Self-creating Universe 4: Emergence of Consciousness

Although we take it for granted, the "conscious human mind" is "perhaps the most complex of emergent phenomena": our "conscious inner self." And the "origin and nature of consciousness" has been continually debated in the modern world. Materialism and positivism tend to want to marginalize consciousness as "an epiphenomenon, a rather odd by-product of the brain."

Whatever it is, human consciousness includes awareness of the external world of "colors, sounds, smells," shapes, pleasures and pains. And the inner world of "sensations and images." Then arises "the world of mind and thought and spirit, the sense of self".

William James introduced the notion of "stream of consciousness," the constant flow of "thought, feeling, sensation". And he pointed out that our "rational consciousness" is but one form of consciousness. We now understand "altered states of consciousness, including visions, hallucinations, trances, lucid dreams, and mystical and near-death experiences" that were once thought of as manifestations of God or the devil or madness.

Yet we think of ourselves as a "unitary self," the whole universe of experience that we reduce to "I am." William James called this the "essential unity" of consciousness, and Kant wrote of "a transcendental unity of apperception."

[W]hile the doors of ours senses open up to a plural world of sights, sounds, and feelings, our minds make sense of these by drawing them together and synthesizing them into a unified whole.

This sense of unity is linked to the notion of "agency", the capacity we seem to have to "steer and direct our actions." At the same time we tell a story about ourselves and seem to be "self-creating."

We need a "natural history of consciousness" to link the "unique qualities of consciousness... with its origins in the womb of nature."  But meanwhile, we seem unable to connect the fact of our material selves with the experience of our conscious selves. Why do we have consciousness? In other words, what role does consciousness have in evolution?

Clarke proposes four characteristics of consciousness:

1. Although it's not material, it is still a natural phenomenon.
2. Animals have consciousness, not just humans.
3. The brain and consciousness are connected.
4. But brain and consciousness are not identical.

The question then arises: where did consciousness come from? Does everything have a "mind-like quality" be it ever so primitive. Clarke finds the idea hard to square with the notion of creation in the Big Bang. Still, it certainly seems that consciousness emerges out of something less developed, as vision is present in some animals as "light-sensitive cells," and then develops into more improved and specific vision. Perhaps consciousness is like that. 

Clarke divide consciousness into two: sensibility, the "power of sensation" of the world and also "the internal world of the body." For instance, pain, for pain is not "one of life's misfortunes" but the way that we avoid and minimize injury. And then there is the sensation of sex.

But consciousness is also integrative.

[V]arious primitive sensations are collected and integrated into the faculty of extended awareness in a way that is beneficial to the whole organism.

One obvious advantage of integrated consciousness is the ability of an animal to deal with "hostile threats". And it is self-organizing. 

But how does consciousness evolve? Clarke looks at "typically human forms of consciousness" and how they evolve as "self-organizing phenomena" and how there seems to be a "growing autonomy of consciousness."

First, there is creativity. Karl Popper calls this the ability to deal with new and unexpected situations: flexibility.

Then there is language. And we are not just talking about human language, but the ways in which other animals, such as ants and bees, communicate to one another.

Then there is self-awareness. And humans seem to have a radically different kind than animals, and involves the ability to construct a narrative about ourselves, past, present, and future.

And then the question arises: how far can consciousness go? Clarke proposes the idea of an extended mind that reaches out and makes contact with the rest of the world out there. He means "altered states of consciousness" and out-of-body experiences: "a sense of being at home in the universe." Can this extension of consciousness be comprehended by science? We shall see.

Next: Acts of Creation

The Tea Party and Misinformation. And COVID

Everybody knows that the worst thing in the world is misinformation about the science of COVID. And misinformation should be firmly suppressed. Because people will die.

So I got a bit of a surprise reading a piece by Melissa Mackenzie on Donald Trump and the Tea Party. Trump is generating the same kind of energy as the Tea Party, she writes.  And Mackenzie was there for the Tea Party: "I covered the Tea Party for years all across the country... Tea Party rallies are where I met and covered Andrew Breitbart, Sarah Palin, and many other notables." 

What was the Tea Party?

Tea Partiers basically divided along two lines: There were the small government types who wanted to be left alone. This faction was made up of small business owners. Women started the Tea Party organizations on behalf of the businesses they and their husbands ran. They protested taxes and big bailouts of banks. They thought the bailouts were grossly unfair since small businesses weren’t rescued. They wanted no rescues. They wanted fewer taxes and regulations.

