Without Feuerbach or Derrida

Daniel Dennett is loose; and boy, is he stupid:

Protecting your inner workings is becoming very difficult; it’s very hard to keep secrets. Religions have thrived in part because they were able to keep secrets. They were able to keep secrets about other religions from their parishioners, who were largely ignorant of what other people in the world believed, and also keep secrets about their own inner workings and their own histories, so that it was easy to have a sort of controlled message that went out to people. Those days are over. You can go on the Internet and access to all kinds of information. This is going to change everything.

I don't even know what this means.  Does he imagine the Catholic Mass is still chanted in Latin, and believers can only read that which is "nihil obstat" and under the imprimatur?  Has he not heard of the printing press, the German Biblical scholars of the 19th century, Soren Kierkegaard or Rudolf Bultmann, the death of God movement or the contemporary work of Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, or John Caputo?

No, probably not.  But he seems to imagine the internet will do what Gutenberg and Franklin and Carnegie (both responsible of the American library system) failed to do.  Oh, and the Enlightenment, and widespread college educations in America and Europe.

I mean, seriously, is this guy for real?  If the internet is going to enlighten us all, can it start to work on him first?

And if you think the internet is going to lead to unity and oneness as we all learn to think like Dennett, please to read the comments at RD.  I gave up.  The comments were pretty much as clueless as Dennett.  I know, I know, same song, second verse.  But Vattimo makes more sense than Dennett; for Vattimo "the postmodern is post metaphysical, wherein freedom 'does not lie in having a perfect knowledge of the necessary structure of reality and conforming to it,' but instead is conceived as disorientation by virtue of the dissolution of reality."

If, for example, Dennett can tell me he understands quantum mechanics and doesn't just take it on faith, i.e., reliance on the expertise of physicists, that the universe includes quarks and mesons and dark matter, I'll eat my hat.  Because while those things are predicted by the mathematics, few of them have been proven to actually exist.  Yet still physicists tell us they do, and we accept that claim; pretty much the way the people in the pews in Dennett's imagined past accepted the claims that God exists, though they could no more understand that existence than most people on the globe can understand the Higg's Boson (which we are told was discovered; we have to take someone's word for it that what the data shows is what they were looking for.  I can't analyze it; can you?)

You can, of course, hide all manner of information in plain sight.  A physicist could work for days to reassure me the Higgs Boson was found (if it was; I can't remember if that was declared confirmed, or not), or that quantum mechanics determines how my computer works (the theory is followed and the result seems to be engineered to function; but that doesn't mean the propositions of quantum mechanics have all been established empirically; if, indeed, they can be).  As I say, the hypothetical physicist could work for days to educate me, but in the end I wouldn't be able to follow the math, I'd just have to accept that it made sense and that what I was being told was at least being presented sincerely as truth.  The perfect knowledge of the world that Newton imagined he could obtain has been proven unobtainable.  That's the whole purpose of Schrodinger's unfortunate cat.

And yet here is Dennett, once again proclaiming the millennium and the year of Jubilee because with the internet we will finally once and for all dial "F" and get, not Frankenstein, but fundamental functionalism.  And all will be discovered, and all will be known, and no one will live in ignorance again.

Except all the commenters on the internet who already know what they know and just want to defend it as fiercely and blindly as ever any knight defended his master.

There is a great deal more I could add, including a lot of information from Armstrong about the rise  (and fall) of atheism and, especially, the ignorance of the New Atheists.   Dennett's definition of religion, of what "belief" and "faith" are, of what religious faith consists of, and what religious belief is:  all false and unfounded and already falling away.  It may be that religion eventually breaks into two camps: fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists; but then we're there already, aren't we?  And what Dennett imagines people will no longer be able to believe means they will either have to think like him (highly unlikely) or that their thinking will forever be a mystery to him, an inner working he'll think they are keeping stubbornly secret (ironic!).  There is much in Vattimo's idea of the return of religiosity to consider, or in Wittgenstein's respect for religious belief.  But I've talked too long already, and Dennett isn't worth the candle, and besides, he's as incapable of understanding. It is as if he were deaf and I was trying to explain Beethoven's music.

However, when I read about how the internet is going to bring the new Enlightenment and make it stick this time, and I think of the number of people who now think "research" is synonymous with "Key word search," and that reasoning matters far less than "facts" ("IS TOO!"  "IS NOT!!!!"), I don't even chuckle mordantly.

I just think how I'm ready to give up; that the dike's gonna burst, and I'm kidding myself that I've even got a thumb in the hole in it.

Still reelin' in the years...

Prior Aelred sent me this some time ago, but I haven't had a chance to address it until now. For some reason I had forgotten Richard Dawkins' connection to "selfish gene" theory, and I also thought that the "selfish gene" idea had found its Wittgenstein, and already been as discredited as thoroughly as Wittgenstein and Godel discredited logical positivism.

Obviously, I was wrong.

I worked out a fairly coherent argument against the "selfish gene" theory when I first heard of it, and seem to remember reading most of my points among criticisms of the idea, which is why, I think, I considered it a dead issue. It is, by and large, premised on a reductio ad absurdum not too different from Daniel Dennett's approach to religion, and since they keep company it is tempting simply to drag out my tar brush and proclaim guilt by association. It would be easier than resurrecting a tedious argument of insidious intent, and besides, Dennett is as poor a philosopher, in my humble opinion, as I am a poor musician. I say that partly because of what I've said before (here and here); partly because I've skimmed Dennett's book (Breaking the Spell) and find it very weakly reasoned (and very clearly written for a popular audience, which is not a back-handed brief for academic philosophers, but technical language serves a purpose of clarity and Dennett's more "accessible" prose masks a number of unsubstantiated assumptions and a great deal of sloppy reasoning); and partly because I agree with Michael Ruse:

Even more reckless, Ruse put on the net an email exchange between himself and Dennett in which he accused his adversary of being an "absolute disaster" and of refusing to study Christianity seriously: "It is just plain silly and grotesquely immoral to claim that Christianity is simply a force for evil." Dennett's reply was an opaque one line: "I doubt you mean all the things you say."

That opaque line, by the way, is fairly consistent with Dennett's method of "argument" in his latest book. Ruse's critique is an argument I've made myself, many times. Most critics of Christianity don't have the passing acquaintance with it a teenager acquires from sitting stolidly in a pew for the first 18 years of life, and yet they proclaim their expertise in their superiority to that about which they know next to nothing. My critiques of science come from my study of it, not from my blank ignorance. It is that ignorance of the subject that makes critics of religion like Dennett and Dawkins little different from the fundamentalist Christians who blast science even as they remain clearly ignorant of scientific reasoning.

Madeline Bunting's argument, by the way, is a bit bizarre itself, which perhaps reflects the difficulty we still have with squeezing religion into a box small enough that we can dismiss it easily. If, indeed, "religion has outrun its evolutionary advantage," (if, indeed, religion is all about providing "evolutionary advantage), then it will wither away on its own, not via the battering of intellectuals. Indeed, it is the reaction to such battering that produced American fundamentalism. And a similarly dismissive attitude toward religion has fueled radical Islam in certain parts of the world. Wittgenstein's observation that we are simply talking about different things, not the same things in different terms, is still the most valuable one. We don't, in other words, need to "demythologize" religion; we need to set aside the claims of "reality" v. "mythology."

