What Ought To Be

The implications of spatiomaterialism are ontologically necessary truths, but there are two kinds of necessary truths. They are all ontologically necessary for reason, because ontological philosophy is an argument about the world directed toward rational beings. But in addition to its theoretical function, reason has a practical function, and since its practical function cannot be entirely reduced to its theoretical function, there are necessary truths about what ought to be, as far as reason is concerned, that are not just truths about what is.

Ontological philosophy is a two step argument. First, it argues that spatiomaterialism is the best ontological explanation of the world, and then it uses spatiomaterialism to show what must be true in a spatiomaterial world. Such implications are ontologically necessary, but many are conditional, because they also depend on space and matter having the more specific essential natures that makes the basic laws of physics true and that give the universe a large scale structure of the kind it actually has. Conditionally necessary truths hold only in spatiomaterial worlds like ours. There are, as we have seen, many such truths about what is, most relevantly at this point, including all those about progressive evolution. On suitable planets, there is an evolutionary change that proceeds through a series of stage in the direction of natural perfection, with each stage being a gradual change in the direction of the natural perfection of organisms (or primary structures) of its kind. And since it is a (conditionally) necessary truth, evolution would unfold in basically the same way in any spatiomaterial world like ours.

Reason itself is, however, something that comes to exist in that grand process. A series of inevitable stages of biological evolution (by natural selection) leads to rational beings, and since spiritual animals contain within themselves cultural evolution (by rational selection), which eventually includes progress in natural science (sponsored, in part, by economic evolution through capitalist selection), reason eventually comes to understand how the world is whole. That is, as we have seen, what ontological philosophy contributes to cultural evolution at the philosophical stage in the wake of the failure of epistemological philosophy. Ontological philosophy is an argument about the wholeness of the world that is made to beings that exist necessarily in that world. Thus, rational beings eventually come to recognize their own nature and their place in the world, and since that self-understanding is itself part of the wholeness of the world, it plays a role in what happens in the world. “Ontological reason,” as I will call it, has work to do.

What reason comes to know about its nature, with the evolution of ontological philosophy, includes recognizing its own function as a behavior guidance system. Guiding behavior is the basic function of what evolves at every stage of biological evolution, and reason guides the behavior not only of individual subjects, but also of spiritual animals, the social level animals of which rational subjects are the parts. Its function as a behavior guidance system explains, as have seen, the difference between theoretical and practical reason.

Practical reason is as basic as theoretical reason. Indeed, the original function of arguments about the true is to enable reason to discover the good. Reason would not have evolved by natural selection if the cultural evolution of theoretical arguments by rational selection did not make it possible for reason to discover what is good for rational beings (that is, what contributes to their maximum holistic power, or natural perfection). Thus, in addition to its theoretical role, reason has a practical employment. Reason is something that acts in the world. That is why there is a difference between conclusions about what is and what ought to be among the necessary truths proved by ontological philosophy.

With the evolution of ontological philosophy, therefore, reason understands its own nature as a behavior guidance system that evolves by reproductive causation, and it recognizes its place in the world. The function of reason is to guide the behavior of the most powerful organisms that come to exist in evolution, and so ontological reason comes to recognize itself as the most powerful being in the world. This self-understanding might even be called the outcome of evolution in a spatiomaterial world like ours, at least, so far, since it happens at the end of a series of inevitable evolutionary stages. But the advent of ontological philosophy is not the end of evolution. Its explanation of the wholeness of the world is merely the point at which reason discovers its own real nature and begins to assume its full power. And since reason has a practical, as well as a theoretical, function, it can be described as the point at which ontological reason (still evolving by rational selection) takes over from biological evolution and controls the course evolution.

Thus, the wholeness of the world is not merely that everything in the world and everything about the world is constituted by space and matter. Nor is it merely that its essential nature entails that a part of any spatiomaterial world like ours inevitably comes to understand its wholeness. It also includes how that understanding of its wholeness leads reason to act in a way that ultimately makes the world more "whole." That is the work of ontological reason.

Predicting the future of evolution. It might seem that what ontological reason does in the world ought to be counted among the necessary truths about what is, because cultural evolution, including its evolution, is a global regularity like the rest of evolution and, thus, can be predicted. As a behavior guidance system, reason pursues the good, and since goodness is contributing to natural perfection, what is good is a fact about the world. Thus, what reason does in the world can be predicted. That means that it is one of the necessary truths about what is in the world that reason discovers, which suggests that there is no need to distinguish from what is a set of necessary truths about what ought to be.

In a sense, it is true that what ontological reason does can be predicted, for it is inevitable. But it is not merely an ontologically necessary truth about what is in a spatiomaterial world like ours, because unlike earlier stages of evolution, what happens depends on ontologically necessary truths about what ought to be. That is, what makes those predictions about the future after the advent of ontological reason turn out to be true is that rational being do what is good, and so the only way to predict what will happen is to work out what ontological reason discovers about what ought to exist. That is not something that can be predicted by knowing what is good for rational beings in the sense of contributing to their natural perfection as rational beings.

After recapping the ontological explanation of the nature of goodness and considering more carefully why it seems that practical reason can be reduced to theoretical reason, I will explain why necessary truths about what ought to be are not entirely reducible to necessary truths about what is. Then I will take up the implications of spatiomaterialism about the goals that reason ought to pursue (in its individual self interest, its spiritual self interest, and its religious self interest).

Goodness. The nature of goodness is explained, as we have seen, by the progressiveness of evolution by reproductive causation. Not only does evolution have an inevitable beginning in a spatiomaterial world like ours, but it also involves change in the direction of natural perfection. And natural perfection has a structure that determines what is good.

Natural perfection. Setting reason aside for the moment, reproductive causation generates four different forms of natural perfection: the natural perfection of the organism, of the ecology, of life and of change itself. That is, they follow from the two main reproductive global regularities, gradual and revolutionary evolution.

Organism. At each stage of evolution, there are reproducing organisms (or primary structures) that start off simple, uniform and weak, and during the stage, they gradually become more complex, diverse and powerful, until each kind of organism is as powerful at controlling all the conditions that affect its reproduction as possible for primary structures of its kind. Such maximum holistic power is the natural perfection for organisms. It is an optimal part-whole relation in which no possible change in the parts will make the whole more powerful, though this maximum may be approached only asymptotically.

Ecology. But since maximum holistic power for organisms (i.e., primary structures) also involves their becoming more diverse, the direction of gradual change is also toward maximum holistic power for the ecology. It is a holistic power, because it is the power of all the organisms in the region. But the appropriate measure of the power that is maximized at the ecological level is different. As the organisms all become naturally perfect, the right kinds and varieties of organisms exist to consume as much of the available free energy to fuel reproductive cycles as possible. Making maximum use of the ultimate source of the power to do work in the region is the natural perfection for the ecology.

Life. But one stage of evolution can make another stage inevitable. When the organisms evolving at one stage have structures that can be organized as the several parts of an organism on higher levels of organization (that is, whose primary structures have higher levels of part-whole complexity), and when that makes it possible for the whole to control a range of relevant conditions that were previously out of reach, such a radical random variation begins a new stage of gradual evolution during which those organisms and the ecology they help make up (along with organisms from previous stages) become naturally perfect for their kinds. The succession of evolutionary stages uses the part-whole relation in space to expand the power of organisms, as primary structures generating reproductive cycles, to control what happens in the world, step by step, increasing the level of organization of the natural perfection involved. Hence, revolutionary evolution is in the direction of the natural perfection of life itself, or the very enterprise of controlling conditions in the world. Reproductive causation makes the most of the spatial structure of the world by using the part-whole relation in space to increase the holistic power of organisms of all kinds to control what happens in the world.

Change. Finally, since evolution is progressive, there is even a natural perfection about the kind of change that is involved in evolution. Since evolution is a global regularity caused by how reproductive cycles add up in space as time passes, each moment during each stage of gradual evolution makes a necessary contribution to the increasing power of the organisms and the ecology at that stage. And since evolutionary stages are caused by levels of part-whole complexity in evolving structures, each stage makes an necessary contribution to the increasing power of life. Thus, by using each moment in the existence of the substances involved to increase the power of material structures to do work, reproductive causation gives change itself a kind of natural perfection. It makes the most out of the temporal nature of the world by using the succession of moments in which substances exist to increase the power of organisms to control what happens in the world. No moment is redundant or superfluous.

The nature of goodness. Natural perfection is an explanation of the nature of goodness, because natural perfection is an optimal part-whole relation. Though the part-whole relation is somewhat different in each form of natural perfection, in each case, parts of certain kinds are combined in certain ways and numbers to make the most out of the least. "The most" always has to do with the power of the whole to use free energy to control what happens in the world, and "the least" has to do with the number and simplicity of the parts.

Natural perfection is a property of the whole, and the corresponding property of the parts of such wholeness is goodness. Goodness is the property of contributing to the natural perfection of the whole of which it is part. But since there are different forms of natural perfection, there are different ways that that things can be good.

Organism. In the case of the organism, the parts are the structural causes that are bundled together to go through reproductive cycles as a whole, and things are good for the organism when they are involved in generating the non-reproductive structural effects that help give it the maximum power to control the conditions that affect its reproduction. Thus, certain kinds of traits are good for the organism because of their functions, that is, because of which relevant conditions they control. And certain kinds of behavior are good for the organism because of its goals, including, in the case of animals, animal behavior, whose goals involve behavior directed at other objects in space in order to control relevant conditions.

Ecology. In the case of the ecology, the parts are the organisms in the region, and things are good for the ecology when they help the organisms jointly consume as much as possible of the free energy available in the region as fuel for reproductive cycles. Each kind of organisms is good for the ecology because of the form of free energy it taps or the way in which it does so.

Life. In the case of life, the parts are the successive levels of part-whole complexity in the reproducing organisms that evolve at each stage of evolution, and things are good for life itself because they are involved in the evolution of another level of organization that helps life control as much as possible what happens in the world. Thus, certain levels of biological, neurological and forensic organization in evolving structures are good for life because each is necessary for life to evolve another range of powers and, thus, step by step, as much power to control conditions affecting reproduction as possible for living organisms.

Change. In the case of change itself, the parts are particular stages in the overall course of evolution and particular moments during each stage, and things are good for change itself when events unfold in a way that helps bring about the natural perfection organisms, ecology and life. Thus, even such events as organisms failing to reproduce because of scarcity and species becoming extinct because other species displace them from their ecological niche are good because that is how reproductive causation makes evolution progressive.

The unity of goodness. Though things are good in various ways, ultimately, they are all good in the same way, because there is a necessary overall structure to the various kinds of natural perfection to which they all contribute. Naturally perfect organisms are essential parts of naturally perfect ecologies, and stages of gradual evolution in the direction of such natural perfection are essential to the overall evolutionary change in the direction of the natural perfection of life. And all the events that occur in the course of evolution are essential to the natural perfection of change, since that is what makes evolution progressive.

It is true that what is good for one organism might be bad for another. The predator is bad for the prey. But since the natural perfection to which they both contribute is a single spatiotemporal whole with an overall structure, there is no ultimate conflict about whether something is good or bad. Everything good is good because it contributes to some form of natural perfection that is part of that overall structure. Thus, what is bad for the prey is good not only for the predator, but also for the ecology, and it is by contributing to the natural perfection of the ecology that the prey is good (and that what contributes to the natural perfection of the prey is good). There is no context in which contributing to natural perfection, or natural perfection itself, could turn out to be bad.

The apparent reducibility of practical to theoretical reason. Since what is good is a fact about the world, or an aspect of what is, it is something that theoretical reason knows at the ontological philosophical stage, for that includes knowledge of the nature of goodness. And since reason gives rational beings the autonomy to do the good because they believe that it is good, it should be possible to predict what ontological reason will ultimately do in the world.

To know the course of evolution, it is not necessary to know all the details about how it will happen, because it is a global regularity about what happens in whole regions of space. This holds for cultural evolution by rational selection as well. It is possible to know how culture will evolve without predicting all the details. That is, after all, how we know that the evolution of ontological philosophy is inevitable.

Even before reason discovers the nature of goodness, it is sometimes able to tell what is good, because rational imagination enables rational subjects to discern what is naturally perfect. Reason can see the uniqueness of the naturally perfect, because it stands out against the background of what all is possible. Thus, reason can tell, in principle, what is good for any organism, for the ecology, and for life itself. Even in the case of individual subjects and spiritual animals, where inherited desires have the function of picking out goals to be pursued, reason judges which actions are good by their contribution to the natural perfection of the whole of which they are part. Thus, it is possible to predict what reason will wind up believing and doing.

Thus, when reason discovers how the world is whole and comes to understand its own nature and its own place in evolution, it will use its understanding of the nature of goodness to sharpen its perception of what is naturally perfect and, thereby, discover more accurately and completely what is good. Though it will still be a result of cultural evolution by rational selection, rational subjects will be better able to judge which arguments make their world view more coherent, because they will understand how everything in the world fits together as a whole and that will constrain their views on particular normative issues in ways that previously seemed impossible. The completeness of their understanding of the nature of the world is what enables reason to see which truths are necessary, including necessary truths about what is good. And since reason will recognize itself as having, in its practical employment as behavior guidance system, the function of doing what is good for rational beings, it will do whatever it discovers to be good for itself.

Thus, it seems that there is no basic difference between the implications of spatiomaterialism about what exists and what ought to exist. What ontological reason will do in the world is inevitable, like any stage of evolution, and thus, it is something that can be known by theoretical reason alone. Since practical reason does not play an essential role in explaining what reason ought to do, necessary truths about what ought to be can be reduced to necessary truths about what is.

The irreducibility of practical reason. Contrary to this impression, however, the necessary truths of practical reason about what ought to be cannot be eliminated in favor of necessary truths of theoretical reason about what is. There are two reasons, one superficial and the other more profound.

First, some of the goals that reason will pursue are optional. Reason gives subjects the capacity to do what is good because it is good, that is, simply because they believe that it is good, and as we have seen, that means that rational subjects can pursue goals in addition to those that control relevant conditions (that is, in addition to conditions that affect their own reproduction). These “optional goals” must already be good (by contributing to natural or artificial perfection in some way), but there is such a wide range of goals to choose from that it is not possible to predict which ones will be chosen. And since choosing them is what makes them good for the rational subject, it is not possible to predict all of the goals that rational beings will pursue. It is also possible for spiritual animals to pursue optional goals. Thus, the future course of evolution is, in principle, not predictable.

Optional goals for rational beings are like aspects of biological evolution that are contingent. It is not possible to predict contingent aspects of evolution, because they are not essential to the global regularity caused ontologically by reproductive cycles and space. Indeed, it is not always easy to see, even in retrospect, what is inevitable about the course of biological evolution and what is not. Since optional goals are contingent, what reason does in pursuit of them is not predicable. Thus, if optional goals are as big a part of what ontological reason does as its power would suggest, much of the future course of evolution is not predictable, at least not on ontological grounds.

The pursuit of optional goals means that what reason does in the world is more like the creation of something beautiful, like a work of art, rather than something it discovers, like a truth about the world. There will be a perfection about it, but since it is an expression of a unique form of life, it will be a unique form of beauty.

Though ontological philosophy includes everything that reason can know about the nature of the world, the future course of evolution will depend on the optional goals it chooses to pursue, and thus, reason stands to its work in the world like each rational subject stands to his or her own Self.

Insofar as the future course of evolution is not predictable, it cannot be among the necessary truths of ontological philosophy about what is, and thus, practical reason cannot be reduced to theoretical reason.

Second, there is a more profound reason why practical reason cannot be reduced to theoretical reason. That is because reasoning about what ought to be may make the pursuit of certain goals inevitable for ontological reason, even though they cannot be predicted from what is good for reason as a behavior guidance system for individuals and spiritual animals. Doing what is good for the world as a whole is such a goal, and it may be a necessary truth about what is in a spatiomaterial world like ours that they are pursued. But it is an ontologically necessary truth about what is that can be known only by reasoning about what rational beings ought to do. Thus, we cannot know whether there are any such goals without following out all the practical implications of our ontological foundation.

Goals that would be of this kind are ordinarily called “religious,” because they come from the recognition that there is something that is worthy of worship. Such a religious interest may not be reducible to the individual or spiritual interest of rational beings, because it could depend on recognizing the existence of God. And if God is not necessarily a transcendent being, naturalism does not rule out the possibility of God's existence.

Though religious goals are pursued before the evolution of ontological philosophy, that earlier pursuit of religious goals is among the necessary truths of theoretical reason (about what is), because religious goals (and the beliefs about God on which they are predicated) can be predicted, as we have seen, by the function of religion at the rational spiritual stage (that is, as the attempt to provide an ultimate justification of the principles of practical arguments, including morality and submission to the group, which are part of rational culture). But that function does not require belief in God after ontological philosophy evolves, because its ontology entails, by way of the reproductive global regularities, an explanation of the nature of goodness that explains why rational subjects ought to be moral. Moral beliefs do not depend on God for their justification.

Similarly, at the philosophical spiritual stage, religious goals pursued as a result of the belief in a transcendent God (as part of epistemological philosophy) are necessary truths of theoretical reason, because they are a predictable part of its attempt to overcome the dichotomy between theoretical and practical reason. But ontological philosophy explains the nature of reason in a way that entails that dichotomy, and thus, it does not need God to overcome the dichotomy of facts and values.

Neither belief in God nor religious goals can be predicted by theoretical reason alone after ontological philosophy evolves, because they do not help maximize the power of reason to control relevant conditions. But it is nonetheless possible that its pursuit of religious goals is inevitable, because given what ontological reason knows about the world, it may realize that there is something that is worthy of worship and, thereby, know that it ought to pursue such goals. If so, those goals would be good for reason, and the pursuit of those goals would be the work of ontological reason in the world. That is how the wholeness of the world may include how reason makes the world more "whole"it would be otherwise.

Though this conclusion of practical reason would depend on what ontological philosophy implies about what is, it would be practical reason that leads ontological reason to take up this work in the world. To show the inevitability of the pursuit of religious goals, we would have to follow practical reason to its conclusions, and so practical reason could not be reduced to theoretical reason.