The second part of the Tea Party was folks who hated the big bank bailouts because they felt that if the government was going to help anyone, it should be the individual. These are the populists. They felt Social Security was a right. They often believed in socialized medicine. They were many times socially liberal. 

I want back and checked my blog posts in 2009 to 2010 when the Tea Party was in the ascendant. First of all, the movement was organic. Second, there certainly were a lot of women organizers. Third, Tea Partiers were definitely against reform of Social Security and Medicare. 

But you may have notions that the Tea Party was racist and funded by the Koch Brothers. Interestingly, I didn't mention race or Koch until well into 2010, when Tea Partiers were accused of shouting racist epithets at John Lewis as he and other black congressmen walked to the Capitol for a key vote on Obamacare. Later on I mentioned the Koch brothers. So you can see that "someone" was injecting race and Koch into the political square. Then there was the accusation of "astroturf" that I wrote about first in June 2009. Actually, it's likely that by June 2009 the Koch brothers had got involved.

Who do you think is doing the misinformation on the Tea Party origins? I wonder.

On the other hand, I'd say, the Tea Partiers were misinformed on the bailouts for bankers. Sorry kids; it's the science. The central bank is the lender of last resort and we really can't allow a cascade of banks to go broke. And we know why: 1929. In a biography of Andrew Mellon, David Cannadine write that:

In 1929, there had been 659 bank suspensions, a figure easily within the normal range for the decade, and through October 1930, there were a similar number of collapses. But in the last sixty days of the year, 600 banks closed their doors, beginning with Louisville's National Bank of Kentucky, and culminating in New York, where the Bank of the United States closed its doors o December 11.

Hmm. let's check the St. Louis Fed. It has the following table.

Year	Bank Suspensions
1928	498
1929	659
1930	1,350
1931	2,293
1932	1,453
1933	4,000
1934	57

Dear God. I had no idea how bad it got. Notice 1933: I call that a suspiciously round number.

Whaddya want? Stop bank bailouts or lose all your savings? By the way, one of the reasons for the bank failures was that people were allowed to borrow up to 90 percent of stock purchases on margin. In the 1930s they changed the rules so that you could only borrow 50 percent of a stock's purchase value.

But then they created Fannie Mae so that people could borrow lots of money on houses.

Let's look at bank failures in the 2000s, with data from FDIC so we can compare the Great Depression with the Great Recession.

Year	Bank Failures
2007	3
2008	25
2009	140
2010	157
2011	94
2012	51
2013	24

But, of course, the depositors in the Great Recession were covered by FDIC. And I presume that failing banks were usually picked by another bank in a nice cuddly deal with the regulators.

Only one problem: silly little Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke let Lehman Brothers fail in September 2008 because he whined that he didn't have the legal authority to bail 'em out. Ben, oh Ben.

So whaddya want? Banks bailed out or lose your savings? Plus, of course, in the 2000s, in accordance with government policy, people could borrow up to 100 percent of the value of a home. And the government was particularly interested in the number of loans granted to people of color: got that you racists?

But here's my point. What is the truth about the Tea Party, and about the issues that Tea Partiers rallied to protest? What's information and what's misinformation?

Yes, it was monstrous that the government bailed out the banks and not mom-and-pop businesses. Only, the government really needs to bail out failing banks otherwise the credit system collapses. So the Tea Partiers didn't really understand what was going down.

It is monstrous that the government encouraged low-down mortgages. But if it does then it must, it absolutely must, bail out failing banks.

But where are the social media searching for misinformation on the Great Recession and on government subsidies for mortgages?

And where, dear media and social media, are you on the constantly changing party line from government on COVID science versus COVID misinformation? Do you have timelines on your fact-checking sites to keep track of all that? Or is it all too hard? Because math.

See, the way I look at government and banks and government and pandemics is that in both cases government makes gigantic mistakes that it tries to cover up.

And the problem with that is that when things go wrong the truth never gets out. Because it is too painful for the ruling class to admit to.

Self-Creating Universe: 3. Re-emergence of Emergentism

After the 1920s emergentism went into retreat, because of the success of mechanistic approaches to genetics following the discovery of genes and the molecular structure of DNA with Watson and Crick in the 1950s.  Also it was thought that psychology should be based on behaviorism, a mechanical approach emulating the method of physics.

But in the 1960s emergentism revived with neuroscientist Roger Sperry who

rejected a purely reductionist view of human consciousness and argued that mind emerges from, though is not identical with, brain function and, moreover, it possesses causal powers and so is not a mere epiphenomenon, or inactive by-product, of the brain.

