I am not a theologian, but by and large this strikes me as perfectly consonant with the Catholic understanding of morality. Only the terminology is different.
You say, "The universe is not traveling anywhere. It simply is - the substrate within which all structure, motion, and meaning must arise." What you here call the substrate, we would call the ground of being. As Bishop Barron says, the atheist makes the mistake of thinking of God as a being. But God is not a being. God is that which permits being to be: the ground of being, or, in your terms, the substrate. God is the name we give to that thing which simply is, the uncaused cause, the ground of being.
Similarly, you say that information is fundamental. We say, in the beginning was the Word. It all begins with information, with the Word. C.S. Lewis, in the Narnia books, has Aslan sing Narnia into existence. God is the word. Christ is the Word made flesh. The Word, the information, creates the universe and gives it form and, if you like, meaning.
And so morality is indeed not divinely imposed, in the sense of being the arbitrary dictate of a divine being, but the expression of the nature of the God who is not a being but the ground of being and the Word that brings the universe into being.
Yes - the model I’m sketching doesn’t require a personified God. There is a universe governed by physical and informational constraints that is capable, locally, of modeling itself. We are part of that universe, and through us it becomes aware of aspects of itself - which is already a nontrivial claim.
If someone wanted to call a higher-order, universe-scale form of self-awareness “God,” I wouldn’t object to the language. But I don’t think a personal or intentional deity is required to arrive at emergent moral norms that are grounded in our nature and our constraints - and that aren’t purely subjective or relativistic.
But surely you must see the problem here. Morality is concerned entirely with the relationship between persons. How can the ground of being give rise by it's nature to a moral system concerned with the relationship between persons if it is not itself personified? Personification is a prerequisite concept to morality. Where does it come from of not the nature of the substrate that gives rise to it?
Well, it is merely a hypothesis, but I'm positing that information is fundamental in the same was that gravity and thermodynamics are. And like energy in an isolated system always moves toward disorder, I'm positing that information in an isolated system drives - in an orthogonal or opposite way - toward perpetuation and/or complexification. If those are the rules (and I have no proof that they are), then a moral system would emerge that preserves relationships that preserve information.
But a moral system must contain an element of compulsion or it lacks all force. There has to be not only an ethic but a sanction or it has no reason to be and no effect. To Catholics, the compulsion is the desire for a relationship with God and the sanction is the loss of that relationship. And it is hard to imagine what other kind of compulsion or sanction could exist when the ethic is, as you propose, a manifestation of the nature of the ground of being. But for any such compulsion and any such sanction to exist, the ground of being must be capable of a relationship, which is too say that God must be personal.
The compulsion in my formulation is the perpetuation and complexification of information. Information-bearing beings (us) would innately, as a function of the universe, desire to preserve, perpetuate, and complexify (mixing, remixing, amplifying, understanding) the information embedded in their (our) minds (self/survival) and embedded in their biology (procreation). Morality in this model would be driven by a developed understanding that the information is preserved, complexified, and perpetuated best through productive relationships with others. Stable social structures. Preservation of life, etc..
But for such a compulsion to be moral in nature there must be the capacity to refuse, and a reason to refuse. There must be a perceived benefit to refusing. And if there is a perceived benefit to refusing, there must be a countervailing motive for giving up that benefit. We call that motive love. Which is why we say that God is love. Really the metaphysical account of morality requires love, which again requires personality.
There is, of course, the biological explanation of altruistic behavior as favoring the perpetuation of one's genes. That might be an analog of your argument. But that's is to reduce morality to instinct, which might be true, but is philosophically uninteresting.
Honestly, I think it is endlessly interesting for a species to have advanced to the point where it is no longer simply relying on instinct driving procreation and survival, but rather on rumination about future outcomes to influence choices which result in a greater good (in service - by way of intuition (call it revelation perhaps?) - of information preservation), and then building systems (i.e., faith traditions, Enlightenment reasoning) to produce generations that don’t need to relearn those lessons the hard way. I think it suggests that morals are inevitable in a sufficiently developed species. That sort of makes them universal. If true, it would be interesting indeed.
Right, that is what makes the biological account of morality so unsatisfying. It's too reductive. There are other reductive explanations as well. There is the political explanation that morality is a tool of oppression, the rich teaching the poor morality to keep them from rebelling. But that is unsatisfactory because it deals with specific moral precepts, not the moral impulse itself.
The non-reductive explanation is the metaphysical one, because all purely physical explanations are inherently reductive. But the metaphysical explanation leads to only one place, really. Outside of mechanical causality, which can explain altruism, perhaps, but not morality, it is impossible to account for moral action (as opposed to moral precept) except as an expression of love.
You can give a biological account of love, too, but it is unsatisfying for the same reason. It is too reductive. The only way out of this reductive account is to posit love as a metaphysical reality. And love as a metaphysical reality is simply one of the names for God. And a god who is love is, necessarily, a personal god.
Your approach seems to be an attempt to co-opt the information-based account of biology into a metaphysical framework, seemingly to avoid the reductionism of the biological account while attempting to exclude God. But I think it is still missing a term. I cannot see how you get to moral precept, let alone to moral action, without giving a non-reductive account of love. And any non-reductive, metaphysical account of love will end up being a name for God.
