Introduction
In my discussion on Karl Barth and Ted Peters in the previous section ("Proleptic Suite: Karl Barth and Ted Peters"), a theology of divine speech act (or divine action) comes to encounter a theology of prolepsis in the framework of postmodern holism.
God’s first act in the original creation (t=0) bestows upon us and the world the gift of an open future through the blessing of propagation of offspring, despite human sin. A proleptic theology as a divine gift focuses on freedom toward the continuing divine work of future-giving, which is the source of life, responsible being, and creativity.
God’s grace is expressed as divine love for us and the world through divine freedom. Thereby, divine action works through all creatures within their lives, shining eternal light upon those fragile and broken under divine care.
Proleptic holism, in a fashion of downward causation, runs counter to a genetically determinism. Peters stands within the spectrum of theistic evolution, taking issue with sociobiology.
Prolepis vs. Sociobiology
In Evolution From Creation to New Creation (together with Martinez Hewlett, pp. 59-69), Peters undertakes a genealogical analysis of Edward O. Wilson's work on Sociobiology:The New Synthesis by looking back at social Darwnism and the eugenic program in the American context. This espousal had been buried in the subconsciousness of biology academy, but it was unprecedently challenged in the arrival of Wilson's book in 1975, drawing upon his work on the colony of ants.
Combined with the neo-Darwinian principle of population and genes, Wilson presents a thesis for a strong genetic component of behavior of social insects, advocating for a similar understanding of human behavior.
Wilson's biological determinism searches genetic factors structuring social behavior in animals, while making the argument for deciphering social behavior in humans. A reaction in the academic world erupted; should social Darwinism and even the revival of Nazism haunt us once more?
Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin at Harvard University discerned the dangerous political ideology and social implication underlying the sociobiological claims. They protested such a discipline centering on genetic determinism and racial injustice.
Indeed, Wilson's position retains a genetically determined view of human behavior as subject to natural selection. He undermines how fundamental an organism and its phenotypic variation operates in dynamic interaction within the ecological landscape.
Furthermore, in Conscilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilison attempts to reframe all human behavior into his doctrine of biological reductionism and genetic determinism. He was called a Darwinian fundamentalist, finding himself in Richard Dawkin's central dogma of the selfish gene. Ruthless selfishness in the DNA works in the driver's seat, dictating every organism and determining human culture. Genotype entirely controls phenotype of the organism. The organism serves as the vehicle of DNA's replication at the level of both animal society and human society, as well.
if genes select social group and kin, its consequences lead to a sociobiological logic that racism, xenophobia, and genocide are also natural according to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. If sociobiolocal argument is not blended with ideological input, shouldn't it provide empirical-scientific evidence on promoting the correlation between human genes and human behavior?
Wison believes in Concilience that the unity of knowledge (including human culture, ethics, morality, and religion) can be located within science in recourse to a genetic explanation. Thereby, he implies that genes hold culture on a very long leash, impacting the human gene pool.
Wilson wants to support an ethic of social cooperation in reference to liberal democratic values such as human rights and altruism. However, the latter contradicts premodern tribalism and xenophobia according to group selection or kin preference. If the tribal values serve the selfish gene, likewise, modern values do the same thing subject to the gene selection.
Wilson's logic reads: if human nature can adapt to more encompassing forms of altruism and social justice, genetic biases can be trespassed in this favor. In contrast, he also holds the contradicting argument that reads: valuing universal human rights can be an extension of kin preference in mammals or group selection.
This incompatible argument is imbued with arrogance of scientism, looking for taking advantage of privilege in changing situations. Like a chameleon, Wilson's position changes in the fashion of ultra Darwinian adherence to natural selection and adaptation.
Against Wilson's sociolobiology, Leontin writes in a convincing way in The Triple Helix (48-9): "Just as there can be no organism without an environment, so there can be no environment without an organism....The earth will precess on its axis and produce periodic glacial and interglacial ages, volcanoes will erupt, evaporation from oceans will result in rain and snow, independenly of any living being..But glacial streams, volcanic ash deposits, and pools of water... are physical conditions from which environments may be built. ...The environment of an organism is the penumbra of external conditions that are relevant to it because it has effective interactions with those aspects of the outer world."
What matters is not in our genes, but an organism's dynamic interactions with the environment as the penumbra of external conditions. Phenomenologically put, environment as the penumbra appears to be life-world, in which human praxis changes the physical external condition, while human life is also transformed by the environment.
