1. The Eonic Effect: Climbing Mt. Improbable
One
of the most tenacious claims of defenders of Darwinism is that of the randomness
of evolution. By and large, despite various efforts of writers such as Richard
Dawkins to claim that natural selection is 'non-random', Darwinian theory is
about random evolution. And yet this assumption is contradicted by world history itself,
where we can see clear evidence of a non-random pattern exhibiting the
properties of evolution, 'evolution of some kind'. We can call this the eonic
effect. This pattern gives real meaning to the phrase 'Climbing Mt.
Improbable'.
2. Enigma Of The Axial Age
One
of the enigmas of world history is the phenomenon of the Axial Age. The study of
the eonic effect can throw especial light on the resolution of its riddle, and
the complexity of its interpretation. The discovery of the Axial Age in the
nineteenth century is one of the fruits of modern historiography as it has
become a global study for the first time. The Axial data is a reminder to not
take history for granted and to consider that the issue of historical evolution
must remain open as long we are confined to short intervals of chronicle, or
isolated streams of cultural emergence. And the question arises as to how we
should understand this spectacular phenomenon in which multiple civilizations in
parallel undergo a relative transformation of their content.
3. History And Evolution: A New Model Of History
The rise of science has seen the extension of its methods and
perspectives into all fields of human knowledge, and yet it is significant that
no science of history has ever been successfully created. In part this is due to
its complexity, and more fundamentally due to the failure of the assumptions of
universal reductionism. The reasons for the confrontation with this limit are
not mysterious and were clearly outlined by the philosopher Kant, whose system
of critiques sounded a master chord in the discourse on causality and freedom.
In a nutshell, the science of history must confront the reality and significance
of the idea of freedom. But if we adopt the perspective of freedom can we create
a science at all? This issue is the object of multiple insights by a host of
students of history and theory, among them Isaiah Berlin with his critique of
the idea of historical inevitability, and Karl Popper with his attack on what he
called 'historicism', a term with a long history, but one to which he gave an
idiosyncratic, but useful, definition, putting it in close concordance with the
issue of historical inevitability.
4. Kant's Challenge: Idea For A Universal
History
As we move to study the eonic effect and construct the eonic
model we make a strange discovery: the relationship to the philosophy of
history. And we also uncover a curious and elegant secret behind the enigma of
the eonic effect itself. The idea of a model is to bring home the project of
science applied to history, but on the way we are forced to consider the issue
of freedom in the context of causality and this summons up the classic discourse
of the philosophers of history, most especially that of the philosopher Kant
whose sudden, almost mysterious, appearance at the climax of the Enlightenment
both fulfilled and challenged or deepened that movement. The irony, and strange
secret uncovered, is that the philosophy of history shows strong correlation
with the eonic sequence itself. This point is elusive and will dawn on one
gradually, to show an extraordinarily deep side to the pattern of universal
history the eonic sequence uncovers.
5. The Old Testament: An Eonic Riddle
Our
understanding of the Old Testament is in crisis. The tide of Biblical Criticism
and archaeology has eroded our sense of divine action, or of divinity acting in
history. Traditionalists are frozen in biblical literalism, and heading over a
cliff oblivious to their situation, while arrogant Darwinian reductionism only
compounds the confusion by offering no insight into religion beyond the Social
Darwinist vulgarity of the cadres of scientism.
6. One Endless Argument: Surviving The Darwin
Debate
It
is not without significance that the Darwin debate has been called 'one long
argument', the phrase being Darwin's. The publication of Darwin's Origin
precipitated a debate that has never resolved itself, and which was soon joined
in the next generation after Darwin by the various religious groups that now
seem to cast the conflict as one between science and religion. That polarity is
misleading since the real source of the the dialectical immortality of the
question would seem rather to lie in a polarity of science with itself, or
science with scientism: perhaps science needs a better theory, not a religious
replacement. And this suggests that we are in the presence of some kind of
'antinomy' of the type explored by the philosopher Kant in his classic 'critique
of reason'.
7. The Oedipus Paradox: The Legacy Of Social
Darwinism
One
of the most ambiguous legacies of the rise of 'Newtonian' science has been the
status of social theories in relation to the successes of theoretical physics.
In fact, the issue is arguably present already in the question of biological
science, but has shown itself to be especially acute on the issue of cultural
evolution, or history. Is there a science of history? This question has assumed
a number of forms, with a number ideological overtones, the most famous being the historical inevitability argument tabled by Isaiah Berlin with respect
to 'marxist' theories. Associated with this is another such cousin argument,
that of Karl Popper, in his Poverty Of Historicism, where his critique of
so-called 'historicism' addresses just this paradox of freedom and causality in
the claims of science in leftist 'prophecies' taken as scientific predictions of
revolution.
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