Many intellectually honest scientists, philosophers and leaders across various institutions both private and public have acknowledged the fundamental flaw of the incoherent materialist worldview modernity has been built on.
I’ve spent a large part of my life doing “deep dive” analysis on various topics across science, technology and modern corporate business operations. Once I started diving deep on Catholicism and getting into the meat of Church history, philosophy and the overwhelming amount of highly credible, intensively-investigated supernatural miracles, I began to realize that, while technically, it’s a faith you need to believe in, I got to the point where I logically couldn’t understand any way how anything else could be true.
And then more recently over the past 6 months, once I started to better understand how to practice my faith, build a relationship with Jesus and more fully trust Him, I came to see how the Aristotelian metaphysics (with elements of Platonism) adopted by the Catholic Church provides a framework that fully integrates modern science. It offers a much more coherent way to understand and explain phenomena that otherwise remain 'unsolved mysteries' under the outdated materialist paradigm—addressing everything from the nature of consciousness and the goal-directedness of biology to the emerging view in physics that meaning is more fundamental than mass.
Freedom of religion is critical. Religious liberty isn’t just a social courtesy; it’s an essential protection for democracies and a roadblock against tyranny because it forces the state to admit there is a moral authority higher than its own will. In fact Catholicism, or any form of Christianity, shouldn’t be the official religion of the US. This wouldn’t be Christian since God has given everyone free will to choose the God who is Love and provides eternal life. Which leads me back to the good news!
Let’s return to the passage from St. Luke above. The Jewish audience hearing Jesus ~2000 years ago were very familiar that Jesus was quoting an Old Testament prophecy (from Isaiah ~700 years prior) regarding the release of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity (present day Iraq).
They would also have recognized that Isaiah’s words were not just about a past political event, but about a recurring pattern in their own history. In Isaiah’s time, many Jews lived with outward stability and religious activity while quietly absorbing the values of surrounding empires, trusting alliances, wealth, and cultural sophistication more than God Himself.
Babylon wasn’t about physical enslavement like in Egypt. Babylon named a condition where God’s people were materially functional, culturally sophisticated, and economically productive, yet cut off from their true center of meaning, worship, and freedom under God. Many Jews in exile were not starving or imprisoned; they were settled, educated, and successful—yet the prophets still called them captives because their lives were being ordered by a system that quietly replaced God with empire. That is exactly why Isaiah’s promise of release, sight, and Jubilee mattered then, and why Jesus deliberately re-announces it centuries later. He is not talking primarily about political escape or material relief, but about liberation from a false account of reality that people have learned to accept as normal. Once you see that, it becomes much easier to understand why this message is aimed not at those visibly desperate, but at people who are outwardly fine while living inside a worldview that can’t actually sustain truth, meaning, or moral responsibility.
By Jesus’ day, something similar had happened under Hellenistic and Roman rule: impressive infrastructure, education, and legal order existed alongside deep moral and spiritual confusion, with faith often reduced to law-keeping, identity, or political hope. Jesus’ audience knew this pattern well, because they were living inside it again. That is why Isaiah’s language of captivity, blindness, and release still resonated—exile had returned in a new form, not as chains or deportation, but as a life ordered more by human systems than by trust in God.
But today, modern minds have a harder time recognizing this pattern because the entire category of God and spirituality has been pushed out of our shared understanding of reality. We’ve been trained to see the world almost exclusively in material, technical, and psychological terms, so when something goes wrong we look for policy fixes, therapies, or new technologies—not repentance, re-orientation, or truth beyond ourselves. Unlike earlier generations, we are rarely taught to interpret history, suffering, or moral breakdown in relation to God at all. As a result, captivity becomes nearly invisible. It doesn’t feel like exile because we no longer have a clear sense of what “home” under God would even mean. When transcendence is removed from the picture, confusion gets renamed as complexity, moral drift as progress, and spiritual hunger as a private emotional issue. That makes Jesus’ proclamation harder to hear—not because it is less true, but because we’ve lost the conceptual language needed to recognize what He is offering release from.
Like Isaiah’s audience, America and most all industrialized nations live in a time of outward success and inward confusion, where trust in human systems has quietly replaced trust in God.
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during the covid years I also had the opportunity to serve on the advisory board for the kids’ Catholic elementary school, The Academy of St. Paul. The combination of learning about advanced biotechnology, artificial intelligence, real intelligence in biology and Catholicism along with an undeserved blessing of God’s mysterious grace, led me to discover and profoundly understand that: (1) the most logical way to understand and explain biological intelligence was through the Christian concept of the Logos, the Word of God (Gospel of John), and (2) the truth of the Trinity is analogously reflected in nature at every level of existence (from atoms to cell cultures to human societal cultures) which, as I’ve since learned and experienced, exists supernaturally and fully in God Himself.
There was no dramatic road-to-Damascus moment. It was more like a geeky science-journalism hobby where every road eventually led to seeing these same conclusions. It started by learning about what some biologists have shown for over a hundred years, and where the contemporary work of biologists makes this truth undeniable now: intelligence in biology isn’t located in DNA, it originates somewhere outside of physical matter. DNA gives us the ingredients of life, but it doesn’t explain how those parts are shaped into a living, intelligent whole. Cells don’t just follow instructions like machines. They solve problems and “know” what to do: how to grow into organs, heal wounds, and act in ways that serve the whole body. Even single-celled organisms can model their environment and solve problems. This kind of built-in coordination and intelligent problem-solving points to something deeper than chemistry. This means that science needs to update its assumed (often never thought about) metaphysical assumptions about how reality actually works.