That is the sense in which reason is not merely the knower of what is, but also an agent that helps determine the future course of evolution. What it does would not be not determined in the way that everything is caused prior to the evolution of ontological philosophy, but would be an act of free will. And it would be a truly creative act.

The pursuit of religious goals, if they are pursued by ontological reason, are ontologically necessary in the end, and thus, they are indeed a necessary aspect of a spatiomaterial world like ours. But the way that ontological philosophy knows them is different from all the other necessary truths, because this necessary truth cannot be known without using practical reason at the ontological stage. But once it is known by way of practical reasoning, it is also known by theoretical reason. It is part of what is as well as what ought to be. It is just that theoretical reason is essentially reflective in the end, knowing about its own role as an agent in the world. This is, as we shall see, God's knowledge of himself as a person.

In order to discover whether reason has such a religious interest, therefore, we shall consider all the goals that reason ought to pursue in three steps, by considering the three practical interests that reason has (or may have) because of the nature of the beings that are rational. The first is the individual interest, which reason has because of its responsibility for pursuing the good of the individual as such. It is usually called “self interest.” The second is the spiritual interest, which comes from reason’s responsibility for guiding the behavior of the spiritual animal. And the third is the religious interest, because that is the traditional name for the interest that reason has when it pursues in the belief that there is something that is worthy of worship, that is, something of such exalted glory that reason ought to revere it and serve it, even beyond its own individual and spiritual interest.

These are interests that reason has in addition to its interest, as reason, in knowing the good, the true and the beautiful. The latter are rational interests, which contribute to the natural perfection of culture as a result of cultural evolution by rational selection. But the interests to be discussed here are practical interests, because they have to do with how reason guides the behavior of the beings whose behavior it controls. Which goals rational beings pursue depends on what is good for them, and that makes it a matter of practical reason.

Ultimately, they are all, of course, interests of the individual rational subject, if they are interests at all, because the subject, as an individual mind, is the ultimate agent of reason in its function of guiding behavior. The individual is the being who must ultimately judge what is good, true, and beautiful and, indeed, who must ultimately do what is good. Thus, they are all forms of "self interest," where the Self is understood as the four dimensional object that one constructs by how one leads one’s life, for they are interests that rational subjects must pursue as part of such a life.

With the evolution of ontological philosophy, therefore, reason recognizes itself as the inevitable outcome of evolutionary change in a spatiomaterial world like ours. Ontological reason recognizes itself as the most powerful being in the world. And reason recognizes itself as having the function of doing what is good for rational beings. Thus, the main question for practical reason is, “What are those goals?” It can be answered by determining what contributes to the natural perfection of rational beings.

By “self interest” I mean, in this case, “individual self interest,” or the interest that the rational subject has as an individual.

Since in our terms, the “Self” refers to the life of the rational subject, all the practical interests of the rational subject can be can be called forms of self interest. Thus, given that the rational subject also has a spiritual and religious interest, their corresponding names would be her “spiritual self interest” and her “religious self interest,” respectively. (See discussion of these forms of self interest in Change: Dichotomies of rational level culture.)

Individual self interest includes, as we have seen, two kinds of goals, necessary goals and optional goals. The necessary goals are the goals that are good for the individual because they control conditions that affect her reproduction as an individual. Optional goals are goals that are good for the individual because they are good in some other way and the individual chooses to pursue them, making them good for herself. These two kinds of goals are good in different ways, and since there are correspondingly different reasons why they are what ought to exist as far as reason is concerned, let us consider them separately.

The individual subject is a multicellular animal, and like any animal, there are certain conditions that the rational subject must control because they affect her reproduction. These are the necessary goals of individual self interest.

They include all the goals implicit in animal nature, such as obtaining food, shelter and other necessary resources. But they also include goals implicit in the nature of the animals that are parts of spiritual animal, that is, the social goals, such as maintaining family relations, having friends, and other social relations that are normal for members of one’s spiritual animal. To a certain extent, therefore, they are relative to the technology and style of life that prevails in the spiritual animal in which one lives. However, they do not include animal goals that are incompatible with being a member of a spiritual animal, such as avoiding the risk of losing one's life fighting wars, since that is a necessary aspect of the ecological niche that individuals occupy

It should be kept in mind, however, that necessary goals do not include reproduction itself. Reproduction is not one of the conditions that affect reproduction, but, rather, what determines which conditions are relevant to control, which is the criterion for necessary goals. By controlling relevant conditions, the subject is in a position to reproduce, if she chooses. But reproduction itself is an optional goal (unless, perhaps, reproduction must be controlled because of necessary goals pursued by the spiritual animal). Reproduction is good for the subject, if she chooses to reproduce, and it brings with it all of the other goals that having children entails.

Necessary goals are normally picked out by desires that are inherited as part of biological nature, which include social goals. From hunger to the need for companionship and love, the goal selection system built into individual subjects by the biological behavior guidance system guides behavior toward goals that control conditions that are relevant in the sense of affecting individual reproduction. But what makes the goals good is not that they satisfy desire, as hedonism mistakenly assumed. Rather, as evolution by reproductive causation implies, they satisfy desires because they are good in the sense of contributing to one’s maximum holistic power as an organism, that is, of contributing to the natural perfection of the individual as an organism.

The function of the desires that motivate the pursuit of necessary goals is the same as in other animal organisms, namely, that they control some condition that must be controlled in order maximize one’s power to control relevant conditions over one’s entire reproductive cycle. In other words, they contribute to the natural perfection of the individual in the same way as the goals pursued by non-rational animals.

Even the hedonistic rational subject, before ontological philosophy evolves, is more powerful than non-rational animals, because when she chooses to behave in the current situation in ways that will maximize the satisfaction of her desires over her lifetime, she also tends to be choosing ways of behaving that control the relevant conditions more efficiently and reliably.

But when the rational subject gives up hedonism in favor of a functional explanation of desires and recognizes that the control of relevant conditions, rather than the desire, is what makes the object of desire good, she is even more powerful over her whole life than the hedonist. The desires built into the brain as part of its goal selection system are a crude indication of the kinds of goals that will give the individual the maximum holistic power of an organism. She is better able to see the relative importance of such goals and how they can be attained as efficiently as possible by considering their role in controlling relevant conditions than by the amount of pleasure they give.

Our ontological explanation of the nature of goodness implies, therefore, that necessary goals are good for the rational subject as an individual because they contribute to her natural perfection as an individual organism. And since they are good for the rational subject, we infer that the rational subject ought to pursue them. That is the form of the argument that will be used to show that goals are good for reason in each of the cases below. But it is commonly assumed that the difference between facts and values makes any such proof impossible, that is, that values cannot be reduced to facts. Indeed, there is a famous philosophical argument against this kind of explanation of what ought to exist, and it will be answered here, though it works the same way for all the goals that determine what ought to exist for reason. What is at issue is whether there is a naturalistic fallacy.

It seems that there is reason to doubt that this argument about the goals that rational subjects ought to pursue is valid. For it can be argued that, from the premise that a goal is good for a rational subject in the sense of contributing to her natural perfection as an individual organism, it does not follow that she ought to pursue it. Indeed, the belief that any such implication holds is called the “naturalistic fallacy.”

Ontological philosophy does give a naturalistic definition of “good,” because it defines “good” as contributing the natural perfection and that is a property that can be known by theoretical reason alone in explaining the nature of evolution (as reproductive global regularities). But according to G. E. Moore, goodness cannot be explained naturalistically. Indeed, he would insist that it commits a logical fallacy which he called the “naturalistic fallacy.”

Moore’s own positive view is that goodness is a simple, non-natural property that supervenes on natural properties (where that means that if one thing has it, then anything else with a relevantly similar physical nature also has it). Its simplicity keeps goodness from being explained in terms of simpler properties, and its non-naturalness is supposed to explain its normative meaning, that is, that what has the property, goodness, ought to exist. But what is relevant here is the problem to which Moore was pointing, which is better known as the difference between fact and value. Can values be reduced to facts, or is there something inherently irreducible about them.

The most compelling argument that G. E. Moore gives for believing that there is a naturalistic fallacy is the so-called “open question argument.” Moore argues that, given any naturalistic definition of “good,” it is possible to ask meaningfully of something that is good according to that definition, “But is it good?” For example, if “good” is defined as being pleasurable, it makes sense to ask of something that is pleasurable,” But is it good?” because it might be bad, for example, because of its later consequences or because it is morally wrong. It is an open question whether something satisfying that naturalistic definition is actually good and ought to be chosen. Moore insists that the same holds of any naturalistic definition of “good.” If any such naturalistic definition of “good” were correct, Moore’s question should be as insignificant as asking, “But is the good good?” or “Is the good what ought to be chosen?” Thus, the fact that Moore’s question can be asked significantly with respect to any naturalistic definition of “good” shows that there is a naturalistic fallacy.

A. J. Ayer argued in a similar way against naturalism, albeit is as a logical positivist. He argued that if a naturalistic definition of "good" were correct, it would be self contradictory to hold that something that satisfies the definition is not good. Thus, the fact that no such proposition is self contradictory would also suggest that naturalism rest on a fallacy.

However, it is not possible to know in advance that Moore’s question will be significant with respect to every naturalistic definition of “good.” Thus, it can be argued that Moore simply had not tried the right naturalistic definition. And that is the way to refute Moore’s open question argument without denying its validity as a test for fallaciousness. (Likewise for Ayer's way of challenging the truth of naturalistic definitions of "good.")

Let us, therefore, apply Moore’s open-question argument to our ontological explanation of the nature of goodness. The issue is, then, whether it can be asked with significance, Is what contributes to natural perfection good? Or since we are talking about what is good for reason, the questions is, Is what contributes to the natural perfection of a rational being good for that rational being?

There is a way in which Moore’s question might seem significant, though it is not relevant here. It might seem significant, because one does not understand what it means to say that something contributes to natural perfection. In order to understand the question, it is necessary to understand this ontological explanation of the nature of goodness, and that means understanding its explanation of the cause of evolution and seeing how it involves an inevitable series of stages leading up to rational subjects like us. Let us assume, therefore, that the question is being asked by someone who understands the conclusions of theoretical reason about what is and recognizes herself as a rational subject of the kind they entail. That is, let us assume that it is being asked by someone at the stage of ontological philosophical spirit, that is, by ontological reason.

In that case, the answer to Moore’s open-question argument will be that it is not significant, at least, not in any way that is relevant to showing that some mistake is being made. Let us focus on the case at issue, about the goodness of the necessary goals of individual interest. The theory implies that such goals are good because they contribute in essential way to one’s natural perfection as an individual organism. To ask, But are these necessary goals good? is to ask whether one has sufficient reason to pursue them. But rational subjects do have sufficient reason to pursue goals that are good in this sense, because pursuing goals of that kind is part of their nature as rational subjects. When the rational subject recognizes that she is a being of the kind that comes to exist as a result of evolution by reproductive causation, that she is able to ask this question about whether she ought to pursue necessary goals because she is rational in the way implied by this theory, and (as we shall see) that all the goals she already takes to be good as a rational being are shown to be good by their contribution to one’s natural perfection as a rational subject, it simply does not make sense to ask if what contributes to one’s natural perfection is good. That is simply what reason does: it pursues the good in that sense.

This point can also be put from the outside, so to speak, because Moore’s question is closed by the ontological explanation of the dichotomy between theoretical and practical reason. The difference between facts and values is one of the dichotomies among arguments at the rational spiritual stage of evolution. Facts are conclusions of theoretical reason, and values are conclusions of practical reason. Ontological philosophy overcomes this dichotomy, as we have seen, by deriving the nature of reason as part of the course of evolution by reproductive causation, for that reveals that reason is a behavior guidance system that uses knowledge of the true to discover what is good. “Good” in that sense is defined as contributing to natural perfection, which is a naturalistic definition. But when we recognize that we are rational beings in that sense, then that is also what we mean by the word, “good.” To ask whether what contributes to one’s own natural perfection is good, when one accepts ontological philosophy, is as senseless as asking, But is the good good?

Likewise for Ayer's argument against a naturalistic definition of "good." For someone with ontological reason, it is self contradictory to deny that something that contributes to natural perfection is good, for that is what "good" refers to in a spatiomaterial world like our own. There simply is no other meaning that "good" could have in such a world.

The more profound refutation of the naturalistic fallacy is ontological philosophy's response to Moore, because its way of closing Moore’s open question also provides the kind of wisdom that Socrates was seeking in the name of philosophy, as love of wisdom. I am assuming that what Socrates was seeking is an explanation of the nature of goodness that would make any rational subject who understood it virtuous. That is my interpretation of the meaning of the Socratic principle: knowledge is virtue.

This is a plausible interpretation of Socrates’ argument in the Apology. When the oracle at Delphi says that Socrates is the wisest man in Athens, Socrates insists that he does not have the kind of wisdom that he takes the sophists to be claiming to have when they offer to teach virtue for a fee. In order to find out what the oracle meant, Socrates explains, he went about cross examining various kinds of respected figures in Athens about the nature of wisdom, and he found in each case that they did not have the wisdom that they claimed to have. How he showed this might be called “Socrates’ open-question argument,” because when they explained their wisdom about goodness, he was always able to point out that there was some question about whether it was really good. In the end, the only wisdom that Socrates admits to having is knowing that he does not have knowledge. But in the context of the Apology, it is clear that what he means is a knowledge about the nature of goodness that would make one virtuous, that is, the kind of wisdom that the sophists claimed to have by promising to teach virtue. Thus, the merely human wisdom that Socrates does have, which he describes by saying that he knows he does not have knowledge, can be expressed more positively as knowledge about what wisdom is, namely, that it is knowledge about the nature of goodness that would make one virtuous. That is the kind of wisdom that Socrates takes philosophy to be the love of.

Our way of closing Moore’s question is also, therefore, a way of giving Socrates the wisdom that he sought as a philosopher, or lover of wisdom. It explains not only what is good for the rational subject, but it also explains why it is good and, thus, gives the rational being a sufficient reason to choose it. The good is what contributes to one’s own natural perfection as a rational subject, and what makes the good good is that it contributes to one’s own natural perfection. The answer that Socrates was seeking is the same answer that Moore was denying was possible, namely, a self-understanding by reason that reveals how reason is related to a kind of perfection that is appropriate to the nature of what exists (including himself) in a spatiomaterial world like ours.

Thus, since ontological philosophy can explain the goodness of all the goals that we believe that rational beings pursue, it succeeds in doing what Plato tried to do for Socrates by taking an epistemological approach to philosophy. It vindicates Socrates’ merely human wisdom by showing that there is, indeed, a kind of goodness the knowledge of whose nature would make a rational being virtuous. But instead of being The Good Itself (the source of the other Forms in the realm of Being, according to Plato) what makes things good is the natural perfection that is entailed by progressive evolution, when evolution is explained as a global regularity caused ontologically by reproductive cycles and space.

Within this ontological theory, however, let me mention a way in which it might seem that Moore’s question is still open and significant (and Socrates’ quest is not fulfilled), though it comes from failing to recognize the nature of natural perfection. What generally makes Moore’s question significant when asked about other naturalistic definitions of “good” is that there are always ways that it could turn out that something that satisfies the naturalistic definition is not good because of some larger context in which it occurs where it is bad. That is, I assume, how Socrates was able to cast doubt on the wisdom about virtue that other Athenians claimed to have. But that is not possible, because of the way in which "good" is defined by ontological philosophy, that is, how it explains the nature of goodness ontologically.

In the case of hedonism, for example, Moore points out that, although defining “good” as pleasure seems plausible at first, we discover that the definition is faulty when we see that it makes sense to ask, But is pleasure good? That question makes sense because we know there are situations in which pleasure is bad. (Socrates uses this argument as well.)

But Moore’s question cannot be significant in an analogous way when applied to our definition of “good,” because there is no larger context in which what contributes to natural perfection can turn out to be bad. All the forms of natural perfection fit together as parts of the overall structure of natural perfection as a single, spatio-temporal whole, and thus, whatever is good by virtue of contributing to some form of natural perfection is good by virtue of contributing to the natural perfection of the whole. That is the unity of goodness on this theory.

It is true that what is good for one organism can be bad for another, as we have seen in the case of the predator and its prey. Eating another animal is good for the predator and bad for the prey. But this is not an ultimate conflict, because the predator catching the prey is good for the ecology, that is, contributes to the natural perfection of the ecology (not to mention how it contributes to the natural perfection of life or to the natural perfection of change).

Nor does Moore’s question become significant by wondering whether the natural perfection within which everything else is good might turn out to be bad in a still larger context, like a perfect murder or perfect tyranny. The overall structure of natural perfection includes spatially a whole planet or, perhaps eventually, a whole planetary system, and temporally, the whole course of evolution. Its larger context is the rest of the universe, with all its other stars and galaxies. But there is nothing about the large scale structure of the universe that could possibly make natural perfection bad. What we know about the rest of the universe is that evolution will follow the same course on any other suitable planet, and that can hardly make evolution in our planetary system bad. On the contrary, given the vast reaches of space separating planetary systems, the rest of the universe seems, at worst, to be indifferent to what happens on any one planet (or planetary system). It is meaningless to suggest there is some larger context in which natural perfection is bad.

There is, however, a way in which it does make sense to ask, Is what contributes to natural perfection good? But it is not a way that supports belief in a naturalistic fallacy. One could be asking if there isn’t something more to goodness, some further story to be told about its nature that is not included in the definition. That surely makes sense. What is good by our definition could be good for other reasons as well. I suggest something like that below. But what is relevant here is that the possibility of such a deeper explanation of the nature of goodness does not supply any reason to doubt that what contributes to our natural perfection is good. It merely adds to the story about why the good, so defined, is good. And far from supporting the claim that there is a logical fallacy about defining “good” naturalistically, it presupposes the possibility of such a naturalistic explanation.

There is, therefore, no naturalistic fallacy. G. E. Moore’s mistake was to infer from his own inability to find a naturalistic definition of “good” that would close his “open question” to the conclusion that there can be none. He promoted his inability to think of a naturalistic definition into a logical fallacy. But as we have seen, there is a naturalistic property to which “good” might be referring that does close his question, at least, if evolution is caused by reproduction. (The same holds for Ayer.)