In most religious circles, we simply call that "ecumenism" and "tolerance."

"The things that pass for knowledge I don't understand."

Just shoot me

Computer problems ate my post.

I think I'll start drinking heavily this morning.

Had a lengthy post prepared concluding my unscientific postcript on Shulevitz review of Daniel Dennett's book. My computer has apparently eaten it (I'm on the other computer in the house, and just realized that post apparently didn't get saved before I was forced to shut down).

Allright, in a nutshell (if I can): Dennett's entire approach to religion fails on the ground Shulevtiz identifies but doesn't, to my mind, adequately describe: he is attempting to analyze a synthetic statement without adequately defining the terms under consideration (the very problem, as Boreas pointed out, that synthetic statements are subject to).

This problem has something of a pedigree, as I had carefully pointed out in words of genius now lost forever (no, of course not! But how will you ever know, eh?). It was the spark (the problem of definition) for Russell's pursuit of logical positivism, which gave rise to Rusell and Whitehead's brave attempt to map language onto mathematics, thus creating linquistic precision in philosophy, and eliminating ambiguity; and which produced one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, and Russell's greatest disciple, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Except that by the end of Wittgenstein's first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he had eliminated logical positivism from his thinking (and for a time left all philosophy behind, only to return and examine the problem of language in philosophy, but to explore its ambiguities and exploit them, not eliminate them), and then Kurt Godel gutted the main contentions of the Principia. Russell was reduced to being largely an anti-war activist and something of an anti-religion crank, and Whitehead followed Wittgenstein into seeming mysticism, and wrote a book now largely notable for giving rise to process theology.

Ironies abound.

But here's the problem for Dennett, and Shulevitz put her finger on it: how can you validly assess a synthetic statement, if you cannot establish the terms of the discussion?

Any serious philosopher of religion would examine the question of religion before attempting to examine its evolutionary relevance (if any). After all, if you cannot define "love" within the limits of scientific discourse, can you examine its relationship to human evolution, or even biology? (And if you do define love within the limits of scientific discourse, tell me how that works out for your Valentine's Day card, okay?). Is there, in fact, "love" as you might define it for science, and "love" as you might whisper it to your beloved? And what's the difference? And why?

You see where this ends up, of course. You end up talking about two different things, and just using the same phonemes for them. The confusion originates in your language. If you can clear that up, maybe you can solve the problem. But you'll be Ludwig Wittgenstein if you do. Or near to him.

Dennett is not Wittgenstein (but then, who of us is?). But thre's a stil more fundamental problem with Dennett's work: it's not a serious work of philosophy, nor of science.

He fails to provide a scientific definition of the terms under discussion. This is a major failing for a scientist, of course. But he also fails to provide an adequate definition of his terms for purposes of philosophy of religion, or even philosophy in general. This, too, is a major failing, and it renders his entire enterprise both pointless, and poorly considered.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is detailed and complex precisely because the issues involved are subtle and require careful delineation. Heidegger devotes much of Being and Time just to elucidating that being and Dasein are. Kierkegaard's output struggled with the questions raised by faith, and the response of reason to those questions, as well as the response of the faithful. His entire prolific output is a careful examination of only a few issues.

Dennett purports to solve all of that in one volume, written for a general audience. The only way to do that is to reduce the issues to a few straw men, and then proceed to knock them over. He can't even do the groundwork of learning about the philosophy of religion, nor the details of Christian, or Muslim, theology, or Jewish teachings; not to mention the other major world religions. All are subsumed in his assumptions, which he is quite free with.

Kierkegaard took on Hegel, on Hegel's terms and Hegel's issues. Kant took on Hume, beginning with Hume's terms and Hume's issues. Godel' s theorem is formally titled: "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems." Dennett writes about: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. The title itself is a silly and sophomoric conflation of religion and magic. And "religion" is a formally undefined term in his study.

How can anyone take seriously what Dennett has to say?

A Lenten Meditation

Well, as long as I'm just sitting here....

I've said it before, or attempted to, but when someone else says it again, and so eloquently and clearly, I want to pass it on.

Via Thought Criminal, David Bentley Hunt reviewing Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell:

For one thing, it does not logically follow that, simply because religion as such is a natural phenomenon, it cannot become the vehicle of divine truth, or that it is not in some sense oriented toward a transcendent reality. To imagine that it does so follow is to fall prey to a version of the genetic fallacy, the belief that one need only determine the causal sequence by which something comes into being in order to understand its nature, meaning, content, uses, or value. For another thing, no one believes in religion. Christians, for instance, believe that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead and is now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, present to his Church as its Lord. This claim is at once historical and spiritual, and has given rise to an immense diversity of natural expressions: moral, artistic, philosophical, social, legal, and (of course) religious. Regarding “religion” as such, though, it is in keeping with theological tradition to see it as something common to all societies, many of whose manifestations are violent, idiotic, despotic, superstitious, amoral, degrading, and false. The most one can say about religion in the abstract is that it gives ambiguous expression to what Christian tradition calls the “natural desire for God,” and to a human openness to spiritual truth, revelation, or grace.

A number of on-line atheists think they destroy the power of scripture by pointing out it is either old ("Bronze Age" is the favorite label now; it is all a matter of faddishness, these labels) or all too human (all the violence!), or not as damning of slavery as we are today, or just too ignorant of modern cosmology.  Because apparently scripture must be wholly Other, or it is only wholly human.

And human is not good enough to believe in, except as humans "reason," and reason in ways approved of.  Hunt touches on that, pointing out the idea of "memes" which Dennett relies on (via Dawkins)  is a reliance on something that simply cannot be established by empiricism or scientific study.  He describes Dennett's conclusions this way:

It is as if [Dennett] imagines that by imitating the outward forms of scientific method, and by applying an assortment of superficially empirical theories to nonempirical realities, and by tirelessly gathering information, and by asserting the validity of his methods with an incantatory repetitiveness, and by invoking invisible agencies such as memes, and by fiercely believing in the efficacy of all that he is doing, he can summon forth actual hard clinical results, as from the treasure houses of the gods.

It's an attempt I've seen over and over again.  The virtue of the Continental philosophers I read, even the lapsed Catholics like Vattimo, is that they understand there is something about religion which is not dreamt of in such a crabbed and ill-informed philosophy as Dennett's; and that there is nothing wrong with religion being "natural" (indeed, the argument that it can't be is largely the argument of the Christian fundamentalists, whom most on-line atheists, as well as Dennett and Dawkins, take for the majority of Christianity).  As Hunt, the theologian, point out:

Certainly the Christian should be undismayed by the notion that religion is natural “all the way down.” Indeed, it should not matter whether religion is the result of evolutionary imperatives, or of an inclination toward belief inscribed in our genes and in the structure of our brains, or even (more fantastically) of memes that have impressed themselves on our minds and cultures and languages. All things are natural. But nature itself is created toward an end”its consummation in God”and is informed by a more eminent causality”the creative will of God”and is sustained in existence by its participation in the being that flows from God, who is the infinite wellspring of all actuality. And religion, as a part of nature, possesses an innate entelechy and is oriented like everything else toward the union of God and his creatures. Nor should the Christian expect to find any lacunae in the fabric of nature, needing to be repaired by the periodic interventions of a cosmic maintenance technician. God’s transcendence is absolute: He is cause of all things by giving existence to the whole, but nowhere need he act as a rival to any of the contingent, finite, secondary causes by which the universe lives, moves, and has its being in him.