Then Karl Popper and John Eccles argued that many of the properties of the living world are emergent.

Consciousness itself was characterized as 'an emergent property of animals arising under the pressure of natural selection', and the self-conscious mind of human beings was... 'an emergent product of the brain.'

But biology maintained a reductionist orthodoxy that everything was chemistry. But then C.H.Waddington proposed that "organisms must be studied as whole beings" and his student Brian Goodwin proposed that "order in living beings emerges by a process of self-organization and that new and more complex beings which emerge possess capacities that are not reducible."

Thus Terrence Deason writes that the atoms in our body may once been inanimate bits of matter.

Nevertheless together in your living body they now share a mode of existence that is quite distinctive and discontinuous from their separated inanimate existences.

This holism, that organisms are more than the sum of their parts, went nuclear in 1975 with physicist Fritjof Capra and The Tao of Physics. He argued that the basis of quantum theory had been anticipated in "Eastern philosophical traditions." In The Turning Point Capra asked us "to see the world, not as a collection of particles, but as a seamlessly connected whole."

This sort of paradigm shift had been anticipated in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn and his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He argued that science advances not just by incremental discovery but also sudden transformation, an "unpredictable emergence of something new."

Reductionism and determinism still have their place, but meanwhile the holistic approach is becoming dynamic, expanding from the static analysis of how "complex wholes are constituted but with the ways they evolve, adapt, self-organize" and emerge. Not that anyone has come up with a "science of complexity."

And emerging from this is the notion of "self-organization." For a living system is self-organizing. And adaptive.

Another facet of the idea of emergence is a revision of understanding of chaos. The traditional meaning is Platonic, that order is the consequence of the impostion of order on chaos. But in the emergence era, it has shifted, that

a complex phenomenon such as a weather system or a living organism may be intrisincally deterministic and will demonstrate orderly patterns of behavior overall, but in detail, their behavior in undecidable.

They "are suspended uncertainly between order and chaos" and it is "this randomness which gives to chaotic systems a creative potential". This provides a way to explain nature's "remarkable capacity for producing an infinitely varied world of great, if fragile, order and beauty."

Canonical examples of emergence as explanation include the Big Bang creation story, and the day-to-day experience of "fluidity, color, temperature and friction", the differences in behavior between elements and chemical compounds, and the creation of life, the economy, and language. However, present science has established that the properties of chemical compounds "can be explained by the properties of electrons" as established by quantum mechanics.

Next: Emergence of Consciousness

Self-Creating Universe: 2. In the Beginning

Emerging Speculations

Emergentism has a long history. Humans have been thinking about "creation, order, evolution, and chaos" for a while. There was the ancient Greek Anaximander

who suggested a kind of evolutionary cosmology in which things emerge spontaneously from a single primal substance and through a cyclical process of generation and destruction give rise to an infinity of worlds of which our own is but one.

Then Heraclitus, who "believed that nature must be understood as a process of ever-changing flux and change." The Roman Lucretius proposed that "Nature is free and uncontrolled by proud masters, and runs the universe by herself without the aid of gods."

But then came Plato. Influenced by Pythagoras, he "sought to demonstrate that the order, beauty, and harmony of the cosmos could be explained in terms of a set of relatively simple mathematical principles" and the "perfection of eternal Ideas or Forms."

Here we can see the opposition between the naturalist presumption and the eternalist presumption, between emergence and eternal order. Then Aristotle came along and split the difference. He believed in a First Cause, but also in "the dynamic processes of the natural world." Aristotle was interested in biology. However, Aristotle still believed in a world in which Nature "is a cause that operates for a purpose."

The Renaissance began the process of 

a long struggle to establish a purely naturalistic way of understanding the world and of making sense of human existence without the presumptions of an eternalist cosmology.

First, it rediscovered ancients like Epicurus, and also, through the age of exploration, the philosophies of India and China. Brahmin thinking allows for "spontaneous evolution out of unconscious being;" Buddhism allows for a universe "undergoing constant change, eternally renewing itself"; Taoism allows things to "create themselves from their own inward reflection."

Initially, the Renaissance was eternalist, with Newton advertising "the wonderful uniformity of the natural world... 'the effect of... a powerful ever-living Agent." But then came Kant. First,

he constructed... a dynamic cosmology which pictured the universe arising through purely natural causes from an original vortex of material particles.

Then, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant proposed a way to differentiate "organisms and mechanisms." Organisms are self-organizing entities.

