Summary of text [comment] page 45

I continue with page 45, where Schoonenberg accepts that “evil is a statistical necessity” for God’s natural creation and wonders whether it applies to the realm of freedom and morality, that is, to us.  Since Schoonenberg accepts de Chardin’s view that “unification” is a “law of nature” (and that “statistical necessity” applies), evil must also intrinsic be to the level of freedom and morality.

[To me, what Schoonenberg and de Chardin labeled as “unification”, von Hayek called “spontaneous order”.

“Failure” or “evil” or “the falling of actuality back into possibility” is intrinsic to all spontaneous orders.

Failure is a statistical necessity in the spontaneous orders of biology.  Failure is also a statistical necessity in the spontaneous orders of freedom and morality, which appear have something in common with biology, but are not determined by biology.

The spontaneous orders of freedom and morality incorporate the statistical necessities of biological order, so failures in “ecology, environment and definition” or “homeostasis, metabolism or definition” may occur.

But does that imply that the spontaneous orders of morality and freedom also express the same statistical necessities as the order of biology?]

Schoonenberg feels compelled to say “yes”.  He is obviously not sure why this is so.   He points to St. Paul’s teaching about the flesh, the Councils of Carthage, and Aquinas’ view that one cannot be free of sin without grace.

[But these resources, rather than supporting a nuanced “yes”, seem to support at tentative “no”.  Paul’s teaching about the flesh does not sound, to me, like a warning about “failure where actuality slips back into possibility”.   It sounds more like a warning about “desires” that have lost their capacity to integrate into a life-affirming order.]

[Being a Jesuit, Schoonenberg was both scholastic and modern.  So, I am confident that he would be amused by what I am about to say, emerging, as it does, from the realm of possibility; the only realm that supports contradictions:

Why not correlate “noumena” to the “spontaneous order” and “phenomena” to “our evolved perception of design”?

Such a correlation would position Modern Philosophy as an unwitting mash of Friedrich von Hayek’s notion of “spontaneous order” (which we always misinterpret as design) and Stephen Gould’s notion of “exaptation then adaptation” (which is why we see design, even when we do not realize what we are doing).

The mash-up highlights the modern problem:  As soon as we start to see designs in the grand spontaneous order that emerges from everyone constructing according to their own designs, we are tempted to play God … or I should say … to act as the Devil, because sovereign interventions, even if well designed, cannot fully take into account the potential ways that the spontaneous order might adapt.]