And that is a fine Lenten Meditation.

Same song, second verse

As the year closes, I've been watching a documentary series on Netflix, "Chef's Table."  It profiles in roughly one-hour episodes famous chefs who will never be on Food Network, but who regardless are apparently well known in the field.

I've never heard of any of them.

The third in the series is a chef from Argentina who has several restaurants around the world, is, the documentary tells me, constantly on television and has been for years, and is very, very famous.  Everywhere except America, apparently.  To say he's the Bobby Flay of South America would be an insult, but I'm guessing his fame is on that level or perhaps well above.  More likely he's Bobby Flay combined with Mario Batali with the name recognition of Guy Fieri.

I mention it only because I thought of the notion of what we know being important in giving us perspective on what we think is revelatory, or especially an indicator of the future.  Annie Dillard pointed out that no place on the globe is "out of the way," except as a matter of perspective, and our perspective is not the only one on the planet.  "Out of the way" to us may be "home" to someone else  (as it is to this chef, who lives on an island in a lake on the border of Argentina and Peru, reached at the end of 100 miles of dirt road).  As Ms. Dillard puts it (if memory serves):  "Out of the way?  From where?"

Anyway, I thought of that when reading about story no. 10 here.  Daniel Dennett, in his ignorance about priests and clerics in general, thinks he's discovered a new thing made possible only by modern technology.  When, in fact, it's neither new, or distinctive, nor the shape of things to come; nor only made possible thanks to silicon chips.  Think of Graham Greene's "whiskey priest," or the preacher in The Grapes of Wrath.  Literature is sprinkled with examples of priests and pastors who found the church a convenient place to make a living, and little more.  Hell, Chaucer wrote about them.  So this is nothing new.  And besides, as I've said several times before:  has Mr. Dennett ever attended a seminary class?

Seminary is not a place for indoctrination.  Take this ludicrous statement by Mr. Dennett as an example:

Protecting your inner workings is becoming very difficult; it’s very hard to keep secrets. Religions have thrived in part because they were able to keep secrets. They were able to keep secrets about other religions from their parishioners, who were largely ignorant of what other people in the world believed, and also keep secrets about their own inner workings and their own histories, so that it was easy to have a sort of controlled message that went out to people. Those days are over. You can go on the Internet and access to all kinds of information. This is going to change everything. 

This (the internet) is going to change nothing, because:  what the hell is he talking about?  Christianity ceased to be a "mystery religion" sometime in the 1st century.  You want a mystery religion, you look to the temple practice of the Mormons.  Is the internet going to destroy them?  And as for parishioners being ignorant of that other people in the world believe, has Mr. Dennett paid attention to the arguments about Islam?  It seems clear people prefer ignorance over knowledge, the better to despise and detest "the other".  Yes, you can go on the internet and get all kinds of information.  Most of it is crap, and people mostly look for the information that confirms their prejudice.

Information is not education.

Maybe this is the place to make that distinction:  education is not about being informed; education is about being trained to think in a certain way.  There is no "objective" stance, no "God's-eye view" or "position of the universe" for humans to take.  All information is served up with a point of view attached, if only the point of view that the earth sits "upright" with North America and Europe "on top," and the lesser countries "below."  Larry Wilmore presents the globe like that on his comedy show, but everyone takes it as a joke.  I first encountered it in seminary, as yet another way to simply change my point of view, my presumptions about everything.   And that's what a seminary education will do:  challenge your point of view about everything.  And it won't give you a new one to replace it.  You have to come up with that on your own.  I remember a seminary professor, a man closer to my age now than then (20 years ago) asking a group of us how we would explain the importance of Jesus Christ without resorting to old-school soteriology about the damnation of the unbeliever.  He didn't have the answer either; he was asking us.

Seminary ain't Sunday School

Education is about being trained in the ideas and even ideology of the teacher.  You can challenge that ideology (I got into almost an infamous spat with one of my professors in seminary), but you have to learn how even start to do that.  The self-taught, the autodidact, are conspicuous by their opinions and insistence on ideas that their self-education never challenged.  The internet has not created a class of people who prefer to confirm their prejudices with select information, it has simply confirmed their existence as a normal part of human society.  We all prefer our own prejudices:  that's why there are so many denominations and non-denominational churches, so many different types of French cheese, so many ever-changing flavors of ice cream.  We all think we are right, and we all gather with "right-minded' people; people who think like us.  The internet didn't invent that; the internet didn't change that.

All the internet did was provide yet another forum for the confirmation of that.  What it won't do is the same thing television was never going to do:  it won't educate.

Education is a deliberate process, an engagement between teacher and student.  It does not occur by happenstance or coincidence or osmosis.

I don't know about the pastors and rabbis selected by Mr. Dennett for his book:  maybe they have had mid-life crises; maybe they have had a crisis of faith.  Maybe the insane pressures of being a religious leader simply got to them, and they abandoned their churches and synagogues altogether.  Nothin he describes is new or unique in the world.  It is as old as religion and clergy itself.

And as for the idea that congregations will demand information the church is hiding from them, all I can say is:  I took my training in the thought of the Jesus Seminar and the German Biblical scholarship which prompted the Christian fundamentalist movement, to my congregation, and they didn't use it to demand more of me:  they rejected it wholesale, and me with it.  I don't think I was a worthy messenger, but what I didn't find in my churches was any desire to know more salient and valid and, at the same time challenging, information than anything I've seen on the internet since I went online in the '90's.

Here I want to tie in another article at RD mentioned in that top 10 list, this one about Sam Harris and his e-mail spat with Noam Chomsky.

Let me say at the outset it still surprises me, as it did Chomsky, that Harris would publish this exchange.  Harris seems to be a man remarkably obtuse when it comes to either self-reflection or even any consideration of an idea that isn't his.  But it's the article at RD that convinced me, mainly on the strength of the three long quotes from the e-mails of Noam Chomsky, to revisit this issue at year's end.  I mention it because it concisely states where Chomsky rebutted everything Harris had to say ("I’ve seen apologetics for atrocities before, but rarely at this level" pretty much marks "paid" to any idea that Sam Harris is an ethical thinker; and I agree with you completely that we cannot have a rational discussion of these matters, and that it is too tedious to pretend otherwise" is so clear and directly between the eyes it is only myopia that can account for Harris being willing to publish this exchange.) and it establishes, as clearly as anything I've ever seen since the collapse of logical positivism, that the positions taken by Sam Harris are morally corrupt, unsound in reasoning, and thoroughly discredited.