Philosophers (originally Aristotle) called this deeper principle “form”, the inner pattern that makes a thing what it is, and exists as a real but invisible informational blueprint-like structure of the physical living thing. Forms define everything’s identity, purpose, and final coherent physical form. This is why the word “information” originally meant; to put form into.
And then behind every individual form is something even more fundamental: a universal source of order, meaning and intelligibility. The philosophical term for this is called the Logos, the mysterious rational dynamic living structure of reality (Stoics, Plato). It’s not just another form. It’s the “Form of forms”: the living pattern that gives rise to all other patterns.
Each specific form can be understood as a partial reflection, or proportional expression, or finite echo of the universal Logos, shaped by it and pointing back to it as its source.
That’s why reality isn’t chaos. It’s a web of meaningful structures—physical, biological, mental, and social—that all follow a kind of grammar.
Without introducing religious doctrine or theology, reality consistently exhibits a triadic structure that appears across every level of reality:
[1] things stably exist making them real rather than nothing, they have identity [2] per above each thing has a form—an invisible organizing pattern or essence—that gives it intelligibility and governs what it can do; each form participates in the one Logos, and [3] Third, each thing has a dynamic purpose—a directed energy unfolding toward its end. This movement isn’t random but goal-oriented, drawing the parts into a fuller realization of their form. Wholeness emerges through this fulfillment. This structure appears in physics, biology, mind, society and beyond.
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[1] things stably exist, making them real rather than nothing; they have identity, and that identity appears symbolically within the larger hierarchy of forms.
[2] each thing has a form—an invisible organizing pattern or essence—that gives it intelligibility and governs what it can do. This form expresses itself symbolically in structure and behavior, allowing higher levels of form to “read” its meaning and integrate it into broader patterns. Each form participates in the one Logos.
[3] Each thing has an intended purpose and naturally organizes itself in ways that unifies its parts into a coherent meaningful whole such that it’s understood symbolically at the next organizational level in the hierarchy of forms. This integrative movement is meaningful as well as purposive, fitting the thing into higher levels of order within the hierarchy of forms and allowing the whole to be more than the sum of its parts.
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This movement isn’t random but goal-oriented, drawing the parts into a fuller realization of their form. Wholeness emerges through this fulfillment.
In Christianity, the Logos is not just an abstract principle but God the Son, the eternal Word of God who became flesh by the Holy Spirit in Mary’s as the New Ark of the Covenant. In this divine-human union, Christ stands as the true New Adam, with Mary as the New Eve, the Mother of God and of all who live in grace. The Trinity is the deepest mystery of God’s inner life. While reason can perceive an analogous structure in reality—where things exist, have form, and are directed toward a purpose—only divine revelation discloses that this pattern reflects the eternal communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
There’s no doubt there will be countless scientists raised in a modern culture that were taught that souls and spirits and God was all a myth who will mock and scoff what follows, but for anyone willing to be intellectually honest, unbiased I am certain that when people evaluate all the options, they will conclude that mind-grounded Aristatolean hylomorphic metaphysics is the best metaphysics for science to adopt because it fits all empirical observation and it enables worldviews that sensible can integrate with faith and reason in order to recover objective morality while also being able to explain consciousness.
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Existence isn’t accidental, that reality has a source with intention and relational depth, and that purpose is woven into the fabric of being.
Nigeria offers a rich case for examining how traditional metaphysical intuitions can resonate with Christian theology. Among the Igbo and other southern Nigerian peoples, belief in a supreme creator (Chukwu) coexists with a layered cosmology: Ala (earth and moral order), Amadioha (justice), and Chi (personal spirit). While distinct from Christian doctrine, these elements parallel aspects of the Christian triad—Ala as grounding moral structure (Logos), Amadioha as the transcendent source of judgment (Source/Father), and Chi as the indwelling guide of one’s path (Spirit). Scholars like Chinua Achebe have cautioned against reducing indigenous systems to foreign categories, and rightly so. But the symbolic resonance remains noteworthy. Nigeria’s extraordinary Catholic growth—seen in its seminary enrollments and vocations—may reflect a cultural readiness for a vision of reality grounded in meaning, relationship, and moral form. These parallels invite serious dialogue, not reduction, between metaphysical worlds.
Judaism and Catholicism differ theologically, but they share deep principles about God, morality, and human destiny. Both affirm that God is personal, just, and merciful—not an impersonal force but a being who forms covenants, judges with justice, and forgives those who repent. Human beings are morally accountable, with eternal consequences based on their response to God. Both traditions affirm a future resurrection of the dead, where the righteous are vindicated and the wicked face judgment (cf. Daniel 12:2).
Repentance plays a central role in both: teshuvah in Judaism and the sacrament of Reconciliation in Catholicism express that sin is real, but not final. Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are also shared disciplines of return and purification. The moral law in both is covenantal—obedience and love of neighbor are how one remains in right relationship with God.
Most striking is the shared view of life’s purpose: to become holy. Judaism calls each person to imitate God’s holiness and honors the tzadik (righteous one) as a model. Catholicism speaks of becoming a saint—conformed to Christ in love and grace. Despite doctrinal divergence, both see life as a journey toward union with (or delight in the splendor of the Divine Presence with)
God through justice, mercy, and faithfulness. "You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy." (Leviticus 19:2)