In fact, the nature of the property, goodness, may also explain why Moore saw “good” as referring to a simple, non-natural property. Goodness may seem to be a simple property, for the goodness of anything actually depends on how it is part of a unique kind of structure that is as large as the planet, at least. That is why “good” cannot be defined by any set of physical properties that characterize the local objects, events and conditions that are said to be good.ⁱ And goodness seems to be non-natural, since to be good means that it ought to exist, and unless one understands the nature of the natural perfection in the world and recognizes oneself to be part of it, it is hard to see how any naturalistic property could call for things that have it to exist. Thus, by closing his open question, not only does this view of goodness show, on Moore’s own turf, that there is no naturalistic fallacy, but it also explains why Moore takes it to be a simple, non-natural property. It seems to be a simple, non-natural property because it is actually the most complex, natural property.

The autonomy of reason, as we have seen, makes the subjects who have the power of reason basically different from all other multicellular animals. It enables them to do what is good because they believe that it is good, and thus, in addition to goals that control conditions that affect their own reproduction as individuals, they can pursue goals that are good in virtue of contributing to the natural perfection of other evolving things or to artificial perfection, such as works of art. And since rational subjects will inevitably choose to pursue them, we have assumed that such goals are good for the rational subject when she chooses to pursue them. That is how we introduced the notion of optional goals for rational beings. But now that the issue arises for practical reason, it might be asked whether rational subjects ought to pursue optional goals.

Reason is autonomous, because it is the new, language-based behavior guidance system that takes over control of animal behavior as primitive spiritual animals evolve into rational spiritual animals. The animal desire to submit to the leader’s instructions becomes the desire to submit to the conclusions of practical reason, and thus, reason wrests control of behavior from (other) animal desires (that is, from control by the goal selection system of the multicellular animal behavior guidance system). That is, as we have seen, what makes it possible for the rational subject to puruse what she believes are necessary goals of individual self interest, even when it is opposed by strong immediate desires. But since reason works by enabling the subject to intend and actually do what she believes is good, it also enables her to pursue goals beyond those that control conditions that affect her individual reproduction, or optional goals.

Optional goals include all goals that are good for other reproducing structures, the ecology, life, or change because of how they contribute to their natural perfection, as well as what is good in virtue of contributing to artificial perfection. They include, for example, doing good for other individual rational beings (beyond what is required by morality, that is, as supererogation), making contributions to culture (beyond the normal rational interest in knowing the good, the true and the beautiful), serving the interest of one’s spiritual animal (beyond duty), doing good for other spiritual animals, for the ecology, for life, or for evolution generally. And optional goals include creating or enjoying works of art, including not only works of fine art, but also the aesthetic aspect of one’s daily life.

It is good to pursue optional goals, however, only insofar as necessary goals are already being attained. Necessary goals take priority over optional goals. But the power of reason is so great that rational beings are often in situations where they are able to control more conditions in the world than what affects their individual reproduction, and they spend their extra rational action on optional goals. The choice of such goals is what makes them good for the rational subject. But as rational subjects, they cannot choose to pursue any goal unless they believe (correctly or mistakenly) that it is already good in some way, that is, by contributing to the natural or artificial perfection of something. The autonomy of reason is the power to do what they believe is good, not the power to act arbitrarily or capriciously.

The natural (or artificial) perfection of other things in the world is often something that rational subjects can detect, because rational imagination enables rational subjects to see the actual against the background of the possible and that can reveal ways in which the whole is an optimal part-whole relation. The rational interest in beauty is also what enables rational subjects to see how best to control all the conditions that affect their individual reproduction, not to mention what enables them to judge what is true. It plays the same role in the choice of optional goals and pursuing them.

When a rational subject pursues an optional goal, she is guided by the perception of what is good for something other than herself, that is, by her perception of how it contributes to some other natural perfection. The judgment of what it is good to do is disinterested, because it depends of her belief about what is good for it. This is true even in the case of a work of art. What is good for the work of art is not what contributes to the natural perfection of something that is already evolving, because it does not even exist until the artist chooses to create it. But it does have an optimal part-whole relation, which is called beauty, and thus, it is like natural perfection and recognized by rational imagination in the same way. Artists testify that, as the work of art grows, it “calls for” certain additions so that the artist is merely ministering to its needs. That is the sense in which works of art imitate nature: the beauty of art is the imitation of the natural perfection found in nature. It is artificial perfection.

To say that rational subjects can choose to do what is good because they believe that it is good, even when it does not control relevant conditions, is not to deny that they may also have a desire to pursue that goal. It is only to say that the desire to pursue the goal is not what makes it good.

Desire may prompt the choice of one optional goal over another, for example, when the desire to listen to music leads one to become a musician or even just to listen to music. But that is not what makes the goal good. What makes it good is that what one is listening to or adding to the whole makes an essential contribution to the optimal part-whole relation of the work of art itself. Likewise, a benevolent desire may prompt her to take an interest in the good of someone else, but what makes the rational subject’s actions in pursuit of it good is not how it satisfies that benevolent desire, but how it contributes to the other’s natural perfection and, by doing so, contributes to her own natural perfection.

Moreover, once one has chosen music, say, as an optional goal, the desire that is the source of the enjoyment one gets from pursuing it is not merely the desire that prompted the choice in the first place. What the rational subject learns about its natural perfection in pursuing the optional goal transforms that desire. Not only does she come to enjoy new aspects of music, or whatever the object, but she also enjoys them for other reasons, having to do with how they contribute to the natural perfection of the whole. The desire that is being satisfied is ultimately the desire to submit to reason, though given how reason grows and matures with the rational pursuit of optional goals, it might be better called the desire to enjoy the power of reason.

It is the nature of rational imagination that leads us, as we have seen, to appreciate aesthetic goodness. The perception of beauty is implicitly the recognition of perfection, and that is what accounts for our response to it. In perceiving that nothing can be done to make it better, reason would have us leave it as it is and simply enjoy it.

However, if goals are not good because they satisfy desire, but rather because of the relevant conditions they control, as our ontological explanation of goodness and our functional explanation of desire imply, one might doubt that optional goals are good at all. Since they do not control conditions that affect the rational subjects reproduction as an individual, what makes them good?

It is clear that optional goals are not good for rational subjects in the same way that the goals of behavior in other multicellular animals are good for them, because the attainment of optional goals does not control “relevant conditions” in the sense of conditions that affect the rational subject’s reproduction as an individual. Controlling them does not necessarily make the individual better able to reproduce. Thus, ontological philosophy cannot explain why optional goals are good for the individual in exactly the same way as it does necessary goals.

Ontological philosophy does, however, imply that it is good for rational beings to pursue optional goals, because it explains the nature of goodness as contributing to natural perfection, not necessarily as contributing to its own maximum power to control conditions that affect its own reproduction. The latter is merely how the power to contribute to natural perfection is usually brought into being in a spatiomaterial world like ours.

The power of reason makes rational subjects essentially different from other multicellular animals, indeed, from all other organisms (except spiritual animals), and that means that their natural perfection is different from other animals. Though other organisms can only evolve behavior (and other structural effects) that control conditions that affect their own reproduction, that limitation is lifted in the case of rational beings, because reason guides behavior as a result of a cultural evolution of arguments that discover the true, the good and the beautiful. It is a behavior guidance system that is able to tell what is good more generally than by pursuing goals dictated by the biological behavior guidance system and what can evolve biologically by natural selection. It enables rational subjects to do what is good simply because they believe that it is good. Furthermore, since reason often gives rational beings more power than they need to control relevant conditions, the natural perfection of rational beings is not just the maximum power to control all conditions that affect individual reproduction. It is the maximum power to control conditions generally that are good.

In other words, the fact that a power to contribute to natural perfection does not evolve by making the organism better able to complete its own reproductive cycle does not imply that it is not good. Reproductive causation is merely what is usually responsible for the existence of such powers in the world. And if at later stakes in evolution, organisms acquire powers of that kind without being naturally selected for having them, that does not mean that they are not good. Given the nature of goodness, any contribution to the natural perfection of the whole of which something is part is good, regardless how it comes to exist in the world. That is something that reason enables the rational subject to recognize, though that is not why reason evolved in the first place.

Perfection is an optimal part-whole relation in which the whole does the most with the least, and in the case of natural perfection, it is an optimal part-whole relation in which the whole has as much power to use free energy to control what happens in the world with the fewest and simplest structural causes as possible. In the case of reason, the structural causes are the sources of rational action, that is, the use of practical arguments to guide one’s behavior toward the good. Thus, the optimum cannot be a matter of using the fewest and simplest structural causes to attain some given ends, for there is a fixed supply of structural causes, namely, all the behavior of a rational subject over her lifetime. In this case, the part-whole relation does more with less by using the structural causes already available to do more, that is, to control more of what happens in the world.

Nor is there any question about what counts as more or less control of what happens in the world, because optional goals are goals that control conditions that contribute to natural (or artificial) perfection in some way or other. Though they may not control conditions that affect one’s own reproduction, optional goals are not arbitrary or random changes in the world. They are not chosen by reason unless they are seen as contributing to the natural perfection of some other organism, to some other form of natural perfection, such as the ecology or evolution, or to an artificial perfection that imitates natural perfection, such as works of art.

Thus, the natural perfection of rational beings is more like the natural perfection of life than the natural perfection of organisms. New levels of part-whole complexity in the structures of reproducing organisms contribute to the natural perfection of life not because they control conditions that are already relevant to reproduction, but rather because their higher level of organization makes new conditions relevant and brings new conditions under control, extending the power of life as such to control what happens in the world. Likewise, what contributes to the natural perfection of reason is what increases the power to control what happens in the world, not to control conditions that are relevant to its own reproduction. In both cases, however, the new conditions brought under control are not arbitrary, but are good because they contribute to natural (or artificial) perfection in some way.

Rational subjects ought, therefore, to choose optional goals and pursue them. Though the optional goals themselves are not necessary, it is a necessary goal of rational subjects to pursue some optional goals or others, if they have the extra power to do so. It contributes to their natural perfection as rational subjects, even though those goals do not control conditions that are relevant to their own reproduction. The pursuit of optional goals is, therefore, good for rational subjects.

Thus, it is possible for ontological philosophy to answer G. E. Moore’s doubts about the possibility of any such naturalistic explanation of the goodness of optional goals in the same way as it did necessary goals. To a rational subject who understands her nature as a rational subject and her place in the natural world, it simply does not make sense to ask, But is contributing to one’s own natural perfection good?

The pursuit of optional goals is also part of the wisdom that Socrates was seeking, because this ontological explanation of the nature of goodness explains why optional goals are good for the rational subject. And the pursuit of any optional goal that one has chosen is good, because the pursuit of optional goals is good for rational beings and this goal is the one that the rational subject has chosen.

Reason has another practical interest, in addition to the individual interest of each subject, because it also has the function of guiding the behavior of the spiritual animal as a whole. The goals of the spiritual animal are good for rational beings in the same way as the goals of individual rational subjects, and there is also a difference in the goals pursued by spiritual animals between necessary and optional goals. But since all these goals, necessary and optional for both individual subjects and spiritual animals, are goals pursued by rational subjects according to arguments that evolve by rational selection, there must be priorities among them. Those priorities are set by rules of morality and rules of justice, and both sets of rules are good for reason in the same way, that is, by contributing to the natural perfection of reason.

What is good for spiritual animals is not necessarily the same as what is good for rational subjects, because spiritual animals evolve by reproductive causation on the social level of biological organization at the same time that rational subjects evolve by reproductive causation on the individual (or multicellular) level of biological organization. Though they depend on one another for their existence, each approaches the natural perfection for organisms of its own kind. At the same time that spiritual animal are becoming naturally perfect as social level animals made of rational subjects as parts, rational subjects become naturally perfect as multicellular level animals that live as parts of spiritual animals.

As a higher level of biological organization, spiritual animals depend for their existence on the coordination of rational subjects as lower level organisms. But the part-whole relation that holds between the spiritual animal and its members is, as we have seen, different from that between the multicellular animal and the cells that are it parts.

In both cases, what is good for the whole is usually good for the parts (because they are parts of the whole), but it can sometimes be bad for the parts as well. For example, the good of the whole sometimes requires the sacrifice of some of its parts. In spiritual animals, this happens in warfare, when some individuals must die, and in multicellular animals, the death of cells is a normal part of the process of development, for example, in the nervous system.

But there is a difference in how the good for the parts is related to the good of the whole. In both cases, it is generally true that what is good for the parts is also good for the whole, because the whole is made up of the parts and depends on them for its own existence. Indeed, in multicellular animals, what is good for the cell is never bad for the whole, because the only way that goals can be naturally selected for a cell is by the success of the multicellular whole in reproducing, that is, by natural selection at the higher level of biological organization. The cells cannot complete reproductive cycles on their own, independently of the multicellular reproductive cycle. In spiritual animals, however, what is good for the rational subject may be bad for the spiritual animal of which it is part, because its goals are naturally selected for the rational subject by how they contribute to individual reproduction, not just the reproduction of the spiritual animal as a whole. That is, individuals do reproduce independently of the reproduction of their spiritual animal. Thus, for example, some of the goals that rational subjects pursue because they contribute to their individual interest may be immoral or treacherous and, thus, harmful to the spiritual animal.

Instead of subordinating the good of the part to the good of the whole, therefore, the good for the individual and the good for spiritual animal are on a par. They are good for the same kinds of reasons, though on different levels of biological organization. And they are both good for the rational subject, for he is the agent of rational beings generally (that is, for the individual, the spiritual animal, and as we shall see, even for the world as a whole). Thus, individual and spiritual goals are both goals of the self, as the four-dimensional being that one constructs by his rational actions over a lifetime, and conflicts between individual and spiritual self interest must be resolved, or else reason will not be able to serve its function. They are resolved, as we shall see, by a symmetrical subordination of the good of each for the good of the other.

Spiritual animals pursue goals by way of institutions that generate social level behavior. (Institutions are patterns of interaction among members guided by low-level practical arguments about social roles and their duties, prerogatives and interrelationships, and their functions are the social level behavior they generate.) When choices must be made among social level goals, it is the function of political institutions, or government, to make the choice for the spiritual animal. And parallel to rational subjects, there is a difference between goals that are necessary and goals that are optional.

Spiritual animals have necessary goals. Goals that control conditions that affect the reproduction of the spiritual animal as a whole are necessary goals. Though spiritual animals, unlike multicellular animals, can continue to exist indefinitely without reproducing, there are nonetheless relevant conditions to be controlled. They must be able to reproduce, if the occasion arises, in order to be naturally perfect. Though reproduction is not a necessary goal of spiritual animals, it is the criterion of which other goals are necessary. And among their necessary goals, two kinds can be distinguished, because the social level behavior in pursuit of goals can be directed either at objects external to the spiritual animal or at its own members.

External necessary goals of spiritual animals are analogous to those of multicellular animals, except for warfare, the new kind of behavior that spiritual animals have toward one another.

Like multicellular animals, spiritual animals must acquire from nature the free energy and other resources they need to fuel their reproductive cycles (This aspect of the economic institution corresponds to feeding in other animals.) Spiritual animals must also protect themselves from natural hazards such as predators, storms and other disasters. And just as multicellular animals must mate, nomadic spiritual animals, at least, must maintain relations to other spiritual animals (such as membership in tribes) by which its members can mate outside their own spiritual animal.

The non-analogous goals arise from group-level natural selection of spiritual animals by war. The overriding goal of a spiritual animal in dealing with other spiritual animals is to wining at war with them, which involves making the best choice about whether (and how) to live peacefully or to engage in war relative to other spiritual animals with which it interacts.

Internal goals of animal behavior are unique to spiritual animals, because in spiritual animals, the animal behavior guidance system also serves as the biological behavior guidance system, that is, as the mechanism that coordinates the behavior of the lower level organisms of which it is composed. Thus, social level animal behavior must serve many of the same functions as the biological behavior guidance system in multicellular animals.

The economic institution also includes internal functions, such as coordinating the productive behavior of members and distributing the products, just as acquiring energy requires digestion and circulation in multicellular animals. Likewise, the government includes executive institutions that administer regulations, just as the brain has nervous connections to the rest of the body. But it also includes an institution for enforcing laws by punishment, which is analogous to the immune system in multicellular animals. The kinship system gives individuals locations in the spiritual body, corresponding to a process of embryological development for determining cells to certain parts of the body. Educational and religious institutions acculturate the members to the arguments that will guide their behavior, just as the endocrine system and parasympathetic nervous system guide the behavior of individual cells.

Some goals of internal behavior have no analogue in multicellular animals. For example, spiritual animals may have institutions that mediate the exchange of arguments and promote cultural evolution, such as academic, scholarly, and research institutions. Nothing like cultural evolution takes place in multicellular animals.

Some internal goals of social level behavior are especially relevant to practical reason because they have to do with controlling the pursuit of individual goals. The health of the spiritual animal requires that its members observe moral rules that limit the pursuit of the individual interests, for unless they are observed, members will not be willing and able to cooperate in generating social level behavior.

The content of moral rules is determined as the conclusions of practical arguments about how individuals should behave in situations that affect others or the spiritual animal as a whole. As we have seen, they include rules that require everyone to cooperate in generating social level behavior (including prohibition of treason and other crimes against the spiritual animal).They also include rules that prevent members from harming one another, rules that enable members to cooperate with one another (such as the duty of fidelity in promises and contracts) and facilitate cooperative attitudes (such as the duty of reciprocity in gift giving and civility.

Because practical arguments evolve when they are rationally selected by everyone, as we have seen, the rules tend to be the rules that maximize the good of the whole (as the utilitarians hold), that maximize the freedom of everyone (that is, minimize the limits they impose on the pursuit of individual goals, as the contractarians hold), and treat members equally (as Kantians insist).

The spiritual animal must act as a whole on its members to ensure that moral rules are followed. Violations of moral rules arouse anger in those who are hurt, and the motives selected for fighting wars tend to take the form of revenge and vendettas within spiritual animals, unless measures are taken to restore the moral equilibrium. The institutions that have traditionally served this function are the religious institutions, which publicly affirm and defend the principles on which other practical arguments are based, and the justice system (including the police and judicial system), which punish wrongdoing. (The former is part of the educational systems, analogous to the endocrine and parasympathetic nervous system in multicellular animals, whereas the justice system corresponds to the immune system, which kills mis-functioning cells in the body as well as invaders.)