We have in Dennett and Harris two people probably better known because of the Internet than they would be otherwise (the number of people who write bestselling books but also influence the public discourse is vanishingly small), and they are far more alike than different in that both of them live in a bubble which the internet only reinforces for them.  And that is what the internet has created:  more of the same.  A little bit louder, and a little bit worse.  Mr. Dennett is as ignorant of the world around him as I am of famous chefs and public figures who don't swim into my ken.  And he's as parochial as people who think that anyplace not near them is "out of the way" for everybody.  Mr. Harris is no different, yet he can't even allow any contrary idea to swim into his knowledge, lest it uproot his understanding and render everything he's ever said pointless.

And yet they are, if not saints, at least representatives of one constituency on the internet.  Maybe that "vast wasteland" isn't inherent in how we use our communications technologies; maybe it's simply inherent in us.

"Truth is Subjective"

Pastor Dan picks up on this quote from Judith Shulevitz' review of Daniel Dennet's book. And while it shouldn't bother me, it does. Because it continues to leave alive the seeming contradiction between religion and philosophy that doesn't really exist, except in the minds of people who understand neither, and gloss over Hume's real meaning in favor of saying he "destroyed natural religion."

Here's the quote from Shulevitz:

Faced with these dilemmas, philosophers concluded that there was only one way to tell religion from other apparent aberrations. Religion, they said, is what makes people feel religious. It puts them in touch with the Infinite or with what Freud called "the oceanic feeling." Defining religion as an experience, however, puts us back into the old Kantian world in which science goes here and religion goes there. An experiential definition of religion renders it impervious to empirical observation. You can never prove that someone feels religious, so you can never prove that something is a religion. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard took this idea even further, saying that the nonreligious could never understand the truth of religion, because religious experience could be understood only subjectively, not objectively.

This is, in point of fact, precisely what Kierkegaard did not do.

"Truth is subjective," Kierkegaard famously wrote, but by that he did not mean that truth is mere sophistry, that what is true for me may or may not be true for you. He was following, in fact, in Hume's footsteps. Which is where we have to go, and do so by way of Kant.

Kant, as Shulevitz notes (rather reductively, but that's unavoidable in this cirumstance) divided the world into pure reason and practical reason. He was responding to Hume, who seemingly left reason in such tatters it could not recover. The problem has been ever since that some think Kant put Humpty Dumpty together again, and some understand he just invented a new Humpty Dumpty, a sort of hologram Humpty Dumpty, if you will. Dennett seems to be of the former category, the attitude that prevails (to be perfectly reductive and generalizing about it) in Anglo-American philosophical circles (and the reason they are usually dismissive of existentialism and other schools of phenomenology, which is primarily associated with "Continental" philosophers, primarily, most recently, Sartre, Heidegger, and Derrida).

So the lines are (very broadly) drawn. Now back to Hume.

Hume was the last great Empiricist, part of the "trinity" of great British empiricists, the other two being Locke and Berkeley. Empiricism (and it's influence on Anglo-American philsophers cannot be overstated) argued, contra Plato, that all knowledge comes only from sensory impressions. For Locke, this meant the mind was a "tabula rasa," a blank slate, upon which our experiences, via memory and the senses, wrote our knowledge (Locke is the reason we are so fascinated with memory and personal identity today. You can draw a straight line from Locke to Philip K. Dick, and to the movies "Memento" and "Batman Begins;" a line that obviously runs through Freud, too.)

Hume took this reasoning to its logical conclusion, arguing, among other things, that since he could not observe a "self" which in turn observed the world the senses told the "self" about, he had to conclude (as Shulevitz says Dennett does) that the "self" was an illusion (the validity of that we can discuss anon). But he also undid causation, and did so by developing a method of determining, quite rigorously, what could be known.

He did so by distinguishing two types of ideas: analytic, and synthetic. In briefest summation, synthetic ideas are those known through experience (more technically, information known a posteriori, not a priori). And example is the knowledge that a given stone is heavy. Analytic ideas are known a prior (a bow to Socrates), but are purely about relations of ideas; an example is 2 + 2 = 4. Synthetic ideas are encountered in the world, and so there are consequences to them; however, they don't reveal any truth. Analytic statements are true, but their truths are irrelevant.

Remember, these are the two kinds of statements we can make: they all divide into analytic, or synthetic, according to Hume; and while the argument over the precise nature of the divide rages in modern philosophy, the importance of the division to empiricism is not really questioned.

But Hume went one step further with his emphasis on observation. He annihilated the "self" by arguing he could never observe a self observing sensory perceptions, and therefore the "self" was just an illusion, a concept arising from the activity of perception itself, which activity, Hume argued, was all that could be known. Well, from that reduction of observation, he went to causation itself. First Hume argued that causation was a synthetic judgment; we know it only from experience, and our reasoning about it is always a posteriori. That is, we determine causation only after the fact. This much is sound "scientific" reasoning. But, says Hume, just as we can never observe a "self" observing sensory impressions, we can never observe a precise connection between the cause and the effect. Based on experience (which is a posterirori), we assume there is one. But that assumption is not proof. We cannot, actually, prove causation; we can only assert it, and that assertion is not enough. Minutely as we might observe the cue ball strike the 8 ball, we cannot say before the fact what will happen before the balls collide, especially if we are seeing it for only the first time. What we can say is what we expect to happen, but that expectation undoes our observation, because the connection between one event (moving cue ball, stationary 8 ball) and the next (moving 8 ball due, says physics, to a transfer of energy) cannot be shown. It can only be assumed, based on experience.

Must the cue ball move the 8 ball? Experience says it will. But how do we know? We must run the experiment. This, of course, is where science would seem to grind to a halt. The experiment says that, under certain conditions, certain results follow. But until we run the experiment, we don't know that is true. Once we run it, will it be true again? We'll have to run the experiment. Rather like Zeno's paradox of the turtle and Achilles, our observation is reduced to a nullity. We cannot, in other words, soundly predict what will happen. We can only, at best, say what we expect to happen.

And in that state of affairs we cannot validly predicate causation.

Kant reestablishes the validity of observation (especially our observation of causation) by linking our perceptions to reality through ideas (hence the name of Kantian school of philosophy, Idealism). He resorts, essentially, to Plato, to defeat the non-Platonic empiricism. To greatly reduce his subtle and complex argument, the crux of the matter is that while we cannot know things in themselves (the Ding an Sich for Kant, and there Hume remains triumphant) we can know the ideas related to those things, and for us, those ideas are reality, so the attempt to separate them from the things in themselves (the ding an sich) is ultimately bootless, because we only talk about the ideas anyway. Might as well accept them as real. On that split arises modern philosophy, and the Enlightenment, with it's assertion that reason is superior to belief, because the products of reasoning can be empirically established. But empirically established by idealism, not by direct observation (Kant and Hume both seal us away from the things in themselves). Kant, in other words, sort of gets folded back in, even as the staunchest materialists (like Dennett) try to reach around idealism and appeal to empiricism (if they grasp Hume fully, they are left with with his conclusion, summed up among philosophy students as: "No matter; never mind." Not a position entirely useful to a materialist.) .