Proleptic Holism and Top-Down Causation
Countering the genetic determinism of sociobiology, Peters argues that God's creative work is not done yet, and God's future will appear as something new, a new creation. His position is scientifically associated with the emergence of dissipative structures in a state of nonequibrium and an arrow of time.
Peters' proleptic principle is oriented toward God's future, but he does not discard the present reality of reconciliation and theologia crucis. His position does not run counter to Barth's threefold sense of creation with emphasis on the present reality of the resurrected Chrtst in our midst. Barth's approach is driven by a confessional notion of concursus in terms of double agency, which draws upon the relationship between the primary cause (God) and the secondary cause (nature).
According to Peters, the theological prolepsis is based on a postmodern notion of holism, in which the whole of creation is greater than the sum of its parts, underlying God’s creation from the future, in other words, divine action in the form of top-down causation (Peters, God—The World’s Future: 142. 146).
I find that there is an affinity between postmodern holism and the systemic view of the significance of living organisms. underlying the network interactions between whole and part. Holism helps us to elaborate on an ecology of collective behavior engaged in dynamic interaction with other components. It undergirds mutual construction of oikos between the organism's life and environment.
This downward causality can be open to the term autopoiesis, in which biological systems such as cells are a product of their own production in circular structures; they are in a circular reproduction of the cell.
(H. R. Maturana, “Autopoiesis.” In Autopoiesis, ed. Zeleny, 21–32).
However, from a proleptic downward position, I conceptualize autopoiesis in terms of continual creation in contrast to process philosophy. Process without structure leads to a dialectics of flow and becomes an eternal recurrence. A structural understanding of evolutionary change (Gould) implies a new emergence of life, which receives flow of energy and spiritual inspiration from God's life-world. A phenemenology of life-world is embedded within the web of life in an ecological theatre.
Thus, I synthesize a proleptic holism with a theory of life-world, finding its significance in Barth’s insight into the natural and cosmic existence of interrelationship, a whole-part system: “the general divides off into the particular and the particular is subordinated to the general. The whole is only in the part, yet the part, too, is only in the whole.” *CD IV/3.1: 144).
Of significance is a two-way interaction of wholes and parts which sees certain patterns of creaturely beings in the sense of recurrence in alteration, the identical in the different, ordered qualities, diversities, and relationships. A complex interaction occurs in mutual influence between parts and wholes as imbued in the course of an unbroken and never-ceasing cycle (Gen 8:22).
In the two-way interaction of wholes and parts, God gives freedom, movement, and intelligibility onto the reality of the secondary causes. In the divine and natural causality or coexistence, God acts through the matrix of secondary causes (world theatre), respecting human freedom and the lawfulness and free activity of the created order for divine glory in terms of concurrence in double agency.
Barth’s model is concerned with “the relative autonomy of creaturely activity”, which is in collaboration with God’s free and gracious love (CD III/3: 97). The divine glory is revealed in the reconciling love and power of grace in Christ. The evolutionary, secondary cause implies that divine action as the primary cause in the sense of concursus continually makes the activity of the creature free, emergent, and a creative cooperative with God (Ibid., 110).
The whole interpenetrates particular fields, becoming integrated totalities in their relationships with mutual participation. The systemic view of relationship between parts and wholes remain central in Barth’s ecological view of evolution, in which the mystery of the cosmos is intelligible and ordered, while intelligent and ordering. This intelligibility involves emergence or new beginning of new form of order. A creature is free and immanent, emerging anew in the created world, while having its own existence, rhythm, and contrariety—“bound by law yet also freely active.” (Ibid., 149).
This ecological-systemic view critically renews Ian Barber’s abstract formulation of divine sovereignty and creature autonomy in Barth, by emphasizing creaturely collaboration and new emergence.
(Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science, 311).
A double agency model of ecology of concurrence cuts through limitations of Aristotle’s teleology imbued with God as the unmoved mover; the latter has no bearing on creativity of emergence regarding God’s proleptic act of continuing creation through reconciliation.
A Clarification
A life-world or ecological-systemic approach comes to terms with a theory of postmodern holism in proleptic frame of reference, while bringing a theory of double agency into downward causality in terms of concursus. This is a site of embodied phenomenology where I undertake a constructive interpretation of Barth and Peters, while continuing my intellectual journey in a different direction.
An expression of respect for teachers is to foster autonomy and creativity on the part of a student standing in phenomenology of autopoietic lifelines.