Morality and the Supernatural

The boundaries of the physical world are closing around us fast. It seems that every week a new genetic expression is discovered, linking what was a week earlier thought to be a personality quirk or character trait to a force of brute biology.

Humans are, its seems, is a product of causal bio-chemistry.

This manifests in a handful of ways. For starters, the traits that manifest through life are attributed to biological factors. The talent for snowboarding, the ear for music, or the knack for public speaking... all genetic.

Moreover, the processes of the mind and the instincts of the body are accounted for as purely physical events, destroying the possibility for freewill. Experiences stream through the senses, are interpreted by the brain, which fashions a response (built from other biological and experiential factors). Freedom, in effect, is gone.

Many clever philosophers try to argue nuanced rebuttals to defend freedom within this physical picture of the world. I applaud them, and hope one of them gets the argument to stick. Honestly, there is no single event of my psyche that is more obvious than my freewill, and I resent any explanation of the world that rejects this immediate truth.

Perhaps I am not clever. I do not defend freewill from within the account of the physical world. Instead, I reject the notion of a purely physical world.

By asserting the existence of spiritual states, entities, and energy, I cleave the world. Sure there is physical stuff happening. But above, below, and all around it, the breath of the spirit moves and animates all things. This makes the fractures both physical accounts of the human.

One, it frees the will of humanity. If the will is not a physical state, but rather one that exists within the person (persons, under this model, are a lot more than just physical), it can be free of the little electrical proddings in the brain. Certainly influenced by them, but not dictated.

It also frees the expression of human traits as gifts, rather than genetic traits. While those genes may be the most proximal cause, the original cause is much more abstract than genes or cell separation. The spark of the Divine animates our bodies, allowing the manifestation of our biologies to follow from our spirit.

This also changes we purpose our gifts should serve. With no freedom or intention in our creation, that which we excel in has no more purpose or reason than we do. But in a world of non-physical minds and godly creators... well, we are called to unleash our gifts in a powerful to transform the world to become a greater vision of glory.

Morality, then, because its operator (the will) and its tools (gifts) becomes a supernatural act, not beholden to physical laws. We can be unstoppable. We just have to unchain ourselves.