This is also where modern philosophy turns toward language, something that becomes an abiding interst of philosophers as different as Austin, Wittgenstein, and (again) Derrida. All Hume really leaves philosophy with, in the end, is language. We cannot really establish anything (not without being Kantian Idealists), and so we have to talk about what we are talking about. Philosophy turns, in other words, on it's own tools: language.

Now, what does Hume have to do with Kierkegaard?

Kierkegaard is both post-Hume and post-Kant, and following somewhat on Descartes, becomes more concerned with the existence of the individual than with the "big idea" of the nature of existence. Hume has already established, at one end, that this "big idea" is at least very difficult, if not impossible, to discuss in philosophical terminology (which would lead to the intense focus of some philosophers on language itself), and Kant at the other had re-established our ability to speak of such things by appealing to trascendent ideals much larger than even humanity itself. That lead philosophy to the rarified atmosphere of Hegel's Idealism, which Kierkegaard was reacting against (in no small part because there is not much room for either individuality, or the God of Abraham active in human affairs, in Hegel's philosophy of history; at least not enough to satisfy Kierkegaard). But where Hume said we cannot speak of truth because we can never identify it objectively, Kierkegaard turned the coin over and said: well, then, truth is subjective.

But then we are referring, of course, to two different kinds of truth. The problem with Hume's definition of the self, for example, is that it leaves one (in our day, if not Hume's 18th century) with the image of a TV screen receiving pictures (sense impressions) in an empty room, yet somehow those sense impressions are turned into reactions, conduct, knowledge, even memories. By whom, or what? The TV itself? The room? The impressions themselves, reaching some kind of mysterious critical mass in some way we can't quite explain, and so we discard the whole process, even as we rely on it? Objectively, Hume is right. But as Kierkegaard pointed out, objectively is not the way we examine our own existence. We cannot stand outside of our own existence an examine it as we would a vase or a favorite pet. So, while objectively we may say we cannot observe the activities of this thing we call a self, that is because objectively, we are speaking nonsense.

Kierkegaard sardonically wrote of the man who got so outside his own existence, determined to be objective about observing all things, that he awoke one morning to find he no longer existed! It was his way of pointing out that the truth which is most important to us has less to do with Aristotelian observation of data, and more to do with the Socratic concern "How should we then live?" (This is where Tillich grounds his idea of God's relationship to humanity being one of "ultimate concern" to the individual. What, asks Tillich, could be more important to one's existence, than the relationship with God?) This emphasis on the individual seems very natural to us, but it is indeed very much the product of Romaniticism. But that is still another essay!

The issues of the difficulty of our observation raised by Hume are left intact here. The answer of Kant is left intact as well. What shifts is the ground of the discussion. What is most important to the individual: establishing the validity of our construct of consciousness (which both Hume and Dennett, after him, were concerned with), or establishing the validity of our existence in the world? What is the truth of your love for your family? Can you establish it scientifically, empirically? Can you establish it for me so that I can objectively see the validity of your love? (Does that even matter to you?) And yet which is more important to you as a matter of "ultimate concern"?

So it comes down, finally, to a matter of language, where Hume almost 200 years ago. What is truth? Well, what do you mean by the term?
what, in Wittgenstein's terms, language game are you playing? He explains the matter this way:

In religion every level of devoutness must have its appropriate form of expression, which has no sense at a lower level. This doctrine, which means something at a higher level, is null and void for someone who is still at the lower level; he can only understand it wrongly and so these words are not valid for such a person.

Empiricists like Dennett are still struggling with Hume (a far better philosopher, W.V.O. Quine, for example, worked to save empiricism from Hume's nihilism, without resorting to Kant's idealist escape hatch). Materialists like Dennett insist truth can be known only in terms of the material universe, but Hume leaves them unable even to talk about that universe, without resorting in some way to Kant's idealism.

Which leaves us in a rather dry place. Wittgenstein, ironically, can point a way out, by reference to that "subjectivity of truth" we started with:

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

"Nietzsche is dead."--God

I haven't read the book (and don't intend to; life is too short), but according to the early reviews, Peter Watson's "intellectual history" The Age of Atheists starts with Nietzsche and ends with the three horsemen of the New Atheist apocalypse:  Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris.  Funny, that; starting with a philologist and influential philosopher, and ending with three dilettantes:

Thanks to such discoveries we will eventually be able to say, objectively, that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, because once we put religion in its place, “[w]ell-being captures all that we can intelligibly value.”

Watson is referring to Sam Harris there.  Since he starts with Neitzsche, I wonder if Watson bothers to mention the "God is Dead" theological movement of the '60's, one inspired more by the late thinking of Bonhoeffer than by the mad German.  It was a movement trying to take seriously Bonhoeffer's idea that God was about to become irrelevant to the modern world; if so, the thinking went, maybe we can establish a "religionless Christianity" by accepting that God, or at least all the "old" ideas about God, are (is) dead.  I still think those ashes might be worth stirring, but I haven't seen anything indicate Watson took any interest.

As for this evaluation of Harris:  Thanks, but I've seen Omelas, and I don't want to live there.  Besides, I wasn't aware that any religiously grounded ethic was not based on what "we can intelligibly value."  The conflict, as ever, is over what those terms mean:  both "value" and "intelligibly."  And that has been true since at least Euripides' "Medea." But then we are dealing with remarkably ignorant men:

Harris argued from the failures of the kibbutzim in Israel that some forms of social life are less moral than others; that conservative societies have higher rates of divorce, teenage pregnancy and pornography; that it is societies whose members are allowed to maximize themselves and others that are the most successful changing morally, and improving, he emphasized—for instance, we are less prepared than we used to be to accept collateral damage in conflict situations.

Harris as sociologist makes out no better than Harris as philosopher, or as observer of current events.  I'll notify the people of Pakistan immediately that the drone strikes have stopped because Americans are now too moral to accept the casual deaths of foreigners.  As soon as that actually happens, anyway.

One of his prime conclusions was that “there may be nothing more important than human cooperation.”

Honestly, this is so stupid it's criminal. This is not an argument, it's the plea of Rodney King:  "Why can't we just all get along?"  Except for Harris, the plea is followed by "Kill all the noncooperators!  That'll fix it!"  And no, I'm not exaggerating.  This argument is also pretty much the claim of everyone from the Roman Empire to 20th century fascism and communism.  The only problem is when some people think there is something more important than cooperation; and what do we do with those troublemakers?  Then again, Harris doesn't seem to have much problem with imperialism, so long as it is on his side.  But from a purely practical point of view, cooperation is the problem; how, precisely, do we attain it?  (I also think Watson's reading of Harris and Dawkins is absolute bunkum; but that's yet another matter.)

As for "improving" morally; don't make me laugh; especially since Harris clearly thinks all Muslims and Christian fundamentalists present a clear and present danger, and should be wiped from the face of the earth.  All in the name of being morally superior, of course.

Gee, who else has taken that stance against other groups of people within living memory?  Sit down, Mr. Godwin, you aren't needed here.  The thing speaks for itself, as the lawyers say.

