Godhood, religion, and moral end-goals remain, but without demeaning life or the material evolution to those goals

The arrogance of traditional religious philosophy is to believe that the human intellect (which some call spirit ) can grasp the “totality” of things, which defined the goal of philosophy for them, that is, to see the world by transcending the world to experience the “spiritual” world of God.

I see the goal of philosophy as seeing the ongoing process of life activated by deepest sacred drive of life, which essentially is the biological origin of social behavior, and that activation has the material goal of evolving life all the way to Godhood, within the ups and downs of natural evolutionary life. Evolution moves inevitably in a pattern, even though it has its random elements, and the pattern has a discernible direction, in spite of instances of stagnation and retreat, toward higher and higher more effective living forms, all the way to Godhood, where grasping the “totality” of things may be possible, but beyond the reach of the present human species.

So Godhood, religion, and moral end-goals remain, but without demeaning life or the material evolution to those goals. Thomas Aquinas got the goal right when he said the goal of human beings is to attain the likeness of God, but he got it wrong when he said to attain the likeness of God an un-material soul must separate from the material body. It is not a non-material soul or or spirit that brings us to a non-material Godhood, the sacred material drive of life brings us to super-material Godhood by way of material evolution, and the great task is to help it along its way.