Knowledge of Good and Evil

Perhaps the most significant words in Western Civilization are 'knowledge of good and evil', since according to its probably most influential document, the entire history of the human race turned on the eating of the fruit of a tree that went by that name. Somehow, though, the lesson of that fateful moment seems to repeatedly go unlearned. Surely nothing qualifies more as answering to that description than Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, and yet Medieval Theologians already commited to the Biblical understanding of humanity did not hesitate to try to digest that Greek's Science of the Good. One product of that effort was the peculiar species of argumentation called 'Proof of the Existence of God', as if Logic were the ultimate determinant of the existence of the Deity. One version of that 'proof', usually regarded as the weakest, was known generally as the 'Argument From Design', the main point of which is that the orderliness and regularity found in the world can only be the product of an Intelligent Creator. Even though all such proofs were conclusively refuted by Kant over 200 years ago, that version has recently re-emerged as the 'Intelligent Design' argument, now being used to counter Evolutionism, with questionable success. Interestingly, proponents of that argument tend to more generally maintain that they possess Certainty, when it comes to Morality. Without the least hint of irony, they continue to insist that they are devoted adherents of Biblical lessons.