Or there's this, from the year 1984:

Dawkins then went on to quote from his colleague Peter Atkins’s book The Second Law(1984) [i.e., of thermodynamics]: “We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.”

Which is on the cutting edge of 1843:

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”

Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling.

Been there, done that, gone through it with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus.  A.N. Wilson covered it in popular form in 1999, for pity's sake.  Watson's book is supposedly a history that takes this all into account, at least according to the reviews.  How can anyone seriously argue that Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris are blazing a new path, except  to do so from truly benighted ignorance?

G.E.Moore.  Aristotle.  Boethius.  Cicero.  I can name philosophers ancient and modern who have essayed systems of ethical behavior without reference to religious beliefs or mores, and I haven't even touched on Eastern philosophy.  Per the reviews, Watson can, too; but there's nothing of that in this excerpt.  Why do these "atheists" insist they have just now discovered fire and invented the wheel when all they have is disdain for an imagined "other" and a philosophical tool as useful as a wet noodle?   I am convinced the only reason these people post and publish is to find someone they can look down on so they can feel superior.  Stenger conflates all religions with some version of Christianity he keeps in his head so he can stick pins in it, and clergy with theologians, a distinction and difference any clergy would insist on.  From Dawkins to Dennett to Watson they all seem to be fighting with the ghost of Jerry Falwell, when they aren't still wrestling with issues from the Victorian era (issues wrestled among public intellectuals, too; not so much among ethicists, theologians, or philosophers).  None of them want to engage a serious discussion (Dawkins likens knowing anything about theology or philosophy of religion to being well informed about fairies and unicorns).  All they do is parade their ignorance and set fire to straw men of their own imagining.

It's pathetic, really.  But it is also what passes for public intellectual discourse in America, where Stephen Pinker gets more regard than Noam Chomsky, and Daniel Dennett is more likely to be quoted than Jacques Derrida.

In the past few decades, both evolutionary biologists like Dawkins and cosmologists—physicists and astronomers—have mounted a spirited attack on the basic dimensions of religion, in particular the main monotheisms, and in doing so have tried hard to reshape what—for the sake of a better phrase—we may call our spiritual predicament.

Really?  We're doomed to repeat the 19th century all over again?  Or did you miss it the first time?  Because I think we've had that discussion, and by the 1920's it sort of came to a head, and we all moved on.

Or having learned nothing from history, are you determined to repeat it?

One of the comments at Salon refers to Pinker's assertions about the decline in violence in history as "Victorian triumphalism."  So maybe it's appropriate our public intellectuals are now atheists and philosophers who have the respect of the Victorians among us.  Frankly I always preferred Browning and Hardy over Tennyson.  ("Christmas:  1924" beats "In Memoriam" all to heck and gone for pungent insight; much as I still like portions of the latter.)  And I dare say this kerfuffle looks very serious to Very Important People, but the fact is the fears of Victorian England about a meltdown in social order were vastly overblown (and self-interested; those in power worried, as ever, about retaining their power) and the meltdown that finally came (thanks largely to World War I, which shattered the European ideal of decency and good order on the Continent) was well behind us all by the 1960's.

It's about time the "New Atheists" joined the 21st century, and quit wishing for the return of the 19th (is it any coincidence so many of the "leading lights" of the New Atheists are either British or products of elite East Coast institutions?).  And the sooner they actually learn half as much as Nietzsche knew, the better for the rest of us they insist on pestering.

Waiting for the Big One

This may just become my preferred image for Lent.

I've been holding onto this post for some time.  Now, thanks to Southern Beale, I have a reason to revise and release it.  I'll start with the original premise, and adjust it below:

These statistics may be completely bogus.  Assuming they aren't, they are quite interesting:

While self-described atheists and agnostics tend to be highly educated, 77 percent of those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” haven’t finished college. Many of these people, largely white, aren’t necessarily hostile to religion; they’re simply as alienated from their local churches as they are from other institutions, including political parties and labor unions. Almost half of those who claim no religion but consider religion important earn less than $30,000 a year. These struggling, detached, impious whites are a crucial part of Trump’s base.

I don't care about the "Trump's base" part, I care about the "nothing in particular" description of religion.  Here are the "nones" you hear so much about in certain quarters.  "[T]hey’re simply as alienated from their local churches as they are from other institutions, including political parties and labor unions."  "Bowling Alone" is not a new phenomenon; but it has yet to trickle down to the common knowledge of the "knowledgeable" on the interwebs.

Daniel Dennett says the rising disaffection with religion (and presumably religious belief) is caused by the rising information level available due to the internet.  I'm guessing people who make less than $30,000 a year don't make high-speed internet, and the computer to access it, a top priority.  I'm also thinking people who haven't finished college are not, by and large, that concerned with the latest "proof" of atheists espoused by Richard Dawkins or Pharyngula (if they've heard of either person).  Daniel Dennett, of course, is not alienated from institutions; like Dawkins and Pharyngula (and Sam Harris and Bill Maher), he makes his living from an institution, and relies on other institutions to carry his thoughts abroad and make him famous from them.

The gap between Mr. Dennett and his running mates, and the people identified in that quote above couldn't be any wider.  One might say they can't even see each other.

The irony of the quote lies in this:  the founding figure of Christianity lived as, and taught as, one alienated from institutions.  He lived and walked among the ptochoi, the homeless; the invisible.  The Pharisees and Sadducees and scribes in the Gospels are not historically rendered figures but representative, just as the shepherds are:  the former represent the institutions of life in Judea; the latter represents the people alienated from those institutions.  The people Jesus spoke to were not learned and wise, not educated and powerful.  They were quite the opposite.

If the time has truly come that the institution of the Church, in all its forms and guises, is no longer serving the people of God, if it no longer reaches those "struggling, detached, impious" people described as supporters of Donald Trump, the problem for the church isn't political.

It's existential.  It's fundamental.  It's theological and ecclesiological.  It's, pardon the apparent pun:  institutional.  I am not saying it is absolutely the sign of the end of the ecclesia; but if the ecclesia is leaving those people behind, then what, or who, is the body of Christ and the clouds of witness for?

Now, standing alone that's just a critique of the church, and a rather simplistic one.  But let us never forget the church reflects the culture; how else did the Roman church become part of the empire, it's hierarchy reflective of the model of Rome?  Where else did Protestantism come from, but the massive social changes that were already shaking 16th century Europe?  So Southern Beale, in a "coincidence?  I think not" post, tells me this:

Those who don’t vote tend to be younger and less educated, according to the Pew Research Center. More than half of those who sat out the election in 2012 had no more than a high-school diploma and less than $30,000 a year in household income.

Those are the people Sanders has to get to the polls if he hopes not only to win the Democratic nomination, but also to lead troops of the party’s congressional candidates to victory in the general election, establishing the legislative majority his agenda requires.

At least in New Hampshire, though, younger, poorer and less educated people did not turn out in disproportionate numbers for the Democratic primaries, according to exit polling data gathered on behalf of major television networks and the Associated Press in 2008 and on Tuesday.