Though many violations of moral rules are naturally sanctioned by the disapproval of other members, some violations of moral rules are so harmful and cause so much warlike antagonism that they are prohibited by laws, and retributive justice is reserved for them. Punishment of crime is a necessary goal of spiritual animals, if only because taking revenge on the individual level leads to civil war.

Rational subjects, therefore, insofar as they are responsible for selecting and generating social level behavior, ought to choose to pursue these goals. The attainment of these goals contributes to the natural perfection of the spiritual animal, because it controls the conditions that affect its reproduction as a whole. These goals are, therefore, good for reason in its function of guiding the behavior of the spiritual animal.

In response to Moore’s open question argument, therefore, it will not make sense for rational beings who understand the nature of reason and its place in the natural world to ask, But is what contributes to the natural perfection of spiritual animals good?

The pursuit of these necessary goals is also part of the wisdom that Socrates was seeking, because this ontological explanation of the nature of goodness explains why necessary goals are good for the spiritual animal.

There are optional goals of spiritual interest. Just as individuals can pursue goals because they are good even when they do not control conditions that affect individual reproduction, so spiritual animals can pursue goals that are good when they do not control conditions that affect its social level reproduction. Though in both cases the goal must already be good in some way (by contributing to the natural perfection of something, including artifacts), the goal becomes good for reason because it is chosen.

For the spiritual animal to pursue optional goals, a general consensus about them is normally required, because they are not necessary and pursuing them will involve the cost of generating social level behavior. But since there are goals that it would be good for spiritual animals to pursue, it is possible to make them good for spiritual animals by choosing them.

Though it is a necessary goal of spiritual animals to protect the environment from the damage of its own economic activity enough to survive indefinitely into the future, an optional goal might be to preserve as many species and ancient ecologies as possible in order to insure the diversity of life on earth.

It is a necessary goal of spiritual animals to make sure that they will win any wars they may fight, since that is a condition that affects their reproduction as a whole. But an optional goal would be to work together with other spiritual animals to end group level natural selection by war. That would require the control of population growth everywhere on the planet, including perhaps even decreasing it, since that is the basic cause of war and would eventually lead to war, unless it is controlled. Under such conditions it might be possible for spiritual animals to end war by cooperating in an international military force to protect national boundaries and prevent spiritual animals from harming one another. (Insofar as there are traits that spiritual animals would otherwise evolve by such group level natural selection which make them more perfect, it might also be necessary for spiritual animals to assume responsibility for giving spiritual animals those powers by other means.)

Natural selection at the individual level continues after a fashion within spiritual animals by success in individual reproduction, but it is significantly curtailed by modern medicine and where it is still at work, it involves much suffering. Thus, an optional goal for spiritual animals would be to replace natural selection with germ line intervention in order to eliminate genetic diseases and to enhance the powers that enable rational subjects to attain the goals they ought to pursue. For example, each couple could be given the option of adding or deleting certain genes from their offspring, and since they would choose what is best for their children, it would be decentralized process much like natural selection in which rational subjects could be expected to evolve further in the direction of natural perfection for organisms of their kind. It would be to replace natural selection at the individual level with rational selection.

Traditional optional goals have included building monuments. But a more up to date goal that may be optional for spiritual animals is space exploration and colonizing the rest of the planetary system. But there are other possible goals. In each case, it is not clear at this point in evolution whether these goals are optional or necessary. That is why the future course of evolution is not just a conclusion of theoretical reason, but with the evolution of reason’s ontological self-understanding, depends on where practical reasoning leads reason in the situations that arise.

The pursuit of goals of the spiritual animal may conflict with the rational subject’s pursuit of individual goals, and since they are both goals of rational beings, there is a conflict among goals that needs to be resolved.

The individual interest and the spiritual interest are equal, because they are good in parallel ways, that is, each by contributing to the natural perfection of the organism (or primary structure) on its own level of biological organization, and ontological philosophy provides no grounds for preferring one over the other. Both are equally the responsibility of reason, or goals pursued by reflective subjects as the agents of reason, and thus, it is a conflict between one's individual self interest and one's spiritual self interest.

When individual and spiritual goals conflict, what ought to exist for reason is what contributes to the natural perfection of reason as the behavior guidance system for both biological levels, that is, for the rational subject as a rational being. But what are those priorities.

Moral rules are generally assumed to take priority over the pursuit of individual goals. Indeed, that is their function: moral rules are meant to limit the pursuit of individual self interest. The general observance of moral rules is, as we have seen, a necessary goal of spiritual animals, for spiritual animals cannot pursue social level goals except by coordinating the behavior of its members and their ability to cooperate in pursuit of such goals depends on the members being moral in their relations to one another. But when moral rules do conflict with the pursuit of individual self interest, why should the rational subject be moral?

Let us recall the answers to this question at earlier points in evolution. Answers at the stage of rational spiritual animals are based on religion, but the answers given by epistemological philosophy are no more adequate.

Rational culture evolves arguments to justify the principles on which its practical arguments are based, and they generally have to do with explanations of the origin of the world, the place of rational beings in it, and the purpose in their existence. These arguments serve the function of mutually acknowledging the validity of the culture of one’s spiritual animal, but they are not rationally compelling. Religious beliefs are typically about gods or superior beings of some kind, which may be interpreted as representations of the spiritual animal and its interest. But in order to justify being moral, rather than pursuing their individual interest (or acting on emotion), they merely assert the priority of spiritual interest over individual interest. Though it may be obvious that being moral is in the spiritual interest, that is, good for the group as a whole, religion does not explain why the spiritual interest is prior to the individual interest.

Philosophical culture has attempted to give a deeper justification of moral rules. In the ancient and medieval period and continuing long into the modern period, the belief was that the reason for being moral, as well as the content of moral rules, has to do with something about the nature of goodness and, thus, is objective. Plato thought that the nature of goodness is explained by the existence of The Good Itself as the source of the other Forms — and, thus, of the goodness of visible objects that participate in the Forms as well. That was meant to explain why rational subjects ought to be moral in a way that would satisfy Socrates, that is, by making rational subjects virtuous. But Plato could never explain the nature of The Good Itself in a way that showed how it made other Forms good, much less why rational subjects should be moral.

It was possible to preserve Plato’s belief in the objective nature of goodness in the medieval period (and the early modern period) despite the inability to give an adequate explanation of the nature of goodness. The Christian view, in its most mature form, holds that it is God who understands the nature of goodness, whereas finite rational beings like us cannot. That is, God's ultimate purposes are said to be inscrutable. Insofar as we do not understand why we ought to be moral, therefore, we must so as a matter of faith. Though it is a faith that there is something about the nature of goodness from a God’s Eye point of view that makes morality prior to individual interest, it is still not reason that explains why we ought to be moral.

In the modern period, attempts to give a naturalistic explanation of the goodness of morality that would explain why we ought to be moral were ultimately failures. Hobbes, as a social contractarian, attempted to explain the content of moral rules as the result of a contract in which every rational subject gives up only as much freedom as is required to protect individuals generally from harming one another and enabling them to cooperate. But since that did not explain why the individual should not be immoral in pursuing his individual interest after the social contrast was signed and he could avoid being punished, it did not explain adequately why the morally good is good.

Kant attempted to explain the content of moral rules as what is required by universalizability, that is, his categorical imperative (that we should act only on those maxims that we can will to be a universal law of nature). But that left Kant with no way to show that individuals ought to be moral, because it did not give the individual any reason for choosing not to be rational in that sense, and being rational only in the sense of pursuing is rational individual interest. Kant suggested that the reason stems from something uniquely valuable about rational subjects, that is, as ends in themselves, but he was never able to explain what that was, except to suggest that is has something to do with the unknown (noumenal) nature of rational subjects and to suggest that freedom from pursuing goals set by one’s desires, or what he called “autonomy,” is somehow better.

Utilitarians, such as Bentham and Mill, explained the content of moral rules as what promotes the general happiness, but they too failed to explain why the rational subject should be moral. They assumed that the individual subject cannot help but pursue his individual happiness, but they were never able to explain why the individual should prefer the general happiness to his own happiness when they came into conflict.

Ontological philosophy does, however, explain why we should be moral. Its explanation of the nature of rational beings and the nature of goodness explains not only the content of moral rules, as we have seen, but also why the individual rational subject should take moral rules as prior to individual interest. The foundation of the priority of moral rules is that the spiritual interest is one of the basic interests of the rational subject. Because of the nature of reason and the way in which it works, the individual has, as a rational being, responsibility for guiding the behavior of the spiritual animal as well as his own individual behavior.

Reason evolved originally, as we have seen, with the function of guiding the behavior of spiritual animals to make reliable choices about war and peace. But since it works by the exchange of practical arguments among members and their rational selection by individual rational subjects (that is, the selection of arguments from among the alternatives that make their world views maximally coherent), it could also be used to guide individual behavior. In the case of guiding the behavior of the spiritual animal, however, not only the discovery of what is good, but also the selection and generation of social level behavior depends on the members coming to agree about what the spiritual animal ought to do (though, in practice, social level behavior may be guided by political institutions that are maintained by mutual agreement about the practical arguments that generate them). Given the way that reason functions as a behavior guidance system for the spiritual animal, therefore, the rational subject has, as a rational being, an interest in pursuing the goals of the spiritual animal. The rational subject is responsible for social level behavior and they contribute to the natural perfection of the whole of which he is part. And being moral is the most basic way that the individual contributes to the natural perfection of his spiritual animal.

It should be emphasized that the spiritual interest of the rational subject is different from his individual self interest in the spiritual animal because of how he depends on it as the means to pursuing his individual goals. First of all, the spiritual animal is the whole of which he is part, the context of all his activity, and thus, his welfare depends on its welfare. But furthermore, most of the goals he pursues depend on having the use of a spiritual body, as well as a physical body (in the sense that the means involve the cooperation of other members of his spiritual animal). Since his spiritual body is a most powerful means to attaining goals that are good for him as an individual, the individual has another interest in the good of the spiritual animal. But this is not his spiritual self interest. It is his individual self interest in his spiritual animal as the whole of which he is part and his individual self interest in having the use of a spiritual body.

Thus, the subject has necessarily, as a rational being, a spiritual self interest distinct from his individual self interest. And being moral is in his spiritual interest. But it may seem that it is not possible for ontological philosophy to explain why the rational subject ought to be moral, because when moral rules require limiting the pursuit of individual goals, there is a conflict between his two basic interests. They are equal interests, according to ontological philosophy, because they both arise in the same way (by contributing to the natural perfection of the organism on its level of biological organization) and the rational subject is responsible for both. They do come into conflict, because moral rules are meant to limit the pursuit of individual goals. It may seem, therefore, that ontological philosophy is inherently unable to explain why he ought prefer on to the other.

There is, however, a sufficient reason for being moral, because there is a simple and straightforward optimal resolution of this conflict which comes from recognizing the difference between necessary and optional goals of individual self interest. That is, submitting to moral rules is good for the rational subject because it contributes to the natural perfection of the whole of which the rational subject.

It is a necessary goal of the spiritual animal that its members observe moral rules, because that is a condition that affects its reproduction as a whole. The spiritual animal cannot act at all unless morality prevails, because that relationship among its parts is essential to its health.

On the other side, it is not a necessary goal for the individual to act contrary to moral rules. Moral rules limit the means the individual uses to attain individual goals, but they do not prevent him from attaining his necessary goals, at least, not in a healthy spiritual animal. In healthy spiritual animals, individuals are able to attain their necessary goals by moral means, if they make a reasonable effort. Thus, necessary individual goals never conflict with the necessary spiritual goal of being moral. Though moral rules may limit how the individual pursues necessary individual goals, that is merely to constrain his pursuit of his optional individual goals, for there are other ways to attain them and one way is good for the individual only because he chooses it.

To be sure, moral rules may make it impossible to pursue some optional goals at all. But since optional goals are good for the individual only because he chooses them, the individual can contribute to the natural perfection of the whole of which he is part by constraining his choices of optional goals in such a way that his pursuit of them does not involve the violation of moral rules. That is not a severe limitation on individual interest, because there are so many good goals to choose from in making goals good for himself. Thus, there is obviously a best way to maximize the attainment of the goals that are good for rational subjects, including both his individual and his spiritual self interest, and it involves being moral.

This implies, however, that in situations where following moral rules would make it impossible to attain the necessary goals of individual interest with a reasonable effort, it is not wrong to violate moral rules. But that is not surprising, because when the spiritual animal is not healthy enough to continue to exist, it does not contribute to the natural perfection of the whole of which the individual is part to pursue the goals that are necessary for the spiritual animal.

Rational subjects ought, therefore, to observe moral limits on their pursuit of individual goals, because it contributes to the natural perfection of the whole of which the rational subject is part. In this case, however, the whole is a unique combination of animals (or primary structures) at two different levels of biological organization, because the rational subject, as the agent of reason, is responsible for both. The priority of morality is a necessary goal of the spiritual animal (in virtue of controlling a condition that affects its reproduction as a whole), and since it does not conflict with any necessary goal of individual interest, being moral is what contributes to the natural perfection of their combination. Thus, it is good for rational subjects to take morality as prior to their individual interest.

In response to Moore’s open question argument, once again, it will not make sense for rational beings who understand the nature of reason and its place in the natural world to ask, But is what contributes to the natural perfection of both spiritual animals and their members good?

This reason for being moral is also part of the wisdom that Socrates was seeking, because this ontological explanation of the nature of goodness explains why the priority of moral rules is good for the rational subject.

What makes this an adequate explanation of why it is good for the rational subject to be moral is the assumption that moral rules do not conflict with the attainment of necessary goals of his individual self interest. But morality is not the only way that his spiritual interest can conflict with his individual interest. The pursuit of optional goals of the spiritual animal may conflict with the rational subject’s pursuit of necessary goals of individual interest, and thus, there is another conflict among goals that needs to be resolved.

Conflicts clearly do occur between goals of the spiritual animal and the necessary goals of the individual. Spiritual animals often find it useful to sacrifice some of its members in pursuing its social level goals, especially in civilized societies, where a class structure gives some members enormous power over other members, and in mass societies, where subgroups are historically antagonistic with one another. The history of oppression shows that this possibility has been actualized far too often.

One kind of conflict between spiritual and individual goals is so basic to the existence of both, however, that its burden on individuals cannot be counted as contrary to the necessary goals of individual self interest. That is the need of individual members to risk their lives in war. War is the inevitable form of group level natural selection that is responsible for the evolution of rational spiritual animals, and thus, neither spiritual animals nor rational beings can exist without accepting the burdens of fighting. The sacrifice of individuals in war does not, therefore, conflict with the attainment of necessary goals of individual self interest in the relevant sense.

The same may be said about dealing with natural disasters, insofar as group level action that sacrifices individual members is required to control conditions that affect the reproduction of the spiritual animal as a whole.

The rules of justice are meant to limit spiritual animals in the pursuit of its social goals in order to protect the rights of individuals. They are generally formulated in terms of inviolable individual rights because they are meant to protect individual rational subjects from being sacrificed unnecessarily in the pursuit of spiritual goals. Such rights include the most basic means by which rational subjects pursue goals of individual interest, both necessary and optional. Such rights include all the means the rational subject must have in order to attain necessary goals of their individual interest, and there are two general classes of them: basic liberties and distributive justice.

Basic liberties. Rational subjects must have the basic means required to attain necessary goals and lead a normal life, including the right to lead one’s life free from unreasonable arrest or other unnecessary restrictions, the right to speak, associate and contract with other people in public, the right to hold the beliefs that one takes to be true, the right to an equal opportunity to pursue optional goals and the like.

Distributive justice. Rational subjects must have enough economic power to be able, with a reasonable effort, to provide the material conditions of life, including the means for attaining necessary goals, such as food, shelter, medicine, and the capacity to have a normal social life.

But when spiritual goals do conflict with necessary goals of individual self interest, why should the spiritual animal observe rules of justice? This is the mirror image of the issue about the priority of moral rules over the pursuit of goals of individual interest. We are asking why the rules of justice are prior to the pursuit of goals of spiritual self interest?

All the goals are goals for reason, that is, for rational subjects acting in their capacity as the behavior guidance system for both the individual and spiritual animal, and what ought to exist depends on what contributes to the natural perfection of the whole, including both the spiritual animal and its members.

The individual self interest and the spiritual self interest are equal, because they are good in parallel ways, that is, each by contributing to the natural perfection of the organism (or primary structure) on its level of biological organization, and ontological philosophy provides no grounds for preferring one over the other. Both are equally the responsibility of reason.

When individual and spiritual goals conflict, what ought to exist for reason is what contributes to the natural perfection of reason as the behavior guidance system for both biological levels, that is, for the rational subject as a rational being. But what are the priorities?

What makes an optimal balance of individual and spiritual interests possible is that the necessary goals of individual and spiritual self interest can both normally be attained without conflict. After all, spiritual animals are viable organisms. They could not have evolved in the first place unless groups of multicellular animals with coordinated behavior were better able to control the conditions affecting both reproduction on both the individual and social level.

The compatibility of their necessary goals means that only optional goals need to be restricted for the good of necessary goals. We have assumed all along that necessary goals at each biological level take priority over the optional goals at that level. And we have just seen that the necessary goals of spiritual interest take precedence over the optional goals of individual interest. Thus, to see the optimal resolution in this case, we need only consider how necessary goals of individual interest take precedence, in the same way, over optional goals of spiritual interest.

The resolution of this conflict between individual and spiritual interest is the mirror image of the resolution that explained why moral rules takes priority over the pursuit of goals in one’s individual interest. In this case, it explain why rules of justice take priority over the pursuit of goals in one’s spiritual interest.

In both cases, the necessary goals of one biological level take precedence over the optional goals of the other level. That is a symmetrical relationship. And in both cases, that priority determines what is good for reason because it is what contributes to the natural perfection of the whole of which rational subjects are part, that is, the unique combination of reproducing organisms (or primary structures) that have evolved by reproductive causation at two levels of biological at once. (The priorities are depicted in the diagram of the symmetry of individual and spiritual interests).