I am not a theologian, but by and large this strikes me as perfectly consonant with the Catholic understanding of morality. Only the terminology is different.
You say, "The universe is not traveling anywhere. It simply is - the substrate within which all structure, motion, and meaning must arise." What you here call the substrate, we would call the ground of being. As Bishop Barron says, the atheist makes the mistake of thinking of God as a being. But God is not a being. God is that which permits being to be: the ground of being, or, in your terms, the substrate. God is the name we give to that thing which simply is, the uncaused cause, the ground of being.
Similarly, you say that information is fundamental. We say, in the beginning was the Word. It all begins with information, with the Word. C.S. Lewis, in the Narnia books, has Aslan sing Narnia into existence. God is the word. Christ is the Word made flesh. The Word, the information, creates the universe and gives it form and, if you like, meaning.
And so morality is indeed not divinely imposed, in the sense of being the arbitrary dictate of a divine being, but the expression of the nature of the God who is not a being but the ground of being and the Word that brings the universe into being.
Yes - the model I’m sketching doesn’t require a personified God. There is a universe governed by physical and informational constraints that is capable, locally, of modeling itself. We are part of that universe, and through us it becomes aware of aspects of itself - which is already a nontrivial claim.
If someone wanted to call a higher-order, universe-scale form of self-awareness “God,” I wouldn’t object to the language. But I don’t think a personal or intentional deity is required to arrive at emergent moral norms that are grounded in our nature and our constraints - and that aren’t purely subjective or relativistic.
Also, thanks for reading it. :-)
But surely you must see the problem here. Morality is concerned entirely with the relationship between persons. How can the ground of being give rise by it's nature to a moral system concerned with the relationship between persons if it is not itself personified? Personification is a prerequisite concept to morality. Where does it come from of not the nature of the substrate that gives rise to it?
Well, it is merely a hypothesis, but I'm positing that information is fundamental in the same was that gravity and thermodynamics are. And like energy in an isolated system always moves toward disorder, I'm positing that information in an isolated system drives - in an orthogonal or opposite way - toward perpetuation and/or complexification. If those are the rules (and I have no proof that they are), then a moral system would emerge that preserves relationships that preserve information.
But a moral system must contain an element of compulsion or it lacks all force. There has to be not only an ethic but a sanction or it has no reason to be and no effect. To Catholics, the compulsion is the desire for a relationship with God and the sanction is the loss of that relationship. And it is hard to imagine what other kind of compulsion or sanction could exist when the ethic is, as you propose, a manifestation of the nature of the ground of being. But for any such compulsion and any such sanction to exist, the ground of being must be capable of a relationship, which is too say that God must be personal.
The compulsion in my formulation is the perpetuation and complexification of information. Information-bearing beings (us) would innately, as a function of the universe, desire to preserve, perpetuate, and complexify (mixing, remixing, amplifying, understanding) the information embedded in their (our) minds (self/survival) and embedded in their biology (procreation). Morality in this model would be driven by a developed understanding that the information is preserved, complexified, and perpetuated best through productive relationships with others. Stable social structures. Preservation of life, etc..
But for such a compulsion to be moral in nature there must be the capacity to refuse, and a reason to refuse. There must be a perceived benefit to refusing. And if there is a perceived benefit to refusing, there must be a countervailing motive for giving up that benefit. We call that motive love. Which is why we say that God is love. Really the metaphysical account of morality requires love, which again requires personality.
There is, of course, the biological explanation of altruistic behavior as favoring the perpetuation of one's genes. That might be an analog of your argument. But that's is to reduce morality to instinct, which might be true, but is philosophically uninteresting.
Honestly, I think it is endlessly interesting for a species to have advanced to the point where it is no longer simply relying on instinct driving procreation and survival, but rather on rumination about future outcomes to influence choices which result in a greater good (in service - by way of intuition (call it revelation perhaps?) - of information preservation), and then building systems (i.e., faith traditions, Enlightenment reasoning) to produce generations that don’t need to relearn those lessons the hard way. I think it suggests that morals are inevitable in a sufficiently developed species. That sort of makes them universal. If true, it would be interesting indeed.
Right, that is what makes the biological account of morality so unsatisfying. It's too reductive. There are other reductive explanations as well. There is the political explanation that morality is a tool of oppression, the rich teaching the poor morality to keep them from rebelling. But that is unsatisfactory because it deals with specific moral precepts, not the moral impulse itself.
The non-reductive explanation is the metaphysical one, because all purely physical explanations are inherently reductive. But the metaphysical explanation leads to only one place, really. Outside of mechanical causality, which can explain altruism, perhaps, but not morality, it is impossible to account for moral action (as opposed to moral precept) except as an expression of love.
You can give a biological account of love, too, but it is unsatisfying for the same reason. It is too reductive. The only way out of this reductive account is to posit love as a metaphysical reality. And love as a metaphysical reality is simply one of the names for God. And a god who is love is, necessarily, a personal god.
Your approach seems to be an attempt to co-opt the information-based account of biology into a metaphysical framework, seemingly to avoid the reductionism of the biological account while attempting to exclude God. But I think it is still missing a term. I cannot see how you get to moral precept, let alone to moral action, without giving a non-reductive account of love. And any non-reductive, metaphysical account of love will end up being a name for God.