Nineteen percent of Democratic primary voters — which, as it happens, can include independents under New Hampshire’s rules — in New Hampshire were less than 30 years old, just one percentage point more than in the state’s primary in 2008. Thirty-one percent had less than $50,000 a year in income, compared to 32 percent in 2008. And the share of primary voters without a college degree apparently declined from 46 percent in 2008 to 40 percent on Tuesday.*

To the politics of that let me add that Hillary went to Flint, Michigan to sympathize with the poor there suffering from the abuse of a state government more concerned with money than people.  Sanders, after New Hampshire, went to Harlem to eat lunch at a famous restaurant with the Rev. Al Sharpton.  Which figure seems more concerned with the poor?

But this isn't about politics, it's about the response to politics, politics being how we do business as a national government, as a society.  At least it's part of how we do business (I use the metaphor advisedly).  The other part is how we treat each other simply as human beings in everyday life.  And the rude fact is, especially in these days where the internet is taken as the vox populi, especially by those who spend all their time on it (raises hand guiltily, points finger down toward self), there are a lot of invisible people out there.

Who speaks for them?  Who is speaking to them?  Who is noticing they aren't showing up?  Hillary went to Flint, Michigan:  that's a safe photo op.  Bernie went to Harlem, to a restaurant.  That's an even safer photo op.

When either one of them is seen among the poor, as LBJ and RFK were seen once upon a time, let me know.  We're still afraid of the poor in this country:  in our politics and in our churches.  And nothing about our national condition is going to change until we change our hearts and minds on that subject; until we pay attention to the people we keep invisible.




* and just as in Iowa, the turnout in New Hampshire for Democrats was down from 2008.  Where is that blasted revolution?  Maybe it will take something more than politics to improve things around here.

The Library of Babble

Well, this is kind of interesting.

Via Grandmere Mimi, in comments, I get a link to this opinion piece about Richard Dawkins and rape (on which topic perhaps enough has been said).  From that piece I get a link to this review by Stephen Jay Gould from late in the last century (it's so much fun to be able to say that!).  It isn't so much about Dawkins' idea of "selfish genes" (although Gould virtually dismisses that theory out of hand, and for clear reasons.  I'm sure elsewhere he wrote more extensively on Dawkins' "fundamentalism," as he calls it.  Again, that problem of research!), as it is about Daniel Dennet's book from the '90s,' Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Which, oddly enough, is what this review is about.  Yeah, yeah, I know:  same book, two reviews, so what?  But I got that link from this post at Thought Criminal.

Synchronicity?

Anyway, it's interesting if only to find out scientists act just like commenters on blogs:  they find it easier to get personal than to engage in rational considerations of topics, even of scientific topics within their fields.  Jump to the last paragraphs of that review by Gould to see what I mean.

It's also enlightening to analyze Dawkins and Dennett as fundamentalists; ultra-Darwininsts, as Gould labels them.  It explains so much, even if it isn't exactly news.  When Eleanor Robertson writes:

Dawkins’ narrowmindedness, his unshakeable belief that the entire history of human intellectual achievement was just a prelude to the codification of scientific inquiry, leads him to dismiss the insights offered not only by theology, but philosophy, history and art as well.

And you read that in light of Gould's review of Dennett (and comments on Dawkins), you begin to wonder if Dawkins has ever made any serious contribution to science or human understanding, and if his turn into a fundamentalist atheist is really a turn at all.

If you weren't wondering already.

I don't know how many supporters Dawkins has among scientists; I do know he has many fans on the internet (go to the comments at the Robertson link above to see what I mean).  But their devotion is rather ignorant, is based more on Dawkins saying what they want to hear, than on Dawkins actually making a sound argument about anything.  Science, like any human endeavor, is all about interpretation.  You can't say that to most atheists/science "supporters" on the internet; they will scream the heavens down upon your head.  But it is true: any human endeavor comes down to the simple ambiguity of interpretation, of how you explain/understand the material (ideas, facts, what have you) which form the basis of your consideration and explanation.

No explanation is complete and total; it is simply accepted as such.  And all explanations are subject, at least, to the Incompleteness theorem, at the extreme.  So no explanation can be complete and total; it simply isn't possible.

I have a weak (admittedly) but enlightening (I hope) example in the new "Sherlock" series, which I've been re-watching on Netflix.  I love this series, because this Sherlock (unlike the demi-god of the Sherlockian canon) can over-read the evidence before him, leaping to conclusions where a simple application of, say, Occam's Razor might make him consider conclusions are more dangerous things than he realizes.

Moriarty, for example, in this series, first appears to Sherlock's eyes as a gay man.  His dress, more than his manner, allegedly betrays him.  Except it turns out Moriarity exploited Sherlock's willingness to accept material facts (the way he dressed) for the final arbiter of truth; Moriarty reveals to Sherlock that he appeared as a gay man knowing Sherlock would leap to the conclusion, never considering it might be a ruse.

In "The Final Vow," Sherlock confronts a man who allegedly has a vast vault beneath his huge modern country home, a vault containing information on paper about almost every person of importance (or of not importance, it seems) in England.  Sherlock never considers an alternative, which turns out to be true:  that the "vault" legend is just that, legend; and the villain has, not a warehouse of paper, but an eidetic memory and a storehouse of memories, of perfect recall of the documents that can blackmail others (or just knowledge of what can be used against them, like the safety of spouses and friends).

It's not an obvious answer, and it's a bit magical (memory doesn't really work that well, especially eidetic memory), but upon review you think:  if Sherlock were as preternaturally intelligent as he is supposed to be, why didn't he consider that possibility?

But Sherlock accepts his intelligence and ability to observe and reason and deduce, as all the power he needs.  This is an intentional weakness in his character, a flaw that keeps him from being a mere automaton or so supremely super-human he is a fantasy figure like Superman.  But it's also a fair warning:  you never know as much as you think you do, and the certainty of your conclusions is always based on what you don't know you don't know.  Sherlock tells Watson at one point that real life is not as neat and tidy as Watson's stories about him are, but the TV episodes can't help being fiction and providing tidy endings to messy story lines.  That is fine for fiction; but it cannot carry over into real life, and in order to make the stories more realistic and less fantastical, Sherlock has to fail, betimes.  Even if the figure Conan Doyle based the first Sherlock on was a real human being, the diagnoses of that doctor were never as final and certain as those of the fictional character he inspired.

Ambiguity, like the poor, will always be with us.  Murder mysteries will always answer all of our questions; real life will not.

But ambiguity and contradiction are anathema to fundamentalists, of which Dawkins is clearly one.  “Mild pedophilia is bad. Violent pedophilia is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of mild pedophilia, go away and learn how to think.”  The first question there has to be:  "what the hell is 'mild pedophilia'?"  But clearly the latter is "worse" because violence has been added, as if "mild pedophilia" were not an act of violence already.  But to Dawkins is isn't; indeed, how could it be, else there could not be "violent pedophilia."  Carry it out with the next topic he brought up, "Date rape" v. "rape by a stranger at knifepoint," and his meaning is quite clear.  Date rape is like mild pedophilia; bad, but fully not an act of violence.  Rape by a stranger with a knife is violent; rape by an acquaintance is merely unfortunate, or at any case a lesser form of rape.