Rules of justice limit the pursuit of goals of spiritual interest in the same way that rules of morality limits the pursuit of goals of individual interest. In both cases, the necessary goals of one interest are the foundation for limits on the pursuit of goals of the other interest. But they limit the pursuit of necessary goals in a different way from how they limit the pursuit of optional goals. They limit only the means to the attainment of necessary goals, but they can limit the pursuit of certain kinds of optional goals.

The necessary goals of individual interest limit how the spiritual animal pursues its necessary social level goals (just as moral rules limit how the rational subject pursues its necessary individual goals). Though there are certain goals that spiritual animals must attain, there are ways of attaining them that do not keep individual from pursuing their necessary individual goals.

This is not to say that the spiritual animal cannot sacrifice the property and even the lives of individual members in pursuit of necessary goals, such as victory at war and protecting against natural disasters. But those exceptions are already included. Avoiding the risk of war or avoiding mutual defense against natural disasters is not a possible means of controlling conditions affecting individual reproduction for members of spiritual animals, and thus, they are not necessary goals of individual self interest in the first place. Mutual protection from predators (and other natural disasters) and fighting wars have been necessary to the existence of the spiritual animal from the beginning. But individual rights protect the means that spiritual animals use to attain such necessary individual goals within the limits of morality, and no infringement on the rights of individual is justified.

Rules of justice would limit the optional goals that the spiritual animal can choose (just as moral rules limit the optional goals that rational subjects can choose). There may be optional spiritual goals that the spiritual animal is not permitted to pursue because they would conflict with individuals pursuing their necessary individual goals. But that is not a severe limitation on spiritual animals since optional goals are good for spiritual animals only because they are chosen and there are plenty of other optional spiritual goals on which spiritual animals may spend their extra power of rational coordinated action.

For example, the spiritual animal would not be justified in sacrificing the life of one member to use various of his organs to save the lives of several other rational subjects, even though that may maximize the total happiness, because maximizing happiness is an optional goal and it would violate his right to life. (Individuals may, of course, contract with others to set up such an arrangement, and the spiritual animal might be in the position of having to enforce the contract. But what makes the arrangement good is that it serves the individual interests of the participants, and what makes it good for the spiritual animal to enforce it, if it is, is that it is good to keep the contracts one makes.)

There may be conflicts between optional spiritual goals and optional individual goals. They will be limited if spiritual animals pursue optional goals only when there is a consensus about them, because the individuals would all contract, in effect, to cooperate in some social level goal. But if there are conflicts between optional goals on the individual and social biological levels, they do not pose any basic problem about what contributes to the natural perfection of the whole, that is, both the spiritual animal and its members, because optional goals are good for reason only because they are chosen and no matter how much extra power rational beings may have, there are plenty of optional goals to choose from.

The symmetry between the individual and spiritual interests of rational beings makes it clear, therefore, which goals contribute to the natural perfection of the whole of which reason is part, including both the spiritual animal and its members. Rational subjects acting in their individual self interest ought to observe moral rules, and rational subjects acting in their spiritual self interest (that is, in guiding social level behavior) ought to observe rules of justice, including both basic liberties and distributive justice (the economic means to attain necessary individual goals). This is the way to maximize the attainment of all the goals being pursued by rational beings, for by including the attainment of necessary goals on both levels, it makes it possible to pursue optional goals on both level of biological organization. Thus, it is the set of priorities that contributes to the natural perfection of rational beings. Thus, it is good to be moral and to be just.

In response to Moore’s open question argument, once again, it will not make sense for rational beings who understand the nature of reason and its place in the natural world to ask, But is what contributes to the natural perfection of both spiritual animals and their members good?

This reason for being moral is also part of the wisdom that Socrates was seeking, because this ontological explanation of the nature of goodness explains why the priority of moral rules is good for the rational subject.

The one remaining question is whether there is any other practical interest of reason. The traditional answer is that there is a kind of goal that is higher than both individual and spiritual interest, namely, religious interest, or the recognition of something that is worthy of worship. Is there anything holy in a spatiomaterial world like ours?

To assert that reason also has a religious interest is to hold that there is something worthy of its worship, that is, something that reason ought to recognize as holy or sacred and, thus, hold in reverence. Such an object would have to be of such exalted glory that it would inspire reason to adore it and act in a way befitting it. Such an object would be the source of a new kind of goal for reason, a goal which serves the religious interest of rational beings.

“God” is the name traditionally given for the object of the religious attitude, and the philosophical defense of religion has traditionally (in the West) been an argument for the existence of God. God is supposed to be a being of such surpassing perfection that He is worthy of our worship. But the belief in the existence of a being outside of space and time who is responsible for the natural world is supernaturalism, indeed, supernaturalism in its most familiar form, and that is what ontological philosophy gives up with its basic assumption of naturalism. Thus, if the existence of a transcendent God were what is required for reason to have a religious interest, then ontological philosophy would have to deny that reason has any such interest.

The repudiation of belief in a transcendent God has led naturalists to see religion in terms of its traditional function of justifying morality, and thus, it might be argued that ontological philosophy has already explained the religious interest by the spiritual interest of reason, as part of necessary truths of theoretical reason about what is. But if that is all there is to be said about religion, God is an illusion, and there are no religious goals for ontological reason to pursue, because ontological philosophy explains religion away. Ontological philosophy reveals that the reason for being moral derives from our spiritual interest, that is, from the function of reason as the behavior guidance system for both the spiritual animal and the individual. It would follow, then, that reason did not pursue religious goals because there is actually something worthy of worship, but simply because such beliefs were the most efficient way of guiding behavior to contribute to the natural perfection of rational beings, both individual and spiritual. It would debunk religion, because once ontological reason saw through its function, religion would no longer be needed to justify morality or to justify submitting to the group. Nor would reason be able to believe in anything like God, except, of course, as their own spiritual animal. But to hold that the interest of their own spiritual animal is what is served by the pursuit of religious goals would be to reduce religion to tribalism.

If this is how ontological philosophy must treat religion, people with a religious sensibility would surely use it as a weapon against ontological philosophy. It is ontological philosophy that believes in tribalism, for it makes the spiritual animal the source of highest goods that reason pursues. By contrast, traditional religions, despite their troubled histories, have usually thought of their goals as something more than mere tribalism, especially Christianity and Islam, with their universalistic claims. Thus, if ontological philosophy must simply dismiss religion, as most contemporary naturalists do, there are many people who will be disillusioned, if they accept it, and regret the absence of anything of truly ultimate value.

The issue is, therefore, whether there is anything in a spatiomaterial world like ours that is worthy of worship by rational beings, that is, anything that rational beings would submit to from sheer knowledge of its exalted nature.

None of the goals of reason explained thus far by ontological philosophy can be considered religious, because they are not pursued from awe at the prospect of something of extraordinary perfection and glory. Necessary goals of reason are pursued because they control conditions that affect the reproduction of the individuals or spiritual animals whose behavior reason guides. To be sure, optional goals are good for contributing to the natural (or artificial) perfection of something other than rational beings, but they are good for rational beings only because they are chosen. If ontological reason has a religious interest, therefore, there must be goals that are more valuable for reason than mere optional goals without being required in the way that necessary goals are.

The only way ontological reason could have such an interest is if there is something worthy of worship in a spatiomaterial world like ours. And as it turns out, there is. The reason is that it is possible that there is — or will be — an absolutely perfect being in a spatiomaterial world like ours. And the possibility of such a perfect being is enough, as we shall see, to make the religious attitude appropriate and to explain how reason has a religious interest in addition to its individual and spiritual interest. Ontological reason will pursue goals that are good because they contribute to the natural perfection of the world itself, and the pursuit of such religious goals will make the world even more perfect. Indeed, since ontological reason takes responsibility for doing what is good for the world, as well as the individuals and spiritual animals whose behavior it already guides, it will be the agent for the world, making the world itself a rational being. Thus, the world itself will be a perfect rational being. God is immanent, not transcendent. Though such an absolutely perfect rational being is something that will be created by reason, it is something that is worthy of worship, and the work of ontological reason in the world is to bring God into existence. That is how reason makes the world "whole."

A Perfect Being is possible in a spatiomaterial world like ours, because it could be the outcome of evolution. We have seen how the basic nature of a spatiomaterial world with a large scale structure like our own and with matter that is capable of taking on complex molecular structures like ours makes evolution by reproductive causation inevitable. Not only does evolution inevitably begin on suitable planets, but it goes through inevitable stages that lead up to rational beings like us. And as we have seen, when reason finally comes to understand how the world is whole, it discovers its own nature as a behavior guidance system for both the individual and the spiritual animal, and as I have suggested, that makes reason the most powerful being in the world. But what I want to suggest now is that, if rational beings take the perfect being that would come to exist they it were to pursue religious goals to be worthy of worship, ontological reason will eventually evolve all the perfections that have traditionally been attributed to God, insofar as that is possible in a spatiomaterial world. The evolution of ontological reason would make the world itself an absolutely perfect being, that is, God.

The personal perfection attributed to God are omniscience, omnipotence, and absolute goodness. It is possible for reason to evolve all the perfections attributed to God as a person, because a person is a rational being and theses traits are the perfection of reason as a behavior guidance system. They are, respectively, the perfection of knowing, doing, and choosing. This would be the outcome of a late phase of cultural evolution during the philosophical stage of spiritual evolution, one that starts with reason understanding of its own nature and place in the world (that is, with ontological reason) and may not be complete for some time.

Reason has three functions, let us recall, because behavior guidance systems are not mere cybernetic (or functional) systems, which use feedback to guide their behavior toward some goal, but have a function in addition to input and output, namely, choosing between incompatible goals. Even if the same input is used to select the kind of behavior and to generate it, as in animals, the selection is a third, essential sub-function of behavior guidance systems, the one that makes them the locus of evolutionary progress. It is the perfection of these three functions of behavior guidance systems that accounts for the traditional perfections: omniscience has to do with the input function, omnipotence with the output function, and absolute goodness with the function of choosing. In rational beings, the first has to do with the perfection of knowing, the second with the perfection of doing, and the third with the perfection of choosing.

Omniscience. Reason will eventually be omniscient, because the input to this behavior guidance system will be the most complete knowledge of the world possible. Reason will be able to know everything that it is possible for reason to know about the world. That is possible, given the nature of space and matter in our world, since as we know, everything in the world and everything about the world can be explained by how it is constituted by those two kinds of opposite substances. What is ontologically necessary in a spatiomaterial world like our own can be known without explaining why the basic laws of physics are true, but there is no reason to doubt that reason will eventually understand the essential natures of space and matter that make the basic laws of physics true. The knowledge of what is ontologically necessary is the framework that makes it possible to explain as completely as required any aspect of the world.

To be sure, this kind of omniscience does not include knowing all the contingent details about the world, nor does it include knowing aspects of the future that depend on its own practical reasoning. But that is the kind of omniscience one might expect of a transcendent God, not what can be expected of an immanent God. As an immanent God, reason will be able to know as much about any contingent aspect of the world as is possible for any part of a world made of space and matter. And since it will be able to figure out how efficient causes can be used to control whatever can be controlled in such a world, it will be able to discover whatever is relevant to attaining its goals. That is as much as is possible for a being in space and time.

As ontological reason begins this phase, the biggest gap in its knowledge is in astronomy and cosmology. But that does not affect the possibility of this future course of evolution, because it does not affect what reason knows about evolution and its own nature as the outcome of biological evolution. It is not necessary to know why the basic laws of physics are true to demonstrate the global regularities about change; it is only necessary to know that they are true.

Omnipotence. Reason will also be omnipotent, because the output of this behavior guidance system can control conditions in the world as well as any structural cause can in a spatiomaterial world like ours. Its omniscience includes knowledge about the means to any goals it may choose (or, at least, where to look for them and how to recognize them when they are found), and so the only limit to its power will be its ability to structure the thermodynamic flow of matter from potential energy to evenly distributed heat. But reason is responsible for guiding the behavior not only of individual rational subjects, but also spiritual animals, and thus, no structural cause can be more powerful than the spiritual structural cause of spiritual animals guided by reason, for it can coordinate the behavior of as many, independently moving animal bodies as are needed to attain the goals that it pursues.

Nothing can equal its power except another spiritual animal. But as we shall see, war would be overcome, when reason understands the nature of goodness, because of its pursuit of religious goals. Understanding the basic cause of war makes it clear what rational beings must do in order to attain their goals without resorting to war. Without such conflicts among spiritual animals, rational beings will be as powerful as possible as anything that can exist in a spatiomaterial world.

Nor is the omnipotence of such spiritual animals is merely potential. Though the parts are rational subjects who are autonomous, they will cooperate in pursuing the goals that spiritual animals pursue, if they are good. Their autonomy as rational beings is what enables them to cooperate in pursuing such goals, because it enables them to do what they believe is good.

Though reason will not be omnipotent in the way that a transcendent God is supposed to be, it will be able to attain any goal that is it possible for a part of a spatiomaterial world. And the lack of the power to do magic or create a natural world from nothing is not a real limitation, if the world is made of space and matter, because it is not ontologically possible in the first place. Omniscience has never been understood as the power to do what is impossible.

Absolute Goodness. Reason could also be absolutely good in the end. We have already seen why reason would pursue what is good for reason. All that needs to be added for reason to be a perfect being is that it also pursue what is good for the world as a whole, that is, to pursue religious goals.

Ontological reason would always pursue what is good for itself, as we have seen, because the function of choosing how to behave is served by a behavior guidance system that discovers what is good by understanding the nature of goodness. It recognizes that goodness is contributing to natural perfection, and rational imagination gives reason the ability to tell what is naturally perfect by seeing how it is a unique optimum against the background of what is possible. And since ontological reason recognizes itself as an essential part of such a natural perfection, it has sufficient reason to do what is good. It knows that there can be no reason not to do what contributes to the natural perfection of which it is part. Thus, it will do what is good for reason, that is, it will pursue goals that contribute to the natural perfection of reason itself, including both necessary and optional goals.

In order to be absolutely good in the sense implicit in traditional theology, however, reason would have to pursue goals beyond what is good for rational subjects and spiritual animals. To do God’s work is to pursue religious goals, and that means pursuing goals that are good in virtue of contributing to the natural perfection of the world itself.

That would be possible, if there are conditions that reason can bring about that would make the world itself more naturally perfect and they would not come to be in any other way. The natural perfection toward which evolution proceeds is only what is possible by reproductive causation, and natural selection is a crude instrument that takes much time and can involve much suffering. By doing what natural selection cannot do, or doing it more quickly or less wastefully, reason could make contributions to natural perfection that are not otherwise possible. It might make the structural causes bundled together in organisms or the organisms combined in ecologies even more optimal in the sense of having more power to control relevant conditions, and reason might make contributions to the natural perfection of life and the natural perfection of change by avoiding setbacks in evolutionary progress or changing their timing. Such goals would require much more detailed understanding of the evolving structures involved, but it is not impossible to make the world even more naturally perfect than it would be otherwise. Thus, reason could be good in the sense of doing what is good for the world itself, rather than just what is good for rational subjects and spiritual animals.

There are some specific goals that might be good for reason to pursue because they contribute something to the natural perfection of the world that cannot come to exist in any other way. They include the goals mentioned above as optional goals for spiritual animals. But what we need to recognize now in order to see how there could be a perfect being in a spatiomaterial world like ours is that they are also good in a different way -- not because they are chosen, but because they contribute to the natural perfection of the world. Instead of being optional, we need to suppose that reason pursues them because they are good for the world as a whole, thereby taking responsibility for making the world more perfect than it would be otherwise.

One such goal is the protection of the ecology from disruption by spiritual animals, or what is called protection of the environment. Though the capacity to survive storms, asteroids and other natural disasters may be part of the natural perfection of the ecology, protection from what spiritual animals do to it is unique, because it is an effect on the ecology that only reason can control. Furthermore, there may also be other ways in which reason might make the ecology more perfect in the sense of maximizing the use of available free energy to fuel reproductive cycles than is possible by reproductive causation. For example, it might make the ecology more perfect to tend it like a garden so that more of the available free energy is consumed.

Another such goal would be to replace the natural selection of spiritual animals by warfare with measures that would make spiritual animals just as perfect, but without the suffering involved in warfare. The only way to stop war, however, is to control population growth, since war is merely the form that the natural selection caused by reproduction takes in the case of spiritual animals. But this would not necessarily make evolution and the world more naturally perfect, unless reason also tended to spiritual animals themselves so that they become no less naturally perfect for organisms of their kind without natural selection. But if that is possible, it would surely make the world itself more perfect, because it would attain the same end with fewer and simpler means than all suffering the effects of war. War is, after all, a very wasteful means to the evolution of spiritual animals. Thus, the creation of a world order in which all spiritual animals could live in peace with one another into the indefinite future is a plausible religious goal.

Another possible religious goal would take over natural selection at the individual level as well as the social level. Natural selection at the individual level is responsible for rational subjects evolving toward the natural perfection of organisms of their kind, but insofar as it is still at work, it is also a wasteful process because of the suffering that it involves (such as individuals dying of genetic diseases). But reason could take over from natural selection as the cause of individual evolution by intervening in the germ line to correct genetic defects and to change genetic structures so that rational subjects are more powerful in attaining the goals they pursue, that is, are more naturally perfect as rational subjects.

There are surely other religious goals, including many that can be pursued on the individual level, because there are other changes that reason could bring about in the world that are neither necessary goals nor mere optional goals, but that would make the world itself more naturally perfect. And as far as spiritual animals are concerned, one of the more important religious goals will probably be the colonization of the solar system in the sense of changing conditions on them so that life can evolve on them as well as on earth.

All that is required for the outcome of evolution to have the personal perfections traditionally attributed to God is for ontological reason to pursue goals because they contribute to the natural perfection of the world itself, rather than just because they contribute to the natural perfection of reason in its role as the behavior guidance system for rational subjects and spiritual animals. That would mean that religious goals rank after the necessary goals of rational beings, yet ahead of their optional goals.

