In recent years, a new word has entered our vocabulary. It was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his attempt to explain the phenomenon of cultural diversity.  Just as genes, as proposed by Darwin, were naturally selected to produce the diversity we see in the animal world, Dawkins proposed that the same process of Natural Selection occurred in the non-material world of culture.

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According to Dawkins, there exists invisible “units of information [or ideas] residing in a brain” called memes, which, like genes, incrementally change over time. From this ever changing meme pool of ideas, certain ideas were naturally selected by unknown environmental forces to produce the cultural diversity we see in the world today.  Accordingly, cultural change is reduced to meme selection.

 

Rejection of a Diving Logos

All proponents of naturalism insist there exists no Divine Logos who created “man in his image” and equipped all people to live in two mutually exclusive spheres, the sphere of CULTURE and the sphere of NATURE.  Instead, from an evolutionary perspective, human CULTURE emerged from NATURE while being PART OF NATURE. 

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For emecists, as well as all naturalists, CULTURE is a biological phenomenon rather than a spiritual phenomenon. Its emergence from NATURE began when “units of information” existing in the brains of primates BECAME “units of culture” existing in the brains of human beings. 

 

At that precise moment of BECOMING, naked apes became cultural beings who began thinking about kinship, family, parents, their brothers and sisters and their sons and daughter. In an instant, CULTURE, LANGUAGE, PERSONHOOD, and man's capacity to say "I" and "THOU" emerged from NATURE.

 

From this point on, a ”unit of culture,” that is,  a “[new] idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.) which is 'hosted' in the minds of one or more individuals, …can reproduce itself in the sense of jumping from the mind of one person to the mind of another” through though conversation, gossip, radio, TV, internet, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth.  Dawkins' theory represents the latest attempt by naturalists to explain how out of cultural sameness there emerged cultural diversity.

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His evolutionary model attempts to explain how "units of culture" called memes are passed from one brain to the next and one society to the next. Like genes, memes have an independent existence, are self-replicating, and are subject to being naturally selected for environmental fitness.

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From an evolutionary perspective, these memes or “units of culture” are in a constant state of BECOMING. This means no meme has a meaning which is constant and fixed. A husband can become a 'female,' an uncle and aunt one's "parents," a gift a ‘bribe,'  and in time, a male a ‘queen.’  "Units of culture" have no fixed semantic boundaries.

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Now rejecting Dawkins' theory of memetics is cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker who wrote: How the Mind Works. For Pinker, “beliefs and desires are information, incarnated as configurations of symbols. The symbols are the physical status of bits  of matter, like chips in a computer or neurons in the brain.”  Defying all rules of logic, Pinker proposes that A, "information" BECOMES “INCARNATED” as B, a system of symbols or “bits of matter in the brain.” 

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As a committed materialists, "[Pinker] cannot conceive the mind apart from the concrete material --the brain --of whose function the mind is an effect."  Nevertheless,  for naturalists of all types, there still remains the problem of meaning?  Who or what attaches meaning to the symbols, forms, or "units of culture"? 

 

One person who wrestled with the problem of meaning was French anthropologist Claude Lévi-strauss who proposed:

“it is only forms and not contents which can be common.  If there are common contents they must be sought......outside the mind”.

 

For anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, what was structured in the brain was not "units of culture" or "symbols," but rather empty forms or molds needing to be filled with the appropriate meaning-content imported from the outside. Accordingly, form and meaning-content were linked together when Natural Selection imported from the outside the mind the  correct meaning-content,  a meaning derived from how PEOPLE interacted with their material environment. 

 

Surprisingly,  agreeing with structuralist Lévi-Strauss is missiologist-anthropologist Charles Kraft who wrote:

“Though the forms are parts [or units] of culture, the meanings belong to the people. They are not inherent in the forms themselves. They are attached to the forms on the basis of group agreements.”

 

For Kraft, each people group determines the meanings of family, marriage, husband, wife, father, mother, brother, sister, and so forth.  No social form has a Divine Meaning which man and society may reject and replace with a meaning which “belongs to the people.”  Instead, "All meanings belong to the people."