A living thing thus displays purposes, but unlike the watch, it has no purposes beyond itself... Moreover, the order within a living being, for example between its various organs, is not imposed from without either but emerges through the interrelationship of its parts and between the parts and the whole.  

Kant inspired Schelling to develop his Naturphilosophie, driven by an immanent spirit, Geist.

Geist emerges and becomes actual through the self-organizing, time-bound processes of nature itself. "We must think of the emergence of the world" was his manifesto for a new evolutionary philosophy of nature.

This immanent process was emphasized by Goethe, "for whom... life... was seen as a matter of striving, movement, development and growth. Darwin developed the idea of the "evolution of species," and Hegel developed "a philosophy of universal becoming in which the world self-creates out of dynamic, ever-changing processes".

From Being to Becoming

Richard Baumer, historian of ideas, sums this shift as "a transformation from being to becoming, from a static to a dynamic view of nature". And this is reflected in understanding politics, science, technology, and culture as "a tale of transformation... full of strife, ingenuity and change." Schopenhauer, of course, experienced all this change as the "source of our woes" and Spencer as an evolution to more complex forms. But Marx saw evolution as a struggle between opposing forces, "the struggle of real people and real social classes."

While philosophy and politics and evolutionary science all experienced a universe of change, in physics as late as 1900, William Thompson could say that "there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now." Newton's mechanism reigned supreme. But then Roentgen's x-rays and Marie Curie's radioactivity showed that "atomic elements were not immutable." And then came relativity and quantum mechanics. Paul Davies:

When quantum theory was properly developed in the 1920s it turned science upside down and swept aside many deeply entrenched assumptions about the nature of reality.

And yet Nietzsche had already prophesied "nature as a continuum of energies and as 'a play of forces and waves of forces... a sea of forces flowing and rushing together'". Thus in the 1920s Whitehead would "place the flow of time and process at the centre of his philosophy." And Heidegger proposed that being was not timeless, but "being-in-the-world of conscious human persons who... are thrown into the world." Thus reality is not eternal, but temporal.

These revolutions in science, culture, and society were, in turn, leading towards completely new worldviews... that penetrated deeply into the fabric of everyday lives.

The Coming of Emergentism

It was G.H. Lewes who coined the term "emergence" in his 1875 book Problems of Life and Mind.

[H]\e held that more complex phenomena such as minds and living beings could not be explained solely in terms of less complex, nonliving things but represented new emergent phenomena which he took to be more than the sum of their simpler component parts. 

John Stuart Mill had already noted that poisonous substances such as sodium and chlorine combine into table salt, which is "life-supporting."

Henri Bergson in his 1907 Creative Evolution:

It emphasized the temporal and ever-changing, constantly flowing nature of the world, and the continuous creation in nature of new life forms.

Bergson influenced three British thinkers, including C.D. Broad. Broad proposed physical reality composed of levels of ascending complexity, where the higher cannot be deduced from the lower. In particular "the properties of the conscious mind cannot be deduced from physical processes." Consciousness is an emergent property. 

The zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan rejected the Darwinian notion that "nature makes no jumps." He

took the view that evolution is relatively discontinuous, making irregular jumps rather than by regular and smooth transitions.

Against Wallace, who believed in a supernatural cause for evolution, Morgan called for "evolutionary naturalism." Meanwhile Samuel Alexander proposed that God is the goal of history, rather than its prime mover. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin proposed the "progressive emergence of ever higher, yet more integrated and more perfect levels of being" with each level a new synthesis in which human thought, the noosphere, emerges from the living world, the biosphere.

Next: Re-emergence of Emergentism.

Self-Creating Universe: 1. The Cosmic Riddle

Can there be meaning in the universe without God? Modern science has seemed to invalidate the notion of God as the creator and minder of the universe; it has increased knowledge about the universe enormously, but it has not achieved much in explaining the meaning of life. Many people have tried and are trying to rectify this problem.

It is difficult not to be amazed at the creativity of the universe, how a "seed that can produce in a few weeks a beautiful flower." How human children "can develop complex capacities... without much drilling from... parents."

But is this miracle the work of a "divine creator" or something that arises "at a lower level from nature's own innate powers"? And if it comes out of nature, then how?

Clarke proposes a worldview he calls the

naturalist presumption... that we are situated within a real, natural world from which we have evolved... yet are able to use our evolved intelligence to make (some) sense of it and (some) sense of our lives.

The old way is the

 eternalist presumption which... locates the source of values and meaning in an eternal reality beyond nature, beyond the world that we can experience through our sense.

