More Unfashionable Observations: Matter and What Matters

Today, as we continue to flesh out our introduction to the Bible, I want to continue with our understanding of the differences between the modern epistemic framework versus the one of the ancients. The difference is important and far too infrequently understood.

To this end I want to begin by discussing the problem of creationism.

From the 18th century onward creationists have been trying to reconcile the biblical timeline with geology, archeology and other sciences. The painful leaps of logic they make in order to hold onto these axioms are spectacularly misinformed. Both the Young Earth Creationists and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities go as far as to claim that evidence from carbon dating on fossils is owning to God having planted these fossils in the earth to test our faith. We are going to try and understand things a little better than that.

All of the various forms of creationism are based in the same flaw — the idea that science and religion are in competition. The rift between science and religion is largely an illusion. Science is about what the world is made out of and the biblical library presents an argument for how people should act in the world and what gives life meaning and value. Let’s be clear, what the world is made is not the same question as what is it we ought to do.

People often point to Galileo’s imprisonment by the church in 1633 after being tried by the office of the Holy Inquisition for his support of Heliocentrism. What people fail to mention is that his imprisonment for the first few months was in the Siena residence of Archbishop Asceanio Piccolomini until the church cruelly moved him over to the Villa il Gioello near Florence before finally being moved into the Villa Medici in Rome which belonged to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. He was given servants, assistants for his work as well as all of the equipment he asked for to continue his studies.

 

The idea of a dispute between science and religion is one largely begun not by scientists or people of faith, but by secular atheists who were desperately looking for some kind of intellectual justification for their lazy and dimwitted understanding of the world.

Back to the creationists, in seeing the issue framed as science versus religion they attempt to make cases for the Genesis creation story using the tools of the scientific revolution — ideas that never would have occurred to people even a thousand years after these stories were written.

The plain truth is, like the phenomenologists and the American pragmatists, the biblical authors did not see history the way that modern people understand it. The epistemological framework which governed that world was one which sought meaning rather than some kind of empirical data.

To make this difference simple we can think of the United States Constitution. It is an empirical historical fact that

the constitution was signed on September 17th, 1787. That is true. There are records and witnesses, first and second hand sources and absolutely no one denies it. From the standpoint of the phenomenologist or of the biblical author that is an absolutely meaningless fact. It does not matter at all when the Constitution was signed and knowing the date gives you nothing of value in terms of knowledge. Knowing it is not helpful in any way shape or form. History, as construed in the modern world, is just not important….only self-important.

For the biblical authors facts were not meaningful outside of a context. This is why, in Eliada’s example of the great fisherman, a hundred stories of different people who came up with different ideas which all get incorporated into the understanding on how to be a good fisherman including the names of each person and the dates of their discovery is not nearly as useful as a distilled story of the great fisherman, a mythical hero of the past who taught mortal man to fish. Sure, the former would be accurate in an empirical way, but meaningless. While the later, for all its lack of empirical exactitude, is meaningful and helpful.

We can think of this also in terms of written law. Written law was invented. How do we know? Well, we have written law now and at some point in history we did not. How was it invented. The response from the biblical narrative is embedded in the story of Moses on Mt. Sinai. Whether or not this story is empirically true, it is meaningful and useful in ways we will discuss when we move on to Exodus. Which long dead civilization first wrote down law in which dead language in which year in no way conveys the meaning and value of the origin of written law as the story of Moses does. The story of Moses explains the phenomena in terms of human subjectivity rather than in objective facts. That explanation has something to teach us while the exact names and dates simply do not. You could change the names and dates and the impact would be non-existent.

The idea of history being a set of names and dates is about as useful as conflating being very good at trivia games with being intelligent. In modern times we have a group of names and dates and we have people who infer meanings. For the biblical authors we have meaning….the names and dates are simply not relevant. That meaning is extracted out of observation and explained through narrative through a natural evolution and is the native cognitive framework of people. It amazes me that people will assume empirical data is knowledge and then also expect to be treated as an individual with inalienable rights.

While both the American pragmatists and phenomenologists in the mid 19th-20th centuries began reconnecting to this epistemological framework of value and meaning over dead empirical facts, I contend that they were never able to push all the way through to the logical conclusions of their work because they were so tied into the industrial world’s mindset of scientism being the only valid method of thinking that the end game of their own understanding of the world would have set them too far away from their peers.

If my claims about the epoch eclipse are correct and we are in fact evolving backwards into a epistemology

characterized by the value of meaning over matter we see in the biblical texts, it should become more and more evident over the next few years that the importance of meaning will begin to take precedent over stale facts which offer nothing more than trivia.

Back, for a moment, to the creationists — their attempt is to take what is subjective interpersonal understandings of the world and explain them in terms of objective science and this is a foolish mistake. It is the equivalent to asking someone to put a number on how much they love you. It’s neither possible nor valuable to think like this.

The reductionism of scientism has fueled the flames of nihilism for several hundred years now to the point where even the most basic understandings of the world are being called into question. People are turning to their whims or worse, their sexual proclivities to understand their identity. Fundamental biological realities which can be understood by animals who do not even have  central nervous systems are being challenged. The attempt to encounter the world as if it were stale facts and not a stage on which meaningful action is played out has all but eradicated meaning from the world and, ironically enough, despite it being the result of the attempt to better understand the world the result is the deepest of confusions.

This is not to say that there isn’t value in the empirical understanding of the world, but rather that the empirical facts divorced from the subjective value which it ought to be properly subordinated to is the root cause of the existential crisis which threatens to destroy the world today. These words are not picked carelessly or made casually. The lack of subordination to subjective meaning for the empirical understanding of the world threatens to destroy civilization. And of course it does. Subordinating empirical facts to subjective human value is what created civilization. What else would happen when they are removed? You cannot live in a penthouse apartment of a building with no foundation.

As for the five hundred pound gorilla in the room, the question of whether or not the Bible is historically accurate is simple. It’s irrelevant. It just doesn’t matter. If nothing else the biblical stories are at least phenomenologically true. Whether you believe they are an accurate history in the way that history has been written over the past 500 years is up to you. It is irrelevant for the topic at hand.

What we are concerned with here is meaning. For as long as we have written records and very likely for much longer than that meaning for humans has involved the confrontation with the known, it’s mastery, sublimation and sharing through information with others. Whether this is Marduk confronting Tiamat, God creating the universe from the chaotic void, Abraham leaving Ur of the Chaldees or learning to juggle it is all variations on a theme.

Understanding this is absolutely crucial to understanding the documents that make up the biblical library.

What matters for us is meaning.

What matters, not matter.