Anthony Bernard Kelly: Understanding the Process of the Cosmos can lead to The Good Society
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Independent of the Greeks, and even before the Pre-Socratics, the People of Israel had developed a theological approach to understanding the world. The Israelites also forged a new link between religion and morality. They adopted a highly moral approach to their social organization and to their daily life. This link, between religion and morality, was also maintained by Christianity, which drew on both Hellenistic and Judaic resources.
Following the initial failure of Philosophy to explain the world, the religions of Christianity and Islam were able to provide explanations that satisfied more than half of the world’s population. This situation prevailed until the end of the 20th Century.
The Christian understanding of the world was dominant in the West. However, by the beginning of the 21st Century it had lost many of its traditional adherents. There were two major contributing factors to the decline of the dominance of Christianity. The first was the rise of Science, which provided a credible explanation of many of the features of the world. This often led to a world-view known as Scientism, which assumed that Science provided all the answers. The second factor was the influence of a form of neo-Darwinism, which held that the world was a chance event that did not need an explanation.
In 1998 a new and comprehensive explanation of the world was the subject of a Doctoral Dissertation, “The Process of the Cosmos”. The Citation on the Dissertation stated that the work had “completed Aristotle’s project to provide an explanation of man and the world”. The Dissertation also provided answers to the fundamental philosophical questions of “Why is there anything at all?” and &”Why is there evil in the world?”
An article in the Flinders University Journal of November 30, 1998 noted that the author of this Dissertation had only turned to philosophy after an extensive working life in a variety of occupations. He was aged 70 when he was awarded his PhD. When he entered tertiary study it was with a wealth of real-world experience behind him.
As a young man he had been a Police Officer in Australia’s Northern Territory, where he conducted the last of the Police Camel Patrols. Based at Finke, he was the sole Police Officer in a semi-desert Police District of over 220,000 square kilometres, roughly half the area of Sweden. There he formed strong attachments with many Central Australian Aborigines, and was invited by tribal elders to attend secret ceremonies, and to accept initiation. He experienced the great contrast between the Aboriginal and the Western way of life. He saw the vast differences between the two cultures, and between the people of the two cultures. These differences left an indelible impression on him.
He later became a Police Prosecutor, and subsequently was the Police Sergeant in charge of a Northern Territory Gold and Copper mining district. In later life he worked in Personnel, in Industrial Safety and in Industrial Relations. As an Industrial Advocate he represented the staff of State and Local Governments in South Australia, in the Industrial Commission.
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