genetic fallacy | Glossary Term | The Komorebi Effect

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a fallacy based solely on thinking the history, origin, or source of a thing completely explains the thing apart from its meaning or context.

One of the deep prejudices that the age of mechanism instilled in our culture, and that infects our religious and materialist fundamentalisms alike, is a version of the so-called genetic fallacy: to wit, the mistake of thinking that to have described a thing’s material history or physical origins is to have explained that thing exhaustively.

-David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God. Yale University Press

Material causes alone are inadequate for explaining a simple physical object. What is almost entirely lost on most of us today was once apparent to the masses. That is, we cannot simply describe the material history and physical origins of a thing and presume to have explained the thing exhaustively. David Bentley Hart describes Aristotle’s four levels of causality using the example of a glass bottle.¹ We can attempt to explain a glass bottle by describing its ‘Material Cause’, in other words we can describe it by it’s chemical composition. This is certainly helpful, but it doesn’t describe the thing entirely. The opening in its neck and the void in its center are defining characteristics every bit as important as the silica the glass is composed of. The shape makes it a bottle. This is the ‘Formal Cause’. Still, someone acted to combine the necessary materials and apply heat and pressure in a very particular way in order to form the bottle. The artisan represents the ‘Efficient Cause’ for the bottle. But even this is not enough to explain a mere bottle. Our penchant for whiskey and the desire to transport it created the incentives that effectively “caused” the glass blower to manufacture the bottle. This is Aristotle’s ‘Final Cause’. We find a variety of causalities perfectly integrated and inseparable. Each is necessary, but none sufficient to explain the existence of the whole.

Each of Aristotle’s levels of causality, more or less, relate to changes in matter and energy. These are secondary causes that don’t adequately explain existence itself. They don’t explain how you get something from nothing. This something-out-of-nothing is precisely what the creation narrative in Genesis deals with. Genesis speaks of an act of prime or essential causation. “God is the creator of all things not as the first temporal agent in cosmic history, which would make him not the prime cause of creation but only the initial secondary cause within it”² Aquinas identified a fifth non-material cause. That is the ‘Primary Cause’, the thing that precedes all secondary causes; that is the creative idea. “The components of the material world are fixed, but those of the imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without destroying or rearranging what came before it.”³ Before the whiskey bottle could be created, one had to conceive of whiskey and bottles.

Natural selection, the big bang, and such deal strictly with secondary causes. They will never give meaningful insight into the primary cause, that is the Creative Idea, that called something out of nothing.

The mechanical philosophy really should have been nothing more than a prescription of intellectual abstinence, a prohibition upon asking the wrong sorts of questions; transformed into a metaphysics, however, it became a denial of the meaningfulness of any queries beyond the scope of the empirical sciences… Mysteries that might require another style of investigation altogether— phenomenology, spiritual contemplation, artistic creation, formal and modal logic, simple subjective experience, or what have you— were thus to be treated as false problems, or confusions, or inscrutable trivialities.

-David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God. Yale University Press.

Theologian John Henry Newman found nothing about evolution that was necessarily contrary to creation.⁴ Newman’s contemporary, Aubrey Moore, the Anglican theologian and part-time botanist who championed Darwinism, believe it or not, pointed out that “those who opposed the doctrine of evolution in defence of ‘a continued intervention’ of God seem to have failed to notice that a theory of occasional intervention implies as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence.”⁵ What he’s saying is that those who argue for an intelligent designer on the basis of irreducible complexity are unwittingly advocating for God’s “ordinary absence.” The presence of causal discontinuities in the order of nature would suggest the unfolding of God’s creative power through the divine Logos that is evident in the rational coherence of nature is somehow inadequate.⁶ Believers who strenuously seek to defend the ‘supernatural’ and ‘intervention’ of the transcendent are deeply embedded in this immanent frame. Moore was optimistic that evolution would yield a recovery of the Christian understanding of God and creation. Moore was concerned because when the natura pura paradigm of pure unadulterated immanence was fully embraced as a metaphysics there was a rise in Christian fundamentalists, lacking intellectual and imaginative resources, reading the Bible as if it provided historical data, a concept completely foreign to the Christian tradition and equally as absurd as saying that science proves God doesn’t exist. Eventually, as David Bentley Hart puts it, “the Bible came to be seen as what it obviously is not: a collection of ‘inerrant’ oracles and historical reports, each true in the same way as every other, each subject to only one level of interpretation, and all perfectly in agreement with one another.”⁷ We end up with religious fundamentalists and the so-called New Atheists in strong agreement on this natura pura concept. They simply disagree on the absurdity of whether or not there is some cosmic carpenter nailing together a celestial edifice. It’s a straw man that both sides embrace.

We should be leery of loose interpretations of the scripture. But also be suspicious of those who are unwilling to admit any use of metaphor whatsoever. Consider how much effort is spent debating the literal seven day interpretation of the creation account in Genesis. Some insist that a day in this context is a literal 24 hour period, while the sun (and moon) from which we define our 24 hour day doesn’t appear until the fourth ‘day’. Might this possibly refer to something other than a 24 hour period? And if so, does it change the Story in any meaningful way? Yet, if we don’t understand the ‘Tree of Life’ and the ‘Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’ as a metaphor, we miss deeply important truths.

