Error and Loss

This book is written out of the conviction that most of us, by virtue of living in the time we do, suffer under a default world-view whose basic assumptions are so deeply buried in us that we are not even minimally aware of them. Furthermore, these assumptions radically distinguish the intellectual and spiritual life of our time from that of previous eras. In order to unearth these assumptions and show up their error, it is necessary to dig deep. The tool used for this must, of necessity, be the tool of our time - of our default world-view. This necessitates a delicate balancing act, one in which materialistic science is used to overthrow scientific materialism, in which reason leads us in march-step to the brink of the formless and incoherent. It is my hope that this balancing act can succeed; I find in our time no other way to arrive at a place which, in other times, was the place of origin. The individual ideas in this book are not original but have been developed and plumbed for centuries and, in some cases, millennia by thinkers far more talented than I. Their combination in this form, however, I have not seen elsewhere, and it is my hope that this may be of some value. I have refrained in general from stating the original sources of ideas by now well in the public domain in the hope of keeping this book less cumbersome and pedantic than it would be if loaded with references and footnotes. When I have borrowed an idea from a contemporary writer, however, I have noted this. I will often refer to Darwinism, though without differentiating between the different strands of thought that go by this name or a slightly modified version of it (e.g. neo-Darwinism), nor have I delved into the controversies still raging between evolutionary biologists and philosophers of biology over exactly which strand is most coherent. For me it is enough that natural selection be seen as an indifferent, purposeless algorithm that favours the development and retention of those characteristics of organisms that promote reproductive advantage in the environment in which they find themselves, and that it be understood as the vehicle which produces the 'designs' found in the natural world. It seems to me that any view that goes by the name of Darwinism must see natural selection in this manner and so I believe I am justified in using the term in this rather undifferentiated way.