Religious goals would not be good because they are necessary goals of reason. Necessary goals of reason are those that control conditions that affect its reproduction, either as individuals or as spiritual animals. But religious goals are good because they contribute to the natural perfection, not of the individual or the spiritual animal, but the world itself. Religious goals cannot reduce to necessary goals of reason as the behavior guidance system of the world, because there are no conditions that affect the reproduction of the world itself. What makes religious goals good is simply contributing to the natural perfection of the world. But that requires seeing the world itself as a form of natural perfection. It depends on reason understanding the nature of goodness as contributing to natural perfection and seeing how what reason can do beyond merely controlling conditions that affect the reproduction of rational beings would contribute to the natural perfection of the whole.

Nor would religious goals be good as mere optional goals, either of individual subjects or spiritual animals. Optional goals are good for reason because they are already good in some way, and reason makes them good for reason by choosing them. Though religious goals are also already good, they are good in a unique way, because they contribute to the natural perfection of the world itself, not just to the natural (or artificial) perfection of a part of it that happens to catch one’s fancy. Nor are religious goals good for reason simply because reason chooses to pursue them. Rather they are good because they make the world itself naturally perfect. If religious goals are good for reason at all, they are good for reason whether or not rational beings choose to pursue them.

The religious interest, if ontological reason has such an interest, is, therefore, distinct from both necessary and optional goals. There is no reason to believe that religious goals would conflict with the necessary goals of reason, because the control of conditions affecting individual and social level reproduction would be an essential part of the natural perfection of the world. But the pursuit of religious goals would affect the pursuit of optional goals, both individual and spiritual, because reason would see their goodness as prior to optional goals. Most optional goals would be compatible with the natural perfection of the world, because optional goals also contribute to natural (or artificial) perfection in some way. But the religious interest would set priorities among optional goals, because in the context of an overall plan is to make the world itself perfect, some optional goals will contribute more to the natural perfection of the whole than others.

Ontological reason has, therefore, the potentiality of being not only omniscient and omnipotent, but also absolutely good. But if that is the future of evolution, it means that the advent of ontological philosophy is only the beginning of a phase of the philosophical stage of the gradual evolution of spiritual animals that leads to it. It will be mainly cultural evolution by rational selection, but the natural perfection for culture of this kind may not be complete until the far distant future, because there may be much for reason to do, including, perhaps, even stages in the evolution of the means it uses to attain its ends. After all, the social and political problems that it must solve are not insignificant and reason has only begun to acquire the technological control of nature that is possible. However, if ontological reason does pursue religious goals, a perfect being with all three personal perfections traditionally attributed to God would be the natural perfection toward which gradual change during that stage will proceed.

The existence of such a perfect individual and spiritual being in the world would be a form of natural perfection by our definition of “natural perfection,” because it would be the kind of optimal part-whole relation that makes the most of what exists in a spatiomaterial world like ours. For an all-knowing and all-powerful being to act for the good of the world as a whole would be for structural causes to use as much free energy as possible to control as much as possible of what happens in the world.

To pursue religious goals would make reason more powerful than simply pursuing necessary and optional goals, because it would be to set a priority among optional goals with an eye to making the world as a whole naturally perfect. Since the goals pursued would do what is required for the natural perfection of the whole, they would fit together more completely than any other set of goals, and thus, reason would be doing as much as possible to control what happens in the world. In other words, to pursue goals that conflict with religious goals could only detract from the maximum power of life, and to pursue optional goals instead of religious goals would be to have less effect on the world than is possible.

Acknowledging its religious interest would, of course, make only its planetary system naturally perfect, because given how space separates it from other planetary systems, that is the only part of the world that it can affect. But that is all that ontological reason can contribute to the natural perfection of the world as a whole, at least, for the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, it is clear that there can be no further evolutionary stage in the series that has led to ontological reason, because there is no higher level of part-whole complexity in reason as a behavior guidance system that would make it any more powerful. No higher level of forensic organization (that is, in the part-whole complexity of argument) can guide behavior any better than one in which reason understands its own nature as a system for guiding behavior that has evolved in a world of matter and space in time like our own, for there is no higher level of reflection than one that understands the wholeness of the world. Ontological philosophy is already complete in that way. Thus, once reason understands its own nature and function as a behavior guidance system, no other structure could discover what is good for individuals or spiritual animals better than it.

There is, by the way, no possibility that machines constructed as artifacts will replace multicellular animals as rational subjects, except for modifications of human biology. A machine could, perhaps, eventually be as powerful as reason, though that would require it to have rational imagination (including spatial and structural imagination as well as the capacity to reflect on itself). But such a machine would not be conscious in the way we are, unless it was constructed of neurons like our own, because the phenomenal properties whose intrinsic natures explain the subjective aspect of experience (or the fact that it is like something to perceive and think) are the intrinsic natures of the photons generated by the synchronized firing of many neurons throughout the cerebrum, like an extraordinarily complex antenna. Rational beings would not choose to replace conscious rational beings with machines that are not conscious, that is, with Zombies. They might know and control all the same conditions that make the world perfect, but without the unity of mind, there is a way in which the perfection would not exist at all.

If, therefore, ontological reason does find the prospect of such a perfect being worthy of worship and reason does evolve toward natural perfection of this kind, it will be the last stage of evolution, because it will have a kind of behavior guidance system than which none more naturally perfect can be conceived.

The kind of natural perfection that exists at this point in the evolution of philosophical spirit may be dwarfed by the perfection that eventually comes to exist, but it is clear that its basic nature permits it to acquire all the perfections that have traditionally been attributed to God as a person. Indeed, the traditional view of God can be seen as an attempt to conceive the greater perfection that is potential in rational beings before reason understands its own nature and place in the world. The traditional belief in God merely looks for God in the wrong place, as something that transcends nature, rather than as something in or about nature itself. But in order to show that what could evolve from ontological reason is a perfect being in the sense of a traditional God, it is necessary to show that this kind of perfect being also has the ontological perfections traditionally ascribed to God: being necessary, ubiquitous, and eternal.

Just as omniscience, omnipotence, and absolute goodness are simply the perfection of the three subfunctions of a behavior guidance system, so these three ontological perfections can be seen as holding of reason because it is the inevitable outcome of evolution in a world of matter and space like ours enduring through in time.

Necessary being. God as a perfect rational being would be a necessary being in a spatiomaterial world like ours, if it is the eventual outcome of evolution, because evolution is a process that inevitably gets started on suitable planets. His existence would follow from the nature of a world of matter and space in time, given that matter has the nature described by the basic laws of physics in this world and the universe has a large scale structure like our own.

If ontological reason inevitably acknowledges a religious interest, the existence of a perfect being would be a consequence of the basic nature of a spatiomaterial world like ours. Since evolution is, as we have seen, a global regularity, we might say that the necessity of a perfect rational being is shown mainly by recognizing how space is an ontological cause of evolution.

This would give God, however, the same kind of necessity that the world itself has, and there is another way in which God has traditionally been thought to be necessary. That is, substances exist necessarily because they cannot come into existence nor go out of existence as time passes, and that makes God necessary, since God is their necessary ontological effect. But the necessary existence of God has been said to derive from His being the cause of Himself, or causa sui. That would also be true of this perfect rational being, as we shall see, if ontological reason, in its practical capacity, inevitably acknowledges a religious interest.

Ubiquitous being. God is ubiquitous in a spatiomaterial world, because it is a necessary being. Reason will evolve everywhere in a spatiomaterial world with a large scale structure like our own, though its frequency depends on how often suitable planets occur. If reason must evolve into God, God will exist throughout the universe.

To be sure, scientists who understand that life could exist on other planets have set up antennas to listen for messages from more advanced life forms in the hope of solving the mysteries of the universe, and they have come up with nothing. But if ontological philosophy is right about the course of evolution, that is just what we should expect. Ontological reason will not even try to communicate with life on other planets, because it will know that intervening and solving the problems that reason confronts on other planets would only cripple the spiritual beings that are evolving there. On the other hand, if ontological reason has already evolved on distant planets, there is nothing to say to them, at least, not in that way. (There may be other ways that rational beings from different planetary systems interact. But they will be severely limited, given the distances they are separated in space and the impossibility of traveling faster than light, and they will occur at a much later point in the evolution of perfect rational beings.)

Reason is also ubiquitous in another sense, which comes from its spiritual nature as the behavior guidance system of a spiritual animal. As ontological reason evolves control over everything that happens on its planet or in its planetary system, there will be a single spiritual structural cause whose non-reproductive work dominates its entire planet, and eventually the entire planetary system where it evolves.

The ubiquity of a perfect being is a consequence of the basic nature of a spatiomaterial world like ours, but in a world that is obviously in space, evolution depends on matter being of the same kind everywhere. Hence, we might hold that its ubiquity is shown mainly by how matter is an ontological cause of evolution.

Eternal being. God is eternal in a spatiomaterial world, also because it is a necessary being. God will exist as long as the universe itself does, because He will evolve again and again throughout the existence of the world. If the universe is eternal, God will have eternal life.

Moreover, particular Gods can be eternal in their own planetary systems, because spiritual animals can exist indefinitely, even if individual rational subjects cannot, and there will always be some free energy to use as fuel for their reproductive cycles. Though God may have to inhabit only the farther reaches of the planetary system when the sun becomes a red giant and engulfs the earth. There is now about four and a half billion years to prepare. And if the red giant later becomes a white dwarf, God could move back in closer and have all the free energy required to exist indefinitely, if He so chooses.

This is to hold that the expansion of the universe does not end (as suggested in our discussion of cosmology). That is the most likely case, because as far as scientists can tell, there is not enough matter for gravitation to cause the universe to collapse back to another Big Bang, and apparently not even enough to slow the expansion to a stop asymptotically, that means the universe is eternal. However, if the Big Bang is a recurrent local process, as suggested earlier, there would be no end to the evolution of perfect rational beings.

The eternity of a perfect being is also a consequence of the basic nature of a spatiomaterial world like ours. But since it depends on how the space and matter constituting the world endure through time as substances, its eternity is shown mainly by how time is an aspect of the existential aspect of the nature of substance as substance. Thus, the eternality of God might be said to depend on how time is an ontological cause of evolution.

Except for being the creator of the world, therefore, ontological reason could eventually come to have all the perfections traditionally attributed to God, both personal and ontological perfections. It depends on whether ontological reason has a religious interest, that is, on whether it chooses to pursue religious goals in addition to its spiritual and individual goals, and that depends, in turns, on whether the prospect of the perfect being that would result is worthy of worship.

All that is required for ontological reason to evolve into a perfect being is for it to pursue goals that are good because they contribute to the natural perfection of the world itself, rather than just goals that contribute to the natural perfection of reason as the behavior guidance system for rational subjects and spiritual animals. Will ontological reason pursue religious goals?

It cannot be shown that reason ought to and will pursue religious goals in the same way that its pursuit of individual and spiritual goals, because religious goals do not contribute to the natural perfection of rational beings. Religious goals are not necessary goals of reason. They do not control conditions that affect the reproduction of rational beings at either the multicellular or social level of biological organization. And religious goals cannot be explained as optional goals, for that does not explain their special worth. Nor would optional religious goals make the existence of God inevitable.

To have a religious interest, reason would have to be the behavior guidance system for the world as a whole. But that is not a function reason could possibly have as a result of biological evolution. The pursuit of goals that contribute to the natural perfection of the world cannot evolve like another level of biological organization, beginning another stage of biological evolution, because the world itself is not a reproducing organism. That is, the world as a whole is not a primary structure generating reproductive cycles. Even something as small as the planetary system or the planet is still the whole in which evolution takes place, not a level of biological organization.

It is nevertheless possible for ontological reason to have a religious interest. The belief that rational beings ought to pursue religious goals would evolve by the rational selection of practical arguments, if what would result were perfect enough to be worthy of worship, because to beings with a faculty of rational imagination, it will be clear that accepting arguments for acknowledging a religious interest gives them the most rationally coherent world view.

As rational beings come to understand the nature of reason and its place in the world, they will see how it is possible for there to be a perfect being in a spatiomaterial world like ours, and they will recognize that its existence depends on whether they pursue religious goals, in addition to the necessary and optional goals of their and spiritual interest. If the perfect being that would result from pursuing religious goals is exalted enough that rational beings revere it and serve it from the sheer recognition of its unique natural perfection, rational beings will identify with the world itself, not just their spiritual animals or themselves as individuals. And by acting in the interest of the world as a whole, they will contribute what only reason can contribute to the natural perfection of all the organisms, to the natural perfection of the ecology, to the natural perfection of life, and to the natural perfection of evolutionary change itself. And by pursuing religious goals, a perfect being will come to exist in their planetary system.

The answer that ontological reason will give to this question is obvious to anyone who understands the situation in which reason will find itself and what is at stake in its choice. Once ontological philosophy evolves in the cultures of existing spiritual animals, rational beings will actually face this choice, and the answer will be acted out in history, determining the future course of evolution. But as rational beings who have traveled the path of this whole argument, we are in a position to know that ontological reason will see the perfect being that they can bring into existence by their actions as worth the effort.

Reason gives them more power than they need to pursue necessary goals, and among the optional goals that are open to them, some will take precedence because they contribute to the natural perfection of the whole of which they are part. By acknowledging that it has a religious interest, reason will change in the direction of maximum holistic power, because when the world as a whole is naturally perfect, as much as possible of what happens in its planetary system will be controlled using the available free energy as efficiently as possible. Ontological reason will, therefore, choose to pursue religious goals.

This choice is similar to another stage of evolution, because an entire new range of conditions come under the control of living organisms. In this case, those conditions are not relevant in the sense of affecting the reproduction of an organism with a higher level of part-whole complexity. But the conditions that are controlled are on a higher level of part-whole complexity than the necessary and optional goals of rational beings, because they contribute to the natural perfection of the world itself (that is, at the scale of its planetary system, the part of the world it can affect). Thus, what makes it good to pursue religious goals is the same thing that makes a higher level of part-whole complexity in evolving organisms good: it contributes to the natural perfection of life.

Though the autonomy of reason makes it possible to pursue any goals that are good, the pursuit of religious goals maximizes the holistic power of reason, because, as we have seen, they are aimed at controlling all those conditions that make the biggest difference in the perfection of the world as a whole. There is no other set of goals that would enable reason to control more of what happens in the world, and thus, religious goals would contribute to the natural perfection of reason itself.

The self-creation of God. For rational beings to choose to pursue religious goals, however, is for ontological reason to choose to transform itself into God. It is the prospect of a perfect being inspires them to make this choice, but the perfect being in prospect comes from reason itself, and thus, it comes from reason choosing to do what is good because it contributes to the natural perfection of the world as a whole. But since that is to act as the perfect being that ontological reason intends to bring into existence, God already exists in those actions. Thus, the belief in God is a self-fulfilling belief. God creates Himself. And God continues to create Himself in all the actions that are done in the interest of the world itself.

Even the immanent God in a spatiomaterial world like ours would be causa sui. God would create Himself, because ontological reason makes itself into God by acting in the name of God.

The world as a rational being. To pursue religious goals is, however, to act for the good of the world as a whole, and thus, it is for the world itself to be a rational being. That is, ontological reason takes up the function of being the behavior guidance system for the world itself, and thus, it does for the world what it does for the spiritual animal and for the individual rational subject.

To be sure, the world does not become a rational being because it is a reproducing organism like individuals and spiritual animals, imposing natural selection on themselves by their own reproduction. But that is merely to say that the world does become a rational being as a direct result of natural selection, or biological reproductive causation. It is due, instead, to the cultural evolution of practical arguments by rational selection. The world acquires the power of reason to do what contributes to the natural perfection of the world itself, because the kind of natural perfection that inevitably comes to exist within it includes rational beings who are able to understand how the world is whole, who recognize themselves as a necessary consequence of its nature, and who see how and why it is good for them to act in the interest of the world as a whole.

The world as a perfect rational being. Since this outcome is inevitable, however, the world is not only a rational being, but a perfect rational being. The nature of a spatiomaterial world like ours makes it inevitable that evolution will begin, because as we have seen, the effect of the cycle of night and day on the kinds of molecules that exist on suitable planets is the existence of reproductive cycles, which impose natural selection on themselves. The course of evolution is inevitable, because, as we have seen, it involves an inevitable series of evolutionary stages, each caused by a higher level of part-whole complexity in the evolving structures of reproductive organisms (taken broadly to include arguments that reproduce within spiritual animals as primary structures). We have seen how the inevitable outcome is ontological reason, that is, rational beings who understand how the world is whole, who recognize themselves as the inevitable outcome of evolution, and who inevitably choose to pursue religious goals because they see how it would make the world itself perfect. With reason acting as a behavior guidance system in its interest, the world is a rational being. But since it is an inevitable consequence of the nature of a spatiomaterial world like ours, it is an expression of the essential nature of what exists. The nature of the world is revealed, not only in the basic nature of what exists, the essential natures of space and matter in time and how they exist together as a world, but also in the nature of what inevitably comes to exist from it. Thus, it turns out that the world itself is perfect. And since the world is inevitably a rational being, the world is a perfect rational being.

What we have been calling “natural perfection” are part-whole relations that are optimal because of the basic nature of the world, but now we find that that nature not only sets the standard of perfection, but also measures up to it in the most complete way. In general, the perfect makes the most out of the least. But the standard of perfection appropriate to nature is fixed by the second law of thermodynamics, because that makes it possible for structural causes to use the thermodynamic flow of potential energy towards evenly distributed heat to make things happen that would not otherwise happen. Judged according to this standard, part-whole relations are optimal when structural causes are combined in such a way that they use the available free energy as efficiently as possible to control as much of what happens in the world as possible. That is how to make the most out of what exists in a world constituted by space and matter enduring through time. And now we find that the basic nature of the world not only sets the standard of natural perfection, but also makes it inevitable that what happens in the world eventually measures up to that standard as completely as possible. And it is more complete than what is possible by natural selection alone, because it uses a behavior guidance system that guides behavior to what is good by recognizing how and why the good is good, even when it does not control conditions that affect its own reproduction.