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Cultural diversity is not a product of man and society rejecting the voice of conscience and deciding to go "its own way" (Acts 14:16), but rather about each society coming to some agreement as to what meaning should be attached to "units of culture"  structured in the brain.  Based on the theory that no form or "unit of culture" has an inherent meaning, every cultural analyst and Bible translator, according to Kraft, should be a cultural relativist who recognizes that all cultural life-ways are essentially equal. 

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Any possibility that cultural change is a spiritual phenomenon rather than material or biological must be rejected by every naturalist.  The idea that a "fallen" society can replace a Divine Meaning attached to a social form common to all with a meaning which “belongs to the people” must be rejected by all naturalists. 

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The possibility that there exists in the unconscious mind a Universal Lexicon containing concepts common to all to which are attached Divine Meanings, meanings which man and society have both the freedom and capacity to replace, must be rejected by every naturalist. Its existence would imply the existence of a DIVINE LOGOS. 

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So instead of the LOGOS BECOMING "man and living among us" as stated in John 1:14, according to Pinker, DATA BECOMES "INCARNATED" as a "system of symbols" or “bits of matter” in the brain.  But there still remains the elusive, hard to nail down problem of meaning.  

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Now one scholar concerned about the loss of meaning in the information age was cognitive scientists Jerome Bruner.   He correctly points out that there can be no meaning without an INTERPRETATIVE SYSTEM.  Neither “units of information,” nor “a systems of symbols,” nor meanings attached to forms structured in the brain, nor memes can provide man with such an interpretative system.  According to Bruner, 

 

“Man’s biological inheritance ...does not direct or shape human action and experience, does not serve as the universal cause.  Rather, it imposes constraints on human action, constraints whose effects are modifiable.  ...it is culture, not biology, that shapes human life and the human mind, that gives meaning to human action by situating its underlying intentional states in an interpretative system."

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Bruner then proposes that such an interpretative system actually exists in the unconscious mind.

 

"There exists certain classes of meaning to which human beings are innately tuned and for which they actively search. Prior to language, these exist in primitive form as protolinguistic representations of the world whose full realization depends upon the cultural tool of language.  ...In a word, we come initially equipped with a set of predisposition to construe the social world in a particular way and to act upon our construals [in a positive or negative way.]

 

It appears that Bruner is setting forth the possibility that mankind is predisposed to construe the social world from the perspective of a DIVINE LOGOS, a perspective man and society can either accept or reject. This means: Any interpretative system which permits the merging of mutually exclusive concepts like MIND and BODY and CULTURE and NATURE must be irrational.    Since every interpretative system depends on the faculty of reasoning, man's capacity to logically connect idea, people, and things which cause and shape events in history, the question thus becomes: "How does one relate, combine, and unify them"? 

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From a top-down, inside-out epistemology, the packaging of form and meaning-content thus becomes crucial.  How form and meaning-content are packaged provide mankind with either an interpretative system which approximates the TRUTH, or an interpretative system which misrepresents the TRUTH.   For example, whenever a society intentionally attaches to an impersonal existential verb a subject which is personal, or separates an inherent or Divine Meaning from a cultural form common to all, it creates a new interpretative system, a system that contextually misrepresents the TRUTH.

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What naturalists  of every kind  refuses to consider, because of their a priori commitment to materialistic explanations, is the possibility that every child is predisposed to construe the social world from a Divine perspective, a perspective that his culture may reject because "they have suppressed the truth in unrighteousness' (Romans 1:18).  

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Convictions

1. There exists structured in the unconscious mind of every human being an INTERPRETATIVE SYSTEM that predisposes every child to construe the social world from a Divine perspective.

2. Meme creation has nothing to do with Natural Selection and biology and everything to do with the rejection of Divine Meanings attached to  cultural forms or "units of culture" common to all.  Whenever a society replaces a Divine Meaning with a meaning which belongs to the people it has created a destructive meme which increases cultural diversity and social chaos in the world.

3. Man and society have the capacity “to create matrices [i.e., memes] and environments of moral evil and bequest them to our children.”  

4. The apostle Paul was aware that any effort to detach from cultural forms common to all their inherent meanings was the first "stepping stone from truth into falsehood."  Paul  therefore encouraged Timothy (II Tm. 1:13) to: "Hold to the standard of sound words that you heard from me" (NET). Sound words have meanings which are fixed and constant.