Christians and fundamentalist materialists alike are aware that Christians believe God is the creator of every person; but presumably none of them would be so foolish as to imagine that this means each person is not also the product of a spermatozoon and ovum; surely they grasp that here God’s act of creation is understood as the whole event of nature and existence, not as a distinct causal agency that in some way rivals the natural process of conception.

-David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God, Yale University Press

We often scoff at ancient people with their strange beliefs and their lack of understanding of the world. But second and third century Christians knew enough to scoff at the idea of literal ‘days’ preceding the creation of the sun. They certainly would have recognized the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ as a metaphor. In other words, they would be appalled by both the New Atheists and the fundamentalist Christians or the moralistic therapeutic deism that passes as Christianity today.⁸

Only dogmatic materialists believe that all causality is of the mechanistic sort, because that is their metaphysics; a conviction based on earnest devotion to a certain picture of the world.⁹

The materialist position is the least coherent metaphysical position on offer, and the one that suffers from the greatest explanatory poverty… the least rationally defensible and most explanatorily impoverished of metaphysical dogmas; but, if materialism is one’s faith, even reason itself may not be too great an offering to place upon its altar… At a moment in intellectual history when there are a good number of theorists not only willing, but eager, to deny the reality of unified, intentional consciousness— an absolute certainty upon which all other certainties depend— it is depressingly clear that behind the putative rationalism of scientific naturalism there lurks an ideological passion as immune to the dictates of reason as the wildest transports of devotional ecstasy could ever be…

What, precisely, did nature select for survival, and at what point was the qualitative difference between brute physical causality and unified intentional subjectivity vanquished? And how can that transition fail to have been an essentially magical one?

How is it that organisms “programmed” for survival occasionally show themselves capable of extravagant acts of self-abnegating generosity or kindness or love that clearly can have no ulterior purpose within this world (for them or for their genes)? Perhaps one can come up with a naturalistic tale that makes all of that seem perfectly plausible (though it will always be only a tale). Even so,if natural selection has given rise to species with this fantastic capacity, it means that it has produced organisms able to act in perfect defiance of evolutionary imperatives, in obedience to a final cause that cannot be comprised within the closed economy of material processes and personal interests. This is quite curious— even perhaps miraculous. It should cause even the most dogmatic of materialists to pause and consider whether it indicates a dimension of reality that materialism fails to account for… Rather than genes fashioning vehicles for their survival, life has fashioned a special genetic legacy for itself, in the very stable form of genetic potentialities, which emerges from a capacity to exceed the narrow requisites of private survival. As a species, we have been shaped evolutionarily, in large part at least, by transcendental ecstasies whose orientation exceeds the whole of nature. Instead of speaking vacuously of genetic selfishness, then, it would be immeasurably more accurate to say that compassion, generosity, love, and conscience have a unique claim on life. They are the formal— or even spiritual— causes that, by their ever greater impracticality and exorbitance, fashion a being capable of cooperation (which happily proves beneficial to the species), but also capable of a kind of charity that cannot be contained within the reciprocal economy of mere cooperation. Since their intentional end is not survival but an abstract and absolute reality, any evolutionary benefit they impart must be regarded as a secondary, subordinate, and fortunate consequence of their activity…

Like a mother imperiling her own life in order to care for her child, says the Sutta Nipata, one should cultivate boundless compassion for all beings. One’s love for one’s fellow creatures should be so great, Ramanuja believed, that one will gladly accept damnation for oneself in order to show others the way to salvation.

-David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God, Yale University Press

To those who honestly seek truth in any pursuit, whether it be theology, philosophy, or physics, they ultimately converge on that which is truth itself. I believe this is what David meant when he wrote that the Heavens declare the glory of God. ¹⁰ God is Truth. Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen in the real existence of the phenomenal world, the power of the human intellect to accurately reflect that reality, the perfect lawfulness of nature, its interpretability, and its mathematical regularity.¹¹

Before there were tiny little sub-atomic bits that make up our pixelated universe, God spoke. And before those tiny particles submitted to mathematically-described relationships to one another resulting in an arrangement familiar to us as the universe; and before these rules governing the cosmic dance were specified; Goodness, Beauty, and Truth already existed as an idea. In a sense, a story has real existence apart from its translation into material form.¹² In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. God merely spoke.

One of the more persistent and inexcusable rhetorical conceits that corrupt the current popular debates over belief in God is the claim that they constitute an argument between faith and reason or between religion and science. They constitute, in fact, only a contest between different pictures of the world: theism and naturalism… The mechanistic view of consciousness remains a philosophical and scientific premise only because it is now an established cultural bias, a story we have been telling ourselves for centuries, without any real warrant from either reason or science.

-David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God, Yale University Press

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