Except, of course, rape is an act of violence.  That's why the criminal statutes don't distinguish between acquaintance v. stranger:  rape is non-consensual intercourse, even if it is with your spouse.  Whether you could prosecute that example or not is a separate question:  the statues don't speak in terms of personal relationships or the necessity of violence additional to the rape itself.  Rape is rape.

Pedophilia is pedophilia.  Dawkins' insistence on distinction in either case, does him no credit at all.  He is not thinking, he is determining, and those who do not determine as he does are the ones with the problem.  It's the world that is wrong, not the Oxford don.

Nice work, if you can get it.

Fundamentalists love to cleave the world into either/or, and one side is right, the other wrong, with no ambiguities or contradictions or shades of grey allowed, and all true knowledge pointing toward one end.  It's a fine method of thought for murder mysteries where the criminal is finally identified, the murders finally stopped and justice fully done.  But in reality there is always that problem of incompleteness, always those questions any system of thought can generate, which only another system of thought can answer.  It's not progressive, moving higher and higher toward a final paradise; it's more like Borges' Library of Babel:  going on endlessly and seemingly repetitively, although it never quite repeats itself, but it never quite reaches an end, a telos, either.

If Plato taught us to think too much of how we might one day achieve the Good, Aristotle taught us to think too much that everything as its goal, its telos; and we took it for a summa, a completion.

Ambiguity and mystery, and the sense that if with God all things are possible then even the contradictions presented by God to our ideas and theologies can be made well by God, are not sources of confusion but comfort; not points where we can be sure we are right or others wrong, but of humility, where we can only be sure we don't yet know all there is to know, and until that time, that telos, we never will.

"Leaning together, headpieces filled with straw. Alas!"

A textbook example of the importance of definition.  There is, this argument claims, a "war" between science and religion.  And the basis of that argument is the definition of "science" and of "religion."  Oddly enough, no definition of "truth" is proffered, because science already has "truth" held tightly in its grip; apparently.

But I digress.  The definitions, please:

My argument runs like this. I’ll construe “science” as the set of tools we use to find truth about the universe, with the understanding that these truths are provisional rather than absolute. These tools include observing nature, framing and testing hypotheses, trying your hardest to prove that your hypothesis is wrong to test your confidence that it’s right, doing experiments and above all replicating your and others’ results to increase confidence in your inference.

And I’ll define religion as does philosopher Daniel Dennett: “Social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” Of course many religions don’t fit that definition, but the ones whose compatibility with science is touted most often – the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – fill the bill.

They don't, actually, but being ignorant about religion is held as a positive in arguments of this type, so set that aside.  Notice science is how we find "truth about the universe."  What is 'truth'?  Answer comes there none.  These "truths" are provisional rather than absolute, but that's the only qualifier given.  What these "truths" actually are is assumed.  All right-minded people know, just as they know the less you know about religion, the better.  Ignorance is strength.

And truth, as Kierkegaard argued, is subjective.  Sherlock Holmes famously asked Watson what good it was for him to know that the earth circled the sun.  That information might be valuable for calculating sunrise and sunset, or interplanetary travel, but as "truth" it comes up quite a bit short.  It is an accurate fact about the physical universe; but "truth"?  I think we all understand the concept is a bit more comprehensive, and complicated, than the reduction of the universe to a set of undeniable facts.  Even Hume understood the distinction between analytic and synthetic, and he used it to discard the notion of truth entirely.

But that requires a knowledge of philosophy, which is almost as bad as having a knowledge of religion.  After all, if your go-to source for definitions of religion is Daniel Dennett, you aren't exploring any subject covered by this argument very deeply.

The definitions, you see, set the argument and declare victory before a shot is fired.  Science discovers "truth," religion demands fealty to a non-existent (because "supernatural".  Science defines the natural, too, and "supernatural" is defined out of possibility) entity.  This is reductio Nietzsche.  Oops, another philosopher; we are going far afield now!  But this is the kind of thing I teach first-year English students to watch for:  set the definitions, you set the terms of the argument.  And in this argument, we have two straw men struggling to knock each other over while remaining standing themselves.  Well, rather one straw man is active; the other is pure abstraction, a figment of a weak imagination, a chimera, a cartoon caricature.  No wonder the other argument "wins."

Obviously it is so "strong" it needs as weak an opponent as possible.

The God Delusion

If ever a book was aptly named to reflect the personality of its author....

Richard Dawkins is trumpeted on the cover of his new book as "the world's most prominent atheist," a title he presumably inherits now that Madalyn Murray O'Hair is dead (honestly, I didn't even know there was a ranking in this field). Neither a theologian nor a philosopher of religion, he spends 80+ pages on the arguments for the existence of the God of Abraham (the Hindu pantheon and other gods of other world religions need not apply, apparently). Neither an anthropologist nor a psychiatrist, he devotes 70 pages to the "roots of religion" and a discussion of whether morality is possible outside of religion (I'll save you the money: yes. That's me. Ignore Dawkins.). Not trained as a scriptural scholar (not all of whom are either religious nor Christian), he devotes another 40 pages to scriptural criticism. The rest of the book is devoted to making clear his straw man is actually a version of Christian fundamentalism, one that exists largely in his fevered perceptions.

Skimming the index, I find no reference to any philosopher of religion outside of Immanuel Kant (and he merits only a page; thus does Mr. Dawkins apparently dispose of both Kant's Idealism and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). The chapter on the proofs of God references Aquinas (whom Dawkins deigns to declare a thinker with an "eminent" reputation. Yeah, and Shakespeare was a pretty good writer, too.) and Pascal. The index betrays no reference anywhere in the book to St. Anselm (creator of what Kant later labelled the "ontological proof"), nor to modern philosophers like Charles Hartshorne (The Logic of Perfection, his updating of Anselm's argument) or Alvin Plantinga. If you want to read a thorough discussion of all the important proofs of the God of Abraham that have been considered in Western culture, you'd do better to turn to Richard M. Gale's On the Nature and Existence of God. So would Mr. Dawkins, who obviously didn't.

Nowhere in his index, indeed, does Mr. Dawkins reference any important philosophers of religion or even of phenomenology. Kierkegaard's argument against proving existence (from the Philosophical Fragments) is not even considered. Mr. Dawkins gleefully sets up his straw men, and proceeds to knock them over, for several hundred pages.

He does, I noted, give ample space to Daniel C. Dennett. Birds of a feather, and all that, I suppose. This is all too familiar.

It isn't that I object to Mr. Dawkins' conclusions. What he believes or doesn't is of no importance to me whatsoever. I must admit a weakness, though: I do not suffer fools gladly. I know more about the arguments against the arguments for the existence of God than Mr. Dawkins has, apparently, imagined. The arguments from free will; omincscience-immutablity; ontology; religious experience; even the pragmatic arguments of Pascal and William James. A very long book can be devoted to this issue alone, if not several books. Mr. Dawkins jumps from an elementary school version of Aquinas' five proofs to Pascal, with just a passing reference to Anselm's argument and no mention of either the Saint or his modern-day defender, Mr. Hartshorne. (Hartshorne's argument is so complex that