But Clarke is not proposing mere materialism, for the the materialism that dominated in the Enlightenment has not seemed to work out so well.

More recently, the terrible wars and human suffering and the perpetuation of poverty, inequality, injustice, and prejudice into and beyond the twentieth century have led to an increasing sense of disillusionment in spite of the enormous social and political benefits that the Enlightenment has bestowed on the modern world.

So his naturalist presumption

gives a key role to mind and to spiritual values, not as echoes from a higher world, but as... nature's irresistible urge to create.

The encounter between naturalism and eternalism has spawned the idea of emergentism; it asks the question

how is it that out of the simple emerges the complex, whether it be molecules, viruses, plants, animals, the human brain, the conscious mind, human society, or the works of science, art, and literature?... How does order come out of chaos?

Traditionally, humans have answered this question with "God." But Clarke proposes to answer it with a naturalist presumption. But the problem is that if "God is dead" as advertised by Nietzsche, how do we recover meaning, from the materialist worldview that replaced the God-centered world?

In Clarke's emergentism there is something else. For instance, in biology. A "living organism" is made out of chemical elements, to "complex constituents... cells... organs... living beings... living communities."

At each level , new properties and laws emerge that cannot be understood or predicted from a full knowledge of the lower levels.

 Clarke experiences this as a paradigm of self-organization. Thus, according to Stuart Kauffman,

the creative power of nature and of the universe around us is 'so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude, and respect, that it is God enough for many of us.'

It is as if the "'sacred' can be brought down from heaven to earth.. without projecting the source of this creativity on to... [an] eternal realm of being."

Next:In the Beginning.

Suppose the First Black Woman Crossed the Aisle

If I were the First Black Woman that President Biden nominated to the US Supreme Court I would be insulted.

Because after all, when President Biden says he is going to nominate a black woman -- as in East Asians need not apply -- that's racism, straight up.

I suppose that whoever he nominates -- and I understand that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is the front runner -- she will be a faithful liberal vote, always voting with the other two women liberals on the court, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan.

Mind you, according to Instapundit:

Judge Jackson grew up in a major metropolitan area, and her father was a lawyer. She would be the fifth sitting justice to fit that profile. She earned both her bachelor’s and law degrees at Harvard and would be the seventh justice with an Ivy League undergraduate degree and the eighth graduate of Harvard or Yale law school.

So, a card-carrying member of the educated ruling class. 

That's really comical, representing a card-carrying member of the educated ruling class as the First Black Woman. A bit like First Black President Obama who was the son of an East African and a white woman, not a West African, from the people that were enslaved by other West Africans and sold to Brit slavers on the coast.

If I were the First Black Woman on the Court I would trot down to Justice Thomas after a day or two at the Court. And I would start to plot a bit of mayhem.

Because being a black woman I ain't gonna take no sh*t from nobody. Right Grrls?

But I doubt if she will. After all, she's a good little girl and went to Harvard and Harvard Law. You think she is going to break ranks and get combative?

For one thing, if you want to break the liberal ranks and start thinking for yourself you have to have done a bit of reading outside the liberal-lefty canon. You think that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has done that? I doubt it. My nickel says she has deadly boring ruling-class-conventional-wisdom opinions on everything.

Hey, if she had ever broken from the herd she wouldn't be the selection of President Biden to be the First Black Woman on the Supreme Court. Because what liberals want now, what they have to have, is an absolutely reliable vote that will vote as a block with the other two liberal women justices. Until Hell freezes over.

Because that's all that our liberal friends have left.

Today Victor Davis Hanson writes about the ruling-class strategy of nihilism, that all the stuff they are doing is part of a dastardly plan.

But if you mention nihilism then for chappies like me you invoke the shade of Nietzsche, who wrote that nihilism is the second consequence of your God dying, as in:

God is Dead, followed by decadence, followed by nihilism, followed by the eternal recurrence, followed by the revaluation of all values.

Eternal recurrence? Think Groundhog Day.

But, see, I don't think that the current ruling class clamp-down and nihilism is a strategy. I think it is a consequence of our liberal friends's faith, in leftist politics, in government programs, in quotas, in mandates, in feminism, in LGBT.

And that the God of Lefty Politics has failed. And our lefty friends do not know what to do. Except double down on their lefty politics.

There is no politics without an enemy, and so our lefty friends are finding enemies under every tree and on every street. If the Great Society failed and it wrecked the lower-income family, then it can't be the programs that failed. It must be some enemy that sabotaged it. If Charles Murray suggests that the lower average IQ of blacks is a fact and thus we will never get "equality" then he is a saboteur and a wrecker and must be condemned. If the stock market crashed in 2008 it can't be the low-down liar mortgages that Democrats have championed since the 1930s. It must be greedy bankers. If the COVID administrative mandates aren't working it must be the anti-vaxxers that are to blame.