The world as God. Since the world, because of its very nature, inevitably becomes a perfect rational being, the world itself is God. As ontological reason acknowledges its religious interest, it takes responsibility for the world as a whole, doing what ought to be done because it contributes to the natural perfection of the world as a whole. That is the work of ontological reason in the world, to act for the good of the world itself.

Thus, it will be possible for ontological reason to answer G. E. Moore’s doubts about the possibility of any such naturalistic explanation of the goodness of religious goals in the same way as it does his doubts about the goodness of other goals. To a rational subject who understands her nature as a rational subject and her place in the natural world, including her identification with the world as much as with her spiritual animal or her individual Self, it will simply does not make sense to ask, But is contributing to the natural perfection of the world good? She will know that it is contributing to her own natural perfection and, thus, that it is good in the same way as her other goals are good. Religious self interest will, therefore, take its place, along with spiritual self interest and individual self interest, as what determines the goals she will pursue. That is, they all contribute to the natural perfection of reason.

The pursuit of religious goals is also the wisdom that Socrates was seeking, because this ontological explanation of the nature of goodness explains why religious goals are good for the rational subject in a way that will make him religious. The pursuit of religious goals is good for him as a rational being, because it contributes to his own natural perfection.

An act of free will. God comes into existence from an act of self-creation, and though it is inevitable, it is an act of free will. As we have seen, free will is autonomy, or the power that reason gives individual subjects to do the good simply because they know that it is good. The choice of ontological reason to pursue religious goals is autonomous in that sense, because it comes from the knowledge that it is good for rational beings to contribute what only reason can contribute to the natural perfection of the world as a whole. It is inevitable, but only because it really is good and reason understands things so completely that it knows that it is good.

God’s act of self-creation within a spatiomaterial world is free in the same sense that Aquinas had in mind when he argued that God’s choice to create the natural world was free. Aquinas was, of course, talking about the traditional, transcendent God of epistemological philosophy. But he wanted to deny that the existence of the natural world is a necessary consequence of God’s nature, because that would mean that it was not an act of free will. What Aquinas meant can be expressed, I believe, by saying that God created the world because He understood the nature of goodness. Because that understanding enabled Him to see that it would be good to create the world, He chose to create it because it is good. In the same sense, it is by an act of free will that God creates Himself in a spatiomaterial world: ontological reason understands the nature of goodness and, by seeing that it would be good for God to exist, chooses to create God because it is good.

That is also the sense in which practical reason, according to ontological philosophy, cannot be reduced to theoretical reason. Since ontological reason’s choice to pursue religious goals is inevitable, the existence of God is among the necessary truths about What is that reason can know by theoretical reason, that is, in reason’s capacity as knower of the true. But that does not mean that What is includes everything that holds necessarily for reason because spatiomaterialism is the best ontological explanation of the world, because What is is, in part, a result of what ontological reason does. Reason creates God, that is, transforms itself into God by acknowledging that is has a religious self interest, as well as a spiritual and individual self interest. Doing cannot, therefore, be eliminated in favor of knowing. It is a product of ontological reason in its practical capacity.

In explaining what happens before the evolution of ontological philosophy, reason can be treated like any other evolving structure. But when ontological philosophy evolves, that explanation becomes part of what is evolving, and as ontological reason, it is the agent whose practical reasoning brings about the subsequent course of evolution. Ontological reason cannot sit back and simply contemplate the existence of God, because the coming into existence of a perfect rational being is the doing of reason. And it does what it does, not because it recognizes its inevitability, but because what it does is guided by What ought to be. In the end, therefore, “ought” implies “is.”

To be sure, the content of practical reason, including all the goals that ought to be pursued, coincides, in part, with the content of theoretical reason. Its necessary truths about What is include what reason does inevitably in the world. But the diagram of the whole argument of ontological philosophy does not misrepresent what holds necessarily for reason by separating the conclusion about What ought to be from the conclusions about What is, because for reason, there is a difference between knowing and doing.

The difference between theoretical and practical reason is nearly as basic to reason as the difference between the ontological foundation and the necessary truths that follow from it, which is represented in a similarly fundamental way in the diagram of the whole argument. In that case too, the content of necessary truths coincides with part of the content of the ontological foundation, because the necessary truths, being truths that follow from it, are implicit in it. But the distinction is important for reason, because there is a difference between what reason knows about the world empirically (by an inference to the best ontological explanation of the world) and what reason knows about the world prior to discovering what happens in the world by experience. If there were no difference between ontologically necessary truths (including conditionally ontologically necessary truths) and ordinary empirical knowledge, ontology would not be a new way of doing philosophy.

God is known first of all, therefore, as an intention of practical reason, as the goal of ontological reason’s own plan of individual and social level behavior in the world. That is the sense in which practical reason is not reducible to theoretical reason. The creation of God is the work of ontological reason in the world.

Ontological philosophy entails, as we have seen, the existence of an immanent God. But believers in a traditional religion, especially those who believe in a transcendent God, are likely to be skeptical about the world itself being sufficiently perfect to be worthy of worship. One way to quell such doubts is to show that all the reasons for holding that a transcendent God is worthy of worship are reasons that also hold for the immanent God of ontological philosophy. That is possible in this case because the points of disagreement about the nature of God are not relevant to God's worthiness of worship.

In what follows, I will argue that the immanent God entailed by spatiomaterialism is worthy of worship by arguing that it has all the traits that are thought to make the traditional God of epistemological philosophy worthy of worship. And since it will also solve the theoretical problems that philosophical theology has encountered trying to think about God coherently, it may even convince traditional theists that such an immanent God is what they have actually been believing in.

This is to give an ontological interpretation of Christianity, but a similar argument can be constructed, I believe, for the beliefs of all the other traditional religions. In their case as well, what makes God worthy of worship is also implicit in this immanent God, as would be shown by giving an ontological interpretation of them. That is, at least, what ontological philosophy would expect, since traditional religions are trying to grasp something about the world that really is holy, but as through a glass darkly. However, only Christian theology will be discussed in the following argument. Christianity is the religion in which epistemological philosophy was historically developed most fully, and though this critique of Christian theology will suggest how it would work in other traditional religious, I must leave that to others.

Let me emphasize, however, that what I say here about Christianity is not the result of a conversion experience on my part. I have not been reborn by accepting Jesus as my savior. I long ago abandoned the faith of my parents and left the church, because I could not believe that naturalism is false, at least, not in the way required to believe in a transcendent God. Nor could I believe that one discovers the truth about such matters by an act of faith. However, in the long process of working out this ontological explanation of the wholeness of the world, I have become increasingly sympathetic with religion, for I have slowly discovered that the wholeness of the world entails the existence of a perfect being -- one that can be recognized as the God referred to by Christian theology, because it has all the traits that make the transcendent God of traditional Christianity worthy of worship. Thus, all that Christians would have to give up in order to recognize that ontological philosophy confirms what they want to believe about the world are metaphysical beliefs that cause theoretical problems — except possibly for the belief in personal immortality, and I will argue that they would not really want that, if they understood the nature of existence.

Some might, therefore, claim that Jesus is a prophet of ontological philosophy. But Jesus is not what leads reason to recognize the existence of God. The path that leads to the explanation of the wholeness of the world in its most complete sense is the path that Socrates was on. And that is a path that began when the Pre-Socratic philosophers gave up religious explanations of the world in favor of an ontological explanation. Indeed, ontological philosophy is, I believe, the wisdom that Socrates was seeking when he distinguished himself from the sophists as a philosopher, that is, a lover of wisdom. It is the knowledge of the nature of the world, including the nature of goodness, that makes rational beings choose goals that are good because they are good. That is, knowledge is virtue! The Socratic principle is true. Thus, although the end of the road of reason is, as I will argue, what Jesus was talking about, it is only reason, not faith (and certainly not force), that can lead us there.

The doctrines of Christian theology. What I take to be Christian theology can be summed up as five doctrines. They are mainly the doctrines that emerged in the medieval period. Many variations on them and interpretations of them have been developed since then, including some that take Christianity to be merely a mythical representation of a moral code. But the more traditional Christian beliefs about the nature of God and the meaning of life bring out more clearly what is true in Christianity, according to this ontological theology.

God’s transcendence of the natural world. Christians (and Jews) have to believe that God transcends the natural world, because He is supposed to have created it by an act of free will. The natural world includes everything in space and time, and thus, unless God were a substance that exists outside space and time, He could not have created it.

The trinity. The most distinctive tenet of Christian theology is, perhaps, the doctrine of the trinity, that God is actually three persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father is the creator of the natural world, who for some reason put human beings on earth. The Son is the incarnation of God on earth whose sacrifice was meant to earn the forgiveness of our sins so that believing that Jesus is Christ would give us salvation from sin and eternal bliss. Thus, God had to be at least two persons. But Christians also believe that God acts in the world by way of the Holy Spirit as well, and that is God as a third person. Thus, despite being a single substance, God is supposed to be three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (and theologians have struggled vainly to explain how that is possible).

Original sin. The source of evil in the world is supposed to be a result of original sin. In the beginning, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, God forbad them to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But Adam and Eve had free will, and being persuaded by a serpent, representing Satan (an angel in rebellion against God), they ate the apple, thereby defying God’s command. That was the original sin. As punishment, God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and after the fall, they and all their children and children's children became mortal beings. They were ashamed of their bodies; they had to labor in order to live; they were both agents and patients of such suffering as war; and they who had to suffer famine and disease, as well as death. Thus, the evil in the world is supposed to come from an act of free will in defiance of God’s command. And their offspring would always be tempted to choose evil and sin, because Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The gospel. Christians believe that the “good news” brought by Jesus as the Christ, or savior, was that God had forgiven our sins, including our original sin. It was possible, therefore, with the grace of God, to avoid sin. This meant, according to Jesus, that the kingdom of God is at hand and, since it would thereafter be possible to avoid the evils that had plagued the descendants of Adam and Eve, we would live in heaven forever. All that is required for this to happen is that that we believe in Jesus as our savior, that we love God, and that we love our neighbors as ourselves, that is, a conversion to Christianity. Though only faith in Christ is required for salvation from sin, it is the struggle to overcome sin and evil that is the basic meaning of life, according to Christianity.

Immortality. When Jesus was crucified, God sacrificed his only Son, and the divinity of Jesus was shown by his resurrection from the dead after three days and his bodily ascension into Heaven some while later, joining his Father. The reward of believing in Christ is salvation from sin, and according to the traditional Christian belief, that means having eternal life in the presence of God, that is, in heaven. Thus, Christianity holds that everyone has an immortal soul in the sense that each person is a substance that lives after the death of their bodies on earth. For the saved, that means living eternally in the presence of God, and heaven is thought to transcend the natural world, just as God Himself does. But the eternal fate of our souls depends on our free will, that is, whether we choose to believe in Christ. Those who do not are not saved, and their immortal souls spend eternity in Hell, deprived of God’s presence. Thus, what is at stake in the choice one makes about how to live one’s life is the fate of one’s eternal soul.

An ontological interpretation of Christian doctrines. God is immanent, according to ontological philosophy, because it implies that the world itself is a perfect being. The basic nature of a spatiomaterial world like ours gives rise to progressive evolution, and that eventually leads to the existence of perfect rational beings, who act for the good of the world as a whole. That is our foundation for explaining what is true and what is false in the doctrines of Christian theism. Insofar as the beliefs that make the Christian transcendent God worthy of worship can be explained by our immanent God, Christians must admit that this pantheistic God is also worthy of their worship. Nor can Christians deny that this immanent God is worthy of their worship, if the ways in which it contradicts traditional theism are not what make their transcendent God worthy of worship.

This way of showing that the pantheistic God of ontological philosophy is worthy of worship is, of course, an ad hominum argument for Christians. It will not persuade everyone, because non-Christians may deny that even the Christian God is worthy of worship. But that is not necessary, since we have already seen that ontological reason acknowledge a religious reason. But it will show how ontological reason can be seen as taking up where Christianity (and religion generally) leaves off, enabling rational beings to have from reason something more than what Christians had to take on faith.

I will take up each of the traditional doctrines of Christianity and offer what seems to me to be the most sympathetic interpretation of them from the standpoint of ontological philosophy. But I will leave the first doctrine, about the transcendence of God, to the last.

The central doctrine from which Christianity derives its name is the belief that Jesus was Christ, the Son of God. The doctrine of the incarnation of God is problematic, because it means that one and the same substances that created the natural world must also be particular substance in that world. It is hard to explain how a single substance can be two such different persons, but if God must be two persons, it is not much more implausible to suppose that there are three altogether. Indeed, Christianity assumes that, in addition to the transcendent Father and bodily Son, God exists in a third form, as the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is supposed to do God’s work on earth. Thus, the doctrine of the trinity holds that, even though God is a single substance, He is three different persons: the Father, who created the natural world and sent his Son to save us; the Son, who brought the father's word to the world; and the Holy Spirit, who does God's work.

It seems to some that the doctrine of the trinity is self-contradictory, and though believers are willing to believe that it is just another mystery that lies beyond the understanding of finite rational beings, the immanent God entailed by spatiomaterialism suggests a solution to that mystery. It is possible for finite rational beings to understand how the three persons of God are a single substance, because in a spatiomaterial world like our own, that substance could be the whole world.

It is possible to explain what is meant by "God, the Father,"for that could be the basic nature of the world. That is what is responsible for the existence of beings like us in the world, for it is the ontological cause of the evolutionary process by which a rational beings come to exist in the world. Since what evolves in the culture of philosophical spiritual animals is the knowledge that provides makes heaven on earth possible. The word of God can be seen as what is spoken by rational subjects with ontological reason, and thus, they can be seen as what is meant by "God as the Son." That is, the individual's knowledge of the truth about the wholeness of the world, including the nature of goodness, is the knowledge of the word of the Father, which Christ was supposed to have. And the "Holy Spirit" refers to the spiritual animal that exists when the word of the Father is known, because when ontological philosophy evolves, reason understands the wholeness of the world, and by acknowledging its religious interest, ontological reason does God’s work, the work of becoming a perfect rational being, that is, God’s self-creation. Thus, all three persons of God can be seen as aspects of the same perfect substance, namely, the world as a whole.

It might seem that, although ontological philosophy can explain how a single substance can have all three aspects, it does not quite explain the doctrine of the Trinity, because it does not show that they are all persons. Individuals are clearly persons, because they are rational beings. And since spiritual animals are rational beings, they can also be called persons. But even if the basic nature of a spatiomaterial world like ours is perfect in the sense of giving rise to natural perfection, the world as a whole is hardly a person.

This objection overlooks, however, a consequence of ontological reason acting in the interest of the world as a whole. When reason takes on the function of being the behavior guidance system for the world itself, the world itself becomes a rational being. And since rational beings are persons, the world is a person.

In other words, the reason that there are three persons of God is that ontological reason has three practical interests, individual, spiritual and religious.

These three rational beings are a single substance in the sense that they are all constituted by space and matter, the substances whose existence explains the existence of everything else in the world. The difference between them is that they are rational beings on different levels of part-whole complexity in space. The Son refers to each of the rational subjects who are parts of spiritual animals after ontological reason evolves. The Holy Spirit includes the spiritual animal (or all the spiritual animals) whose behavior is guided by ontological reason to do what is good for the world as a whole. And the Father is the whole world to whose natural perfection religious goals contribute.

To be sure, what is affected by the activities of the Son and the Holy Spirit may extend no farther than their own planetary system. But that does not mean that it is not a contribution to the natural perfection of the world as a whole. It does make the whole world more perfect than it would be without ontological reason, and it happens throughout the universe, since because perfect rational beings evolve on every suitable planetary system.

The most telling objection to traditional pantheism is that it is incompatible with God being a person, but that does not tell against the kind of pantheism entailed by ontological philosophy.

The God of ontological theology is a person, because He has the nature of a rational being. Even though ontological philosophy takes the world as a whole to be God, that is compatible with God being a person, because the world itself has behavior that is guided to do what is good for it by rational subjects who do what as good for the world as part of their self interest. That is not incompatible with God being a rational agent that also has an individual and spiritual self interest. Indeed, even if Christianity had not believed in the Trinity, ontological philosophy would still have had to recognize something surprisingly similar to it, because a spatiomaterial world like ours necessarily has rational subjects with an individual, spiritual and rational self interest.

It is even possible for ontological philosophy to confirm the traditional Christian view of original sin as the source of evil in the world and, thereby, understand its view of the meaning of life. But since its interpretation of that doctrine locates original sin in the larger context of evolution, it avoids the problems that the existence of evil has posed for traditional theism.

Original sin can be explained as war. Accordingly, the Garden of Eden would represent the innocent life of higher primates or first hominids. War was an inevitable evil, because this means that the serpent that talked Adam and Eve into disobeying God's command was the evolution of natural sentences (rather than an angel rebelling against God, which is, in any case, difficult to reconcile with God's omnipotence. The use of language made war a possible means for groups of hominids to overcome the scarcity caused by the reproduction of spiritual animals, and it can even be seen as a "violation" of God's command in the sense that groups of nonlinguistic animals are apparently unable to evolve the behavior of killing other groups of animals from their own species in order to acquire food. But the evolution of war in spiritual animals was inevitable, and the advent of war can be seen as banishing them from the Garden of Eden, for it forced them to live in a dangerous world indeed. To fight wars was, furthermore, to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because as we have seen, the group-level selection pressure imposed by warfare led to the evolution of reason. Though the original function of reason was to choose more reliably between war and peace, that became, as reason evolved, the more general choice between good and evil, because reason had to enable members of spiritual animals to live at peace with one another. Evil is what is at stake in morality, because individuals had the option of intentionally harming others as a means to their ends, and from their adaptation to war, they even had desires that made it possible to enjoy killing other members of their own species. Reason discovered moral rules that limited the pursuit of their interests, and it gave them autonomy, or free will, that is, the ability to resist even the strongest animal desire and do what they believe is good and right. But it was an imperfect mechanism, and moral evil was an inevitable apart of the world. Thus, their fate was to be both the agent and patient of harm done intentionally, both war and moral trespasses against other individuals — not to mention bearing the burden of the labor involved in the evolution spiritual animals.

Ontological philosophy can, therefore, confirm, in a way, the traditional doctrine of original sin. But what is more, ontological theology solves other problems that Christian theology faces about the nature of evil.

