THE IMPORTANCE OF LOCATION

Every worldview, and so every theology, offers some sense of a place for human life: what we are, where we come from, what we should do, and where we hope to go. Many of us today hold a worldview predicated upon a scientific understanding of nature and of ourselves. As our scientific understanding develops, we get clearer ideas of where we come from and what we are and what we as human beings are likely to do. We gain an increasingly detailed knowledge of our past and present, and even our most probable futures; but what our advanced understanding lacks is any sense of how things are supposed to be. Of course, we can extrapolate how species, ecosystems and individuals would develop in various circumstances, and (if we want) we can call some of those circumstances “natural” or “right”, but we do not find anything in nature that marks out any set of circumstances as the way things are supposed to be. At most we can try to determine how we would like things to be, and we can try to engineer policy and practice toward that particular end; but that is not quite the same as a genuine telos.