Does The Long Arc Of The Universe Bend Toward Justice? Is That Embedded In The Foundation Of The Universe?

I have been finding that going through the Hebrew scriptures, guided by Walter Brueggemann's writings on them, has been a real revelation that contradicts pretty much everything I'd ever been led to think about them.  Even though I was certainly not ever taught to think of them as "literally true" in the way that atheists wish that religious people always regard scriptures, I had never been exposed to thinking about them on such a deep, deep level of engagement, a level of engagement that includes criticism that distinguishes between the view of the wealthy elites contained in them and the view of, by and for the underclass, the slaves, the escaped slaves, the laboring class and the destitute which are also contained in the collection.  There is no, one thing that is "the Bible" it is a collection of very diverse writings by very different people and to regard it as a unified entity with a single purpose or a single origin or a single goal is to start out on a program of lying about it.   How complex it is can be seen in Brueggemann's life-long engagement with it at a level of the highest intelligence.  I suspect if he lived another seventy or eighty years he might write another hundred or so books on the topic, revealing even deeper levels of engagement with those writings.

Listening to an old interview that Krista Tippett did with the South African physicist and cosmologist, George Ellis, I was struck at how another wide ranging intellectual made me think of Brueggemann on the 4th chapter of Hosea.   I'll start with what Ellis said about his belief that morality is an embedded property of the universe, just as mathematics and the laws of physics are believed to be.  From the transcript.

MS. TIPPETT: I think I want to ask you, is this something that has to do with you as a person of faith more than a scientist, or does this also flow into this idea of this ethic that's embedded in the universe? Does this also affect your — you as a cosmologist or the way you approach the field of cosmology?

DR. ELLIS: It's this cosmology with the small "c" and the big "C."

MS. TIPPETT: So this is the cosmology with the big "C."

DR. ELLIS: Yeah. Absolutely.

MS. TIPPETT: OK.

DR. ELLIS: From the cosmology with the big "C," it immediately gives one for a route into — in effect arguing for the existence of God, if you like, from the way that the whole thing is constructed.

MS. TIPPETT: OK.

DR. ELLIS: From the small "c," it's — as a scientist, I work as a scientist and this just doesn't enter into it. As a cosmologist in the big "C," they're just trying to understand the big pattern, the way humanity relates to the universe. It's a central issue.

and later in the interview:

MS. TIPPETT: So this is the nature of God, this way of being.

DR. ELLIS: Yes.

MS. TIPPETT: This kenosis, this ethic. And it's embedded in the universe as an expression of — an expression of that is embedded in the universe.

DR. ELLIS: This is why I introduced this thing about mathematics. We haven't got a clue in what way mathematics is embedded there, but it is there in some platonic space waiting to be discovered. We actually haven't got a clue how the laws of physics are embedded in the universe. We know they're there. We know they're effective. We don't know how they are embedded.

MS. TIPPETT: Mm-hmm. OK.

DR. ELLIS: So, it's important to understand that we don't understand those, either. In the same way I envisage ethics as being a universal thing, which is applicable. It is there because of the nature of God. It is something we discover and don't invent. That's why I made that point about mathematics. And it is discovered to be the same by all these religious traditions. I'm confident of the following: If we were to one day make contact with people in Alpha Centauri…

MS. TIPPETT: Those are people in other galaxies, life in other…

DR. ELLIS: Yeah.

MS. TIPPETT: Yes.

DR. ELLIS: …we would start talking with them about mathematics, because we are confident that they will have the same understanding of mathematics as we do. If we got on to talk to them about ethics, I'm confident we would find that they, also, had discovered kenotic ethics in the nature of the universe.

MS. TIPPETT: Hmm.

MR. BUZENBERG: [The producer of Krista Tippett's program, I believe] We have a questioner who wants to know what is the evidence that ethics, like math, is in the universe, waiting to be discovered?

DR. ELLIS: The evidence is, firstly, in seeing that all these other religious traditions have come to the same conclusion. But the deep evidence is the same in all faith. It is by beginning to comprehend the deep nature of this transforming current. If you see the deepness and the quality of transformation that is possible through this, and if you really asked me to pursue it, then it is the life of Christ, which is the example. Giving up life in order that those that persecuted Him would have freedom. That is what it is about. And in the end, it is self-authenticating. There is actually no other way of saying it. It is just something you either see or you don't see. There is no proof. It's something you recognize or you don't recognize.

MS. TIPPETT: I also hear you describing it as a model which replicates itself…

DR. ELLIS: Yes.

I am sure one of the first things that some reading this will do is mock George Ellis as a science denying crack pot, to which I'll point out that he's one of the foremost cosmologists of his generation, having co-authored one of the recent classics in the field, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, with none other than that great hero of pop-atheists, Stephen Hawking.   Get back to me when you can match his scientific CV and publications history on that point.