One problem with the doctrine of original sin is the inability to explain why God would create beings with a free will who He knew would disobey Him. That is supposed to be part of God’s mysterious purpose and, thus, beyond human understanding. And even though Christians believe that God ultimately would forgive them their original sin, making salvation possible, there is no explanation why, generation after generation, the fate of their immortal souls should depend on the choices they make on earth. That was still part of the mystery.

Another problem is the fact that evil exists at all, for that argues against the existence of a supernatural God. That is the so-called “problem of evil.” If God created a world that contains evil, then either (1) God must not be absolutely good, (2) God must not be all-knowing, or (3) God must not be all-powerful. God must lack at least one of these three traditional perfections. There is some plausibility to the claim that the existence of moral evil is necessary on the grounds that evil will be done as long as there are beings who have both free will and the capacity to do evil, and that cannot be avoided, if the existence of human beings in a world like our serves some higher purpose that God in creating the natural world in the first place. But it is still a mystery why the existence of finite beings with free will is good or makes the natural world good. And even if there is some such explanation of moral evil, there is still no explanation why natural evil, such as famine, disease, and earthquakes, should be part of God's plan.

Ontological theology, however, solves both these problems. Evil does not show that an immanent God must lack any of the personal perfections of God, because the world as a perfect rational being will do everything that can be done to avoid evil in the world. It is just that the evil that occurs in evolution is not something that can be avoided, because that is how perfect rational beings come to exist.

Ontological philosophy also explains, therefore, why there are beings with free will who must struggle against original sin in order to avoid evil. War and the evolution of reason is an inevitable stage in the evolution of spiritual animals. Furthermore, this explanation reveals why the existence of such rational beings is good: it makes a necessary contribution to the natural perfection of life, the natural perfection of evolutionary change, and in the end, to the evolution of perfect rational beings in the world. No being who lacks the power to do evil can be an all-powerful being. The progressiveness of evolution, therefore, compensates for the moral evil that exists in the world.

Finally, even the natural evil that exists in the world is compensated. Nothing can be good without evil, because evil is necessary for evolution. The scarcity caused as reproductive cycles multiply is evil, by our definition of "good", because it detracts from the natural perfection of which it is part. But such evil is compensated. There would be no natural perfection and, thus, no goodness without it, because that is how reproductive cycles impose natural selection on themselves and propel evolution along. Likewise, since disease is a necessary consequence of the evolution of organisms at lower levels of biological organization, it makes a contribution to the natural perfection of the ecology. Death is a necessary part of the structure of the reproductive cycles of multicellular animals and, thus, of subsequent evolution. And even natural catastrophes, like the impact of asteroids, play a necessary role, because they alter conditions so radically that inherently more powerful organisms can replace inherently less powerful incumbents in ecological niches. That is, after all, how mammals replaced dinosaurs in the most energy rich ecological niches some 65 million years ago.

Not only does the belief in an immanent God make it possible to see a truth in the Christian belief about the meaning of life -- that it is the struggle for salvation from original sin -- but it can also be seen as confirming the “glad tidings” taught by Jesus about eventual success.

Grace. The “good news” was that God has forgiven us our sins, and according to ontological philosophy, Christians are right to believe that salvation from original sin is possible. Indeed, it can even be said to depend on the grace of God, although the grace of God must be understood, not as a gift of forgiveness of sin by a transcendent God, but rather as the fact that the nature of the world makes perfection possible for spiritual animals and their members. It is possible in the end to control population growth and arrange human affairs so that wars do not occur and human beings are not even tempted to do evil to one another. Indeed, that is part of the natural perfection of the world itself that ontological reason undertakes to bring about when it acknowledges its religious interest.

Heaven. Salvation from sin means that the kingdom of God is at hand and that we shall have eternal life in heaven. What Jesus saw was the kind of natural perfection that is possible for beings like us, who can see into one another minds and act together in pursuing goals. Jesus was right to insist that what it involves is loving God and loving one’s neighbor, for that is what is involved in pursuing religious goals. But according to ontological theology, heaven will be at hand only when ontological reason acknowledges its religious interest and pursues goals because they make the world as a whole naturally perfect. And in that heaven, there will be eternal life. Once a perfect rational being exists, reason can go on pursuing goals that are in individual, spiritual and religious interest forever, because spiritual animals can live as long as the world.

Belief in Christ. Salvation is supposed to be the result of believing in Christ, that is, believing that He is the Son of god and following his commandments to love God and our neighbors as ourselves. But Jesus was mistaken to believe that all that heaven requires is a change of heart, a conversion to Christianity. Heaven will exist only when original sin is overcome, and according to this naturalistic ontological interpretation of his gospel, that requires the labor of reason, though cultural evolution and history. When Jesus taught his vision of perfection, there was still much more for reason to learn before it could understand the wholeness of the world. And once that is understood, reason still must do God’s work by, among other things, controlling the causes of war and controlling the causes of the moral evil that individuals do to one another.

On this interpretation of Christian theology, therefore, the significance of the belief that Christ is God become man is that it is possible for rational subjects like us to understand the word of God and create heaven on earth. That is, Jesus represents the fate of rational subjects generally. It happens during the philosophical stage of spiritual evolution when reason finally understands how the world is whole, sees itself as the inevitable outcome of evolution, and by understanding the nature of goodness, understands how and why it is good for reason to pursue goals that are good for the world as a whole. As ontological reason acknowledges its religious interest and does the work of creating God, original sin is overcome and eternal life in heaven begins.

In sum, salvation depends, not on faith, but on reason. The incarnation of God is that rational subjects have the kind of understanding that God was supposed to have when he created the natural world. It is, in effect, to understand God's purpose in creating the world. And that is what makes it possible to create heaven on Earth.

The promise of eternal life in the presence of God may seem to be where ontological philosophy fails to explain Christian theology, because it must deny that rational subjects have immortal souls. The immortal soul is supposed to be a substance that continues to endure though time after the body decays. But except for the matter and space that constituted the body, there is no such substance, and thus, there can be no life after death. That does not mean, however, that ontological philosophy must deny the promise of eternal life in heaven.

Though they are not immortal as individuals, rational beings can and will be immortal as a spiritual animal. Spiritual animals can be immortal, because they do not reproduce by the sexual mixing of parts of their structures, like eukaryotes. They reproduce by division, like prokaryotes. The same spiritual animal can continue to exist indefinitely, and that is what begins when reason evolves into God. The perfect rational being that comes to exist on earth as the outcome of evolution is the existence of God in the world, and that is eternal life in heaven. The immortality of the spiritual animal is a kind of immortality for the rational subject, because the spiritual animal is an aspect of the self in whose interest the rational subject acts. Indeed, the world itself as a whole is an aspect of the self in whose interest the rational subject acts, once the world becomes a perfect rational being in that sense. The immortality of the spiritual animal and the world are way in which the self live on after the death of the individual body.

To be sure, the individual must eventually die. Since rational subjects are multicellular animals, they cannot live without going through reproductive cycles in which they are born and die. But the life of the rational subject as an individual multicellular animal is not the only life she has, because she is, as a rational being with ontological reason, the agent who guides the behavior of her spiritual animal and even the world itself, not just her own body. That is, the self in whose interest she acts is not just the individual, but also the spiritual animal and the world, and her spiritual and divine self are immortal. That is how the rational subject has life after death.

Ontological philosophy does imply, nevertheless, that rational subjects do not continue to live as individuals after the death of the body, and this is not what Christians believe about how their souls are immortal. It may, however, be closer to what Jesus himself actually meant, because as a Jew, the kind of salvation that he probably believed the Messiah would bring was heaven on Earth.

The belief that salvation takes the form of immortal souls in an otherworldly heaven could have been what the earliest followers of Jesus came to believe in order to avoid losing their faith in Jesus’ message when he was crucified. If they expected the kingdom of God to begin immediately on earth, his death would suggest that Jesus was simply mistaken. But it was possible to continue to believe that Jesus' followers would have eternal life in heaven, even though it did not happen on earth, if it meant having immortal souls that live in the presence of God in a transcendent realm. That would be the significance of the resurrection and ascension, and it would be another distortion caused by the belief in a transcendent God. (For a defense of such a view, see Thomas Sheehan, 1986.)

Though ontological philosophy must deny that rational subjects have immortal lives as individuals, that does not mean that its immanent God is any less worthy of worship than the traditional Christian God. It merely reflects the difference in what rational beings really want that comes from understanding the nature of existence.

In a world constituted by space and matter, the immortality of bodily existence is not a good thing. Rational subjects who understand their nature ontologically as inevitable products of evolution by reproductive causation will not want to be immortal as individual multicellular animals. They will recognize that the desire to have an immortal soul is a form of narcissism, an unhealthy kind of "selfishness."

It is possible to extend lives, and that will be done, because it is good. Life is not currently long enough to make the most of it. And it will probably also be possible to make the body immortal in the sense that it will not die of old age or disease, but only by accident. But it would not be good to make the body immortal, because the natural perfection of the rational subject as an individual requires a temporal limit to life.

The life of an individual is a process of growth. She starts out as a baby, only later acquiring the capacity for reflection, and she goes through a process of development and growth that continues throughout life, until death. What makes the maximum holistic power of the multicellular animal holistic is that it controls all the conditions that affect reproduction over the whole cycle. That is the way to make the most of the least in the case of the individual animal. The parts that fit together as such an optimal whole are mainly the rational actions that make up the life as a four-dimensional object, and the individual gains power to control relevant conditions in the process of growing older. One acquires practical wisdom as time is running out. The self one constructs is like a painting, as I suggested earlier, that is painted from left to right on the canvas, trying to make the most of every part of the life. That each moment make its own essential contribution to the perfection of the whole -- that is, that it not be redundant -- is a essential aspect of the structure of the natural perfection of the individual animal. If life did not terminate at some point, there would be no whole of which the parts are all parts and thus no possibility of a natural perfection about it.

Or to put it negatively, growth is such an essential part of the structure of the natural perfection of individual life that the worst hell that a reflective subject with ontological reason could imagine is to have grown as much as possible for beings of her kind and yet be unable to die. Even if she were in perfect health and in possession of her faculties, it would become boring to go on living, because in a world made of space and matter, there is a limit to how much an rational subject can do and learn and enjoy. After she had passed that limit far enough, it would be torture to wake up each day and know that it would just another repetition of something already experienced many times before. Fortunately, such a condition is not possible for rational subjects with behavior guidance systems based on brains.

God’s transcendence of the natural world. Christians believe that God transcends the natural world, and that seems to be an aspect of traditional theology that ontological philosophy must deny. But transcendence is not relevant to God's worthiness of worship, for it is simply what Christians had to believe in order to believe that God is responsible for their own existence and the source of purpose in the world. Ontological philosophy makes it possible to see God as the creator in the latter sense without transcending the natural world.

Christian believe that God created the natural world out of nothing. It is the role of God as the Father to call into existence by an act of will the natural world and the teleological order it involves, including human beings. But if God as the Father is the basic nature of a spatiomaterial world like ours, as ontological philosophy implies, God is still the source of human beings and all the purpose in the world. That is, God is still the creator of the natural world in the relevant sense, and thus, such an immanent God is no less worthy of worship than the transcendent God of traditional Christian theology.

An immanent God cannot create the world as act of will. But the world can, and does, by the very nature of what exists in it, give rise to the existence of rational beings like us. It is our “creator” in the sense of being the source of our existence. To be sure, since we are a necessary consequence of its nature, we are not something done from the knowledge of the nature of goodness, that is, created as an act of free will. But the nature of the world gives rise to us as part of the process by which it gives rise to natural perfection and a real difference between good and bad in the world. Thus, even though God is not a substance existing outside space and time that gives rise to a world of objects in space that change through time, God turns out to be the cause of our human world and the source of real difference between good and bad. Hence, an immanent God is no less awesome. Nor is such an immanent God any less beneficent, that is, “good-doing,” though, of course, He cannot be benevolent, that is, “good-willing,” except through God’s self creation as a perfect rational being.

Simply being immanent does not make God any less a perfect rational being than a transcendent God. To be sure, an immanent God does not know as much and is not as powerful as it seems a transcendent God would be. But that does not make an immanent God any less worthy of worship, because it does not imply that an immanent God is inferior to a transcendent God. It is merely a difference is the conception of perfection that comes from one's conception of the nature of existence. The kind of perfect knowledge and power that is conceivable in a substance that exists outside space and time is different from the kind of perfect knowledge and power that is conceivable in something made of space and matter in time. But that does not show that one is better than the other, for it is just a question of which ontology is true of the actual world.

Finally, if there is a difference in perfection, there is one way in which an immanent God is more perfect than a transcendent God. Both are alike in having something permanent and unchanging about them. A transcendent God is unchanging because He outside of time, whereas an immanent God is unchanging because He is constituted by substances that endure through time with the same essential natures and they inevitably give rise to perfect rational beings. But since a transcendent God is outside time, He cannot change at all. Thus, He lacks at least one perfection that an immanent God can have, namely, the natural perfection of change itself. When evolution is change in the direction of natural perfection, as we have seen, each moment in the existence of the world makes a unique and necessary contribution to the existence of a perfect rational being in the world. Time is another way in which parts may be combined optimally as a whole, and a transcendent God is deprived of it.

God’s transcendence of the natural world is not, therefore, what makes Him worthy of reverence. Rather, transcendence marks Him as the God of epistemological philosophy. Though Christianity inherited the belief that God is the creator of the natural world from Judaism, His transcendence of the natural world is explained in Christian theology in a way that depends on Western philosophy. Ever since Augustine, at least, it has been explained in terms of Plato’s dualism of Becoming and Being (albeit by way of its transformation into a more idealist, neo-Platonist metaphysics by Plotinus). Plato first used the dichotomy between naturalistic and subjectivistic understanding (together with the radically different phenomenal appearances of the objects of each form of understanding) to explain what is good in the natural world as deriving from a supernatural source. And deriving from a form of metaphysical dualism that results from the epistemological approach to philosophy, it is not surprising that the belief in a transcendent God leads to serious theoretical problems. The problems are all solved by ontological theology.

The Problem of Proving God's Existence. The most immediate problem of traditional theology is proving God's existence. The dualism entailed by realism in epistemological philosophy usually leads, as we have seen, to doubts about realism, or anti-realism, and in the case of Christian theism, that means atheism. The transcendence of God makes it impossible to prove His existence from within space and time. But it is possible, as we have seen, to prove the existence of an immanent God, for this is a spatiomaterial world of the right kind.

The metaphysical dualisms of epistemological philosophy are inherently problematic. Plato could not explain adequately how two such different substances as Being and Becoming are related as parts of the same world. Christianity escapes being embarrassed by that problem only by insisting that the relationship is just part of the mystery about God. Though as persons (or rational beings), we are supposed to be created in the image of God, we are finite rational beings, and thus, we must simply accept the mystery and have faith in God. But the mysteriousness of God cannot, as such, make God worthy of worship. At best, the mystery merely leaves the possibility that God will turn out to be holy. And at worst, it is a mask that could just as well be worn by an evil or contemptible being and faith could be our undoing.

The Problem of God's Foreknowledge. Nor does the dualism of God and nature escape the theoretical problems inherent in a Platonic metaphysics. For example, God, being perfect, is supposed to be omniscient, as well as omnipotent and absolutely good. But since He exists outside of time as the creator of the natural world, He creates all the moments in the history of the natural world at once, including everything that finite rational beings ever do. Thus, God must already know what each individual will choose in each situation she faces. But that is hard to reconcile with the belief that individuals have a free will and that what becomes of us and the world is the result of our doing it. The future is not open. It is always already determined what we will do. Thus, God’s foreknowledge of what will happen seems to deny that rational subjects are free to choose in the way they think they are.

No such problem arises from the belief that God is immanent, even though God is still a perfect rational being, including omniscience, because knowing everything that it is possible to know as a rational being constituted space and matter does not include knowing what every rational being will ever do. It is possible to know what individuals have done in the past. And it is possible to know what will happen in the long run because of global regularities. But there are no necessary truths about what rational beings will choose in particular situations. That is among the contingent details that can be known only through experience of the world. (Nor is there any reason to believe that actual choices can be predicted by knowing how the bits of matter constituting a rational subject are moving and interacting.) In any case, since what exists are substances that endure through time, the future is open in the sense that it depends on what we choose to do (along with what else is happening at the time). Thus, the belief in an immanent God solves the traditional problem about God’s omniscience imply foreknowledge of our choices.

Nothing that Christians must give up, if they accept the foundation of ontological philosophy and accepts the necessary truths that follow from it, shows that the immanent God entailed by spatiomaterialism is any less worthy of worship than their traditional God. What changes is one's conception of the nature of existence, and that has implications about the nature of perfection that can be conceived in such a world. Thus, even though ontological philosophy must deny that God transcends the natural world, that does not mean that there is no perfect being, for as it turns out in a spatiomaterial world like ours, the world itself is as perfect a perfect being as can be conceived to be made of space and matter. And that perfect being is demonstrably worthy of worship, if the God of traditional Christian theology is. Indeed, ontological theology would have to include the doctrine of the trinity, quite apart from Christian theology, because the ultimate perfection of the world comes from how perfect rational subjects have three kinds of self interest: individual, spiritual and religious. Far from denying the doctrine of original sin, ontological philosophy clarifies what it is. With that clarification of original sin is, it not only confirms the Christian belief about the meaning of life being the struggle to overcome sin, but it points the way to overcoming it. Salvation is surely no less valuable for being achieved by reason rather than by faith. The denial of personal immortality may seem to be a sticking point for some, but the desirability of immortality is an illusion that comes from failing to recognize the basic nature of the life of individual reflective subjects, for when it is understood ontologically, its natural perfection precludes immortality. Indeed, it would be hell, and as it turns out, there is no hell, according to ontological theology.

If, therefore, the Christian God is worthy of worship, the perfect rational being that the world turns out to be, according to ontological philosophy, is no less worthy of worship. On the contrary, the insights into the nature of God make Him more worthy of worship. Not only is it possible to know about God without a leap of faith, but it is possible for reason to know what work it is that needs to be done in the name of God.