But don't expect the two liberal justices and the new addition, the black woman Harvard educated daughter of a lawyer, to understand any of that. They are clueless, and will remain clueless, until the whole society is collapsing around them. But they still won't get it.

And frankly, even if Judge Jackson has half a brain, she would be afraid to use it. Imagine the storm that would engulf her if she dared to step out of line. I am not talking about columns in The New York Times and insults from race hustlers. I am talking about removal from the Court. You think they wouldn't stoop to that?

I gotta bridge...

Reviewing and Extending Downstreamism

 Andrew Breitbart famously said that "politics is downstream from culture." But did you know that SciFi author  John C. Wright has said that "In the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion."

But is there something beyond religion? I like to misquote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and talk about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

In other words, if you really believe in the importance of downstreamism, then you will agree that

Politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

And if you don't agree with that obvious truth, there is no hope for you!

Now, I have been reading a book that reviews the whole of philosophy, religion, science, and spirituality in the last 200 years written by a Brit J.J. Clarke, The Self-creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview. It is telling us all about the post-materialist, post-mechanical worldview that issues from what I call the "German Turn" that begins with Kant. Clarke is talking about a worldview that he calls "emergentism,"

a radical strain of thinking which is advancing in fields such as evolution, complexity, chaos, and self-organising systems[.]

In other words, the way the world works is that some nobody -- it could be a nobody plant -- tries something new, and, wonder of wonders, it works. And that successful change changes the world. Not because it was forced on the world, but because it worked, and people copied the new idea. Because it worked.

So the way the world works is creativity, people creating new things, animals creating new things, plants creating new things, from the bottom up, not from the top down.

So, things just evolve.

But Clarke is an academic, so when he gets to religion and spirituality, he thinks that God is dead so let's reinvent spirituality as a creative enterprise. The old religious culture was based on an eternalist presumption, it

locates the source of values and meaning in an eternal reality beyond nature, beyond the world as we experience it through our sense.

The new worldview is what Clarke calls a naturalist presumption, it is

a way of thinking about the world in general which focuses its outlook, its values, its meaning on the natural world of which we humans are an integral part.

This includes both what we experience in the physical and living world and also the "world of inner sense," the mental world, and also culture and history.

But what Clarke tells us is that the old "eternalist presumption" is done, finished, because we educated advanced humans know that the old world of God and Sin and the promise of eternal life in Heaven has been replaced by the new world of emergentism and the naturalist presumption.

That is where I part ways with the noble professor.

Because not everyone lives in the world of the creative educated philosophy professor for whom God has died. And clearly, for Clarke, there is no reason to respect or make a cultural space for the old people that still live with the worldview of the eternalist perspective.

I say that for the ordinary middle class person the old eternalist presumption still works pretty well. You believe in God; you believe that if you live your life by the rules then you will go to Heaven. So, you live a life of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

But for the educated elite this old worldview is a superstition and verges on bigotry.

Actually, I believe, further, that for the lower class, a still earlier worldview applies. For the lower class there is no happy land of Heaven if you do the right thing. In the lower class, power is everything, and what you need to do is get with a powerful person, and shelter in his powerful shadow. The old Nordic and pagan and Greek and Roman gods seem to apply. The newer Christian God of sweetness and light seems to be a fantasy to the lower class person.

Now I say, starting at 3:00 am today, that for all levels of society, the following applies, using the downstream hierarchy.

Politics answers the question: who is my enemy?

Culture answer the question: who are we the people?

Religion answers the question: who is God?

The meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" answers the question: What's it all about, Alfie? 

Who is my enemy? For the serf it's the cruel master; for the Commoner it's the tribe or nation next door; for the educated creative it's the dumb white middle-class racist-sexist-homophobes whose religion is pure bigotry.

Who are we the people? For the serf it is the people enslaved and oppressed like me; for the Commoner it is the nation; for the educated creative it is the global community of educated and evolved people.

Who is God? For the serf God is the cruel master; for the Commoner it is the God who made Heaven and Earth and declared that it was good; for the educated creative the god is the creative thinker, artist, activist.

What's it all about? For the serf it is just to stay alive; for the Commoner it is to live a virtuous life and get to Heaven; for the educated creative it is to create something that changes the world.

To be continued.