And as to why that brings me back to what Walter Brueggemann has pointed out about what Hosea says in Chapter 4, it's short so I give you the whole thing.

4 Hear the word of the Lord, you Israelites,
    because the Lord has a charge to bring
    against you who live in the land:
“There is no faithfulness, no love,
    no acknowledgment of God in the land.
2 There is only cursing,  lying and murder,
    stealing and adultery;
they break all bounds,
    and bloodshed follows bloodshed.
3 Because of this the land dries up,
    and all who live in it waste away;
the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky
    and the fish in the sea are swept away.
4 “But let no one bring a charge,
    let no one accuse another,
for your people are like those
    who bring charges against a priest.
5 You stumble day and night,
    and the prophets stumble with you.
So I will destroy your mother—
6     my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge.
“Because you have rejected knowledge,
    I also reject you as my priests;
because you have ignored the law of your God,
    I also will ignore your children.
7 The more priests there were,
    the more they sinned against me;
    they exchanged their glorious God for something disgraceful.
8 They feed on the sins of my people
    and relish their wickedness.
9 And it will be: Like people, like priests.
    I will punish both of them for their ways
    and repay them for their deeds.
10 “They will eat but not have enough;
    they will engage in prostitution but not flourish,
because they have deserted the Lord
    to give themselves 11 to prostitution;
old wine and new wine
    take away their understanding.
12 My people consult a wooden idol,
    and a diviner’s rod speaks to them.
A spirit of prostitution leads them astray;
    they are unfaithful to their God.
13 They sacrifice on the mountaintops
    and burn offerings on the hills,
under oak, poplar and terebinth,
    where the shade is pleasant.
Therefore your daughters turn to prostitution
    and your daughters-in-law to adultery.
14 “I will not punish your daughters
    when they turn to prostitution,
nor your daughters-in-law
    when they commit adultery,
because the men themselves consort with harlots
    and sacrifice with shrine prostitutes—
    a people without understanding will come to ruin!
15 “Though you, Israel, commit adultery,
    do not let Judah become guilty.
“Do not go to Gilgal;
    do not go up to Beth Aven.
    And do not swear, ‘As surely as the Lord lives!’
16 The Israelites are stubborn,
    like a stubborn heifer.
How then can the Lord pasture them
    like lambs in a meadow?
17 Ephraim is joined to idols;
    leave him alone!
18 Even when their drinks are gone,
    they continue their prostitution;
    their rulers dearly love shameful ways.
19 A whirlwind will sweep them away,
    and their sacrifices will bring them shame.

Which, of course, is the kind of thing that atheists love to poke fun at but just consider the point Brueggemann emphasizes about how nature is drying up as a result of the practice of injustice.  In some of his lectures from recent years, he mentioned the long drought in Texas, he could be talking about Maine the past two of those years, as well.  

Could it be that injustice, economic and social injustice, practiced on a large enough scale, inevitably have a disastrous impact on the life systems of the Earth and human societies that depend on them? 

If you take it out of the historical and literary context and put it in terms of today, oligarchic monopoly, extraction of wealth, despoliation of the environment, animals and people, you would have pretty much the same scenario that produces global warming and the human made extinction event that is going on right now.  I don't know, of course, but you could probably magnify the ability of the local elite in Hosea's region destroying the local environment, to a global scale and you can begin to see the wisdom in what his poetry says.  

If you wanted to put it into the same terms George Ellis does, you could see the consequences for our planet and our lives in a violation of the ethical foundation of the universe.  Of course, in our terms, an embedded ethics would intimately involve what makes life possible and what preserves instead of destroys it.

I have come to see that, where we might get caught up in the anachronistic language and literary modes of expression in the prophets, when you translate those into our daily experience of the world of consequences coming from practices, of committing injustice out of motives of selfishness are often most like doing stupid things out of ignorance.  Though I think mere ignorance is less likely to produce really catastrophic consequences than selfishness.   Yet in both conventional economics and in its child, the Darwinian theory of natural selection, selfishness are considered to be naturally embedded in the universe, even by many of the professionals in those fields, elevate to a status not unlike an ethical principle.  I think we're going to have to look, seriously, at the real life, real world consequences to try to discern which view point is right and I don't think there is any serious doubt about selfishness producing disaster.

Note:  I will caution that thinking of this in terms of "structure" and other physical concepts of the kind that science can talk about is probably getting farther from the issue than closer.  I will mention that thinking about the problem of how a merely physical mind could construct a structure to BE an idea without that idea already being present in the brain and related problems flowing from the atheists' "brain only" model of the brain seems to lead to the conclusion that that model can't work, I suspect that trying to fit a moral universe into the physical concept of "structure" and the habits of thought that come from engaging the universe in scientific terms is probably doomed to produce the same kinds of paradoxical dis-confirmations.   I don't see any way for materialists to get past that problem with their "brain only" assertions and if they can't then their model is not possibly true and the mind is not material.