Doubt the historicity of the Crucifixion if you like, but the narrative of a God who goes to hell in the place of his alienated child is the only cosmic story that embraces love as we know it. And love is valued, universally, far more than other parts of human life, which makes it first on the checklist of features in the successful cosmology. The human race unites in believing that if we live without experiencing love, our lives suck. However, nobody thinks that if we do not understand biological similarity in diversity our lives suck. It is amazing, really: apparently bright minds will choose a world-view based on a subset of data that doesn’t matter at all outside itself — a subset whose direct relevance to their daily lives they would be hard-pressed to explain. Most people, if quizzed about the most important experience in a human life, will answer: ” love”, and will place understanding their biological roots somewhere near the bottom of their heirarchy of priorities. Yet, illogically, they fail to look for a narrative of the cosmos which hinges on an act of love. Rather, they slide lazily into the only world-view which argues that the love they most highly value in practice is but a useful illusion: Darwinian materialism.
The war of world-views is decided ahead of time, of course. Define what is in the data set which the competing worldviews are required to integrate, and how those data elements are valued relative to each other, and you have rigged the game. Love, this central experience of life, has as much right to be called “data” as does the chemistry of blood. Requiring that “data” must be physical, or measurable, is without warrant. It’s just to rig the game. It’s intellectually lazy.
Biological descent by modification does not derive its attraction as a meta-narrative from its explanatory power. Even if we concede it explains the human body, it still has only explained the least meaningful of the data elements, as humans define meaning when they are not on their guard. As a cosmology, it derives its attraction from the existential laziness it affords the thinker. Scientific materialism requires nothing of me. On the other hand, to accept that my moral malfeasances have murdered a loving God would ask me to change the rest of my life.
Not only does secular materialism not ask me to change my life, it formally can supply no reason for me to do so, except perhaps the desire to survive and not die. But it offers no reason why I should survive and not die, except that the species should perpetuate. But why? Why should the species survive and not die? In a materialistic system, the actual answer is: because the sun exists. We should survive because we happen to have occurred — a formal tautology. Not many people would argue this integrates their experience into a coherent intellectual construct.
Prune the data set beforehand and any theory can sound good. But derive the data set from the ENTIRE experience of the organism and THEN look for a theory that answers to it — STARTING with those parts of the data set considered most unique to the species (i.e. the non-material).
It is clear that only a cosmology centered on love can satisfy Occam’s Razor.
TimothyOne 