To use a very bad pun, the ‘things’ of earth from which we turn away are really ‘thinks’ of earth. We do not stop thinking about earthly things, but we stop thinking about things in the same ‘earthly’ ways. We repent. We change our perspective. We transfer our allegiance from the ways of the earth to way of the heavens. We disrupt the dominant conceptual paradigms that often seem as stable and foregone as the ground beneath our feet – our earth – and we replace them with narratives and perspectives that affirm the realities that Jesus reveals – our home, the heavens.

Philosophers have fun getting fancy with these conceptual paradigms, using big words like materialism, scientism, egoism, atheism, empiricism, skepticism, etc. Guilty as charged. If you’re going to play with ideas, you might as well play with the big ones.

But there is a danger of distraction in all this abstraction. It is helpful to consider questions of the nature of reality – what philosophy calls ‘metaphysics’. But Jesus seems to care a whole lot more about ethics – who we are, what we do, and why we do it – than about metaphysics. Most, and maybe all, of the things Jesus says about metaphysics – heaven, hell, eternity, spirit, earth, life, afterlife – are in service to his larger concern of loving one another. I wonder whether anything ‘metaphysical’ that Jesus says should be taken literally, or rather as rhetorical devices to support and illustrate his ethical claims.

This is why the ‘thinks of earth’ that interest me most are the ones with the strongest ethical implications. Lately, I’ve been thinking most about evolutionary theory.

Full disclosure, on the metaphysical question, my view is closest to ‘theistic evolution’. But I’m not dying on that hill because I agree with Jesus that the metaphysical question doesn’t matter as much as the moral questions.

At a purely academic level, evolution doesn’t ‘do’ ethics. Hume’s Law tells us we can’t logically derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Evolution is just a descriptive theory about the way things are and not a prescription for how they ought to be. And at a more popular level, belief in ‘Social Darwinism’ has long been out of fashion.

But at a deeper, somewhat vague and inchoate, subconscious and underground level, like the earth beneath our feet, foundational beliefs like evolutionary theory create a kind of mental framework that shapes our perspectives without us ever realizing it. We sometimes call these ‘worldviews’ but they often function more like implicit biases. We just find it natural, common sense, to think about life in certain ways, and we become so accustomed and indebted to these ways of thinking that we acquiesce and adopt them, almost unaware or even against our will. Add in cognitive scripts like confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy and these perspectives become so deeply ingrained and accepted and reinforced that it can seem futile to resist them, if the thought of resistance even enters our minds.

When we directly challenge them, we sound like we are from another planet. Not of this earth. Strangely dim.

In evolutionary theory, correct as it may be at the biological level, there are certain patterns that Jesus directly opposes and rejects at the human relational, social, psychological, economic, and spiritual levels. Among these are 1) survival, 2) competition, 3) fitness, and 4) reproductive success.

Maybe my next posts will focus on these. Stay tuned.