Christianity" are properly taken as decisive in identifying their infidelity to the Gospel.  That's despite their enormous numbers among those deputed to be "Christians."

On the simplest level, if Republicans who professed Christianity really did follow the teachings of Jesus, they could never vote for a single one of the present Republican members of the Congress, any of the Republican candidates for President from well back into the 20th century, most of the other Republican politicians of the past century.  I don't think we could have ever had most of the governments or courts we have had if the professing Christians had really followed even the most basic and universally admitted commandments of Jesus.  

When I began political blogging more than eighteen years ago, I had no idea that in investigating the reasons for the failure of the American left would involve religion, never mind, specifically, Christianity, but that's what I have come to conclude. I think the failure of the American left is intrinsically related to the rejection and stigmatization of Christianity by the secular left, especially as that has tended to center in academic settings and the media and, with their derision and snobbery, the backlash to that has smeared the actual, real left which has been so well personified in The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. and others who work in a religious milieu.  It certainly couldn't have escaped my notice that it was the religious left, which has also been such an active part of the organization of labor and which had the greatest success of any left in American history through abolitionism and the modern Civil Rights movement, was entirely more of a success than the materialist-atheist-scientistic "left" which has produced everything from the most modest of success by comparison and is more fairly characterized by a counter-productive backlash in the general population.  That is despite what the mythology of show biz, fiction and media tell us.  It is a fact that the most successful leftists in North American history have been Christian ministers.  MLK jr. and Tommy Douglass in Canada, the father of the Canadian health insurance system.  I am aware of no atheist on the left who matches their accomplishments or comes close to them.

I think anything that discredits materialism, atheism and scientism in the general culture and, especially, among those who receive academic credentials will be to the good.  Anything that enhances the content of The Gospel of Jesus will be to the good AND I AM CONVINCED THAT THAT SUPPORT CAN COME IN NO OTHER VENUE THAN THROUGH REVEALED RELIGION.  It doesn't have to be nominally Christian, many non-Christians have many, most or all of the same content as their motivation in their political and social and economic justice activities and motives.  But that content is not replaced by anything from science or materialism or atheism and the many centuries of intellectual operation within that ideological framework has produced nothing at all which gives those any claim that they will ever find it.  I have noted that when I used to look at one of the CSI blogs, years ago, that one of them proposed as a possibility that atheists should start to practice charitable giving.  I congratulated them on discovering something which had literally been a major part of religion for millennia.  That call by those organized atheists was met with derisive rejection by their fellow atheists on making anything like that a focus of materialist-atheist-scientism.  Which I was already not surprised at.  What is surprising is that any materialist-atheist-devotee of scientism would muster the feeling that they should do something like that because that cannot arise from the content of their ideology.  What is even more shocking is the extent to which "Christian nationalists," the traditional American, pseudo-Christian right has adopted the very same indifference and hostility to the least among us that is characteristic of much of if not most explicit, logically conclusive materialist-atheist-scientism, which is far more characteristically represented politically by either totalitarianism or extreme, jejune libertarianism.  

Just as David Bentley Hart was surprised to hear Rupert Sheldrake's latest thinking about fields as formal causes, especially at how obvious his points are because of their implications of a "mind-like" controller of that, I immediately saw in it support for the one who monotheistic religion knows as God.   And, as they said, it's lying right there in the heart of modern physics, the obsessive and elusive quarry of all of modern theoretical physics and, if Sheldrake's hypothesis of morphic resonance is well founded, and he has come up with impressive support for it, every aspect of biology.*  If his latest thinking about the nature of fields as the vital force in formative causation is true, than such mind-like force would have to impinge on every aspect of physical reality and, so, on the very subject matter of all of science.   Since modern social-science is a faith product of old-fashioned scientistic material monism, such a force would be formative of all social structures (to the extent those are not an obvious product of the imaginations of human beings, which is hardly admitted by social would-be scientists).  

As is indicated at the end of the discussion, the implications of that for religious thought, supporting the ideas of religion, are obvious even to the atheists who, on that basis and on that basis alone, would be expected to violently reject the idea and to come up with every kind of implausible or merely plausible reason for suppressing it just as they resisted what one of them derisively called the "big-bang" theory because they were afraid it was too close to the beginning of Genesis and that an absolute beginning to the universe would have no naturalistic or scientistic or materialistic explanation, that God created the Universe being entirely more plausible than it is under the simplifying regime of scientism, materialism and modern atheism.  

If that discrediting of elite, pretentious materialism could be made into a discrediting of vulgar materialism such as fuels the Republican-fascist, "Christian right" I don't know but it's certain that the elite, pretentious materialism of the materialist-atheist-scientistic, academic, snob "left" hasn't worked that way.  I'm certainly willing to try something that declares that vulgar materialism inhibits spiritual salvation as a revealed truth to anything the atheists have impotently proposed in that regard.  I'd certainly welcome it over an impotent and stupid and discredited revival of any Marxist or secular-socialist or anarchist antique of the far less than quaint past.  I'd certainly welcome it over the vulgar, pop-kulcha, stand-up comedian (who are never very funny) motive for most of the derisive rejection of Christianity which is the cheap substitute for the intellectual stuff even in most of the college-credentialed, post-literate population.

* I have to say that it was thinking very hard about what the theoretical first organism on Earth must have been like to be a self-contained, metabolizing, "eating and excreting," molecular-synthesizing, . . . ultimately successfully reproducing (presumably by the replication of the necessary molecules, physiological structures, enough to make two out of one, to result in two self-contained, metabolizing,etc. creatures) in what I think is an inescapable conclusion by a biologically active and effective containing membrane splitting and healing, all in an entirely unprecedented act which was probably the most complex physical phenomenon in the history of the Earth and not improbably in the universe, that I became convinced that the idea it was done by the will of God was, actually, the most probable explanation of it.  Though I have also become convinced that seeming simplicity and random chance are god substitutes in actual atheist thinking because they skate over the complexities, some of the many quanta ignota that atheism skates over to come up with its seemingly plausible arguments that sway those who either don't know about or, as well, skate over the difficulties.  

I would rather take my chances on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Reformation Project, those who worked with and around the late Bishop Thomas Gumbleton than anyone on the atheist "left."  I'm not stupid enough to not see who have gotten and likely could now get results that result in a better life for us all.