Publisher's Synopsis
God Has Skin In The Game is a creative promenade down the corridors of time, memory, history, metaphysics, politics and science. This is, however, no ordinary re-examination of the relationship between morality, politics, religion and the soul; it is a quantum leap towards a new understanding of the meaning of time and space. What is missing from contemporary political and moral discussion is which concept of Existence underlies our common thinking and our institutions. Existence, conceived as being related to God's Nature or existence postulated as being only energy by science, are two intellectually legitimate choices that have very different political and social consequences.
Understanding how we think about Existence, as either a transcendental reality or a discontinuous process, affects the entire social order. How a culture frames the question of Existence determines whether or not values will be conceived of as being merely relative, or whether they ought to be connected, objectively, to a higher order. Using the idea of non-locality, for example, as a metaphor for Existence helps bridge the gap between Aristotelian and Platonic ideas about matter and form and existence conceived of as energy that is neither created or destroyed. Both positions are mirror images of each other in that God and energy are both seen as being neither created nor destroyed. The consequences that flow from these two positions are, however, very different.
John Adams voiced a concern, shared by many of the Founding Fathers, as being fundamental to the relationship between good governance, religion and morality in 1811. -Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not only of Republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all governments and in all the combinations of human society.- In order to fully understand what Adams meant by this, when the common understanding today is not just an absolute separation of Church and State but an exclusion of God and State, an investigation into the metaphysical and moral heritage of the West is necessary.
Many of the ideas presented may seem shocking and possibly intolerant but they will lead you on an intellectual adventure that can change your life. Our civilization suffers from amnesia when it comes to metaphysics and this book will attempt to show the reader why.
There have been many thinkers who have covered some but not all of the same territory in what might be called the high country between morality and existence. Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Scotus Eriugena, Avicenna, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Bishop Berkeley, John Locke, Hegel, Sri Aurobindo, Martin Heidegger, Whitehead, Etienne Gilson, Joseph Piper, Hans Kung and Karl Rahner, to name a few of the more famous and well-known philosophers and theologians, have all grappled with the effect God's knowledge may or may not have on the material universe.
Understanding how an immutable or unchangeable Being can act within and without time, or affect change without changing Itself, might be said to be the puzzle of the ages. Many writers have attempted to link the great minds of the past and the absence of their ideas to our current political and social difficulties without fully understanding the nature of Existence. Ayn Rand, Walter Lipmann, Richard Hofstadter, Allen Bloom, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, Andrew P. Napolitano, Ann Coulter and Mark Bauerlein, to name a few, have all decried the anti-intellectualism that characterizes both academia and the media to the detriment of rational political policy. Few of these thinkers have found and elaborated on the root cause of almost all social incoherence and disorder: the failure to identify what theory of causality motivates our intellectual, moral and political views.
God Has Skin in the Game will show how America can become the economic and moral powerhouse that it was intended to be by the Founding Fathers by rediscovering a common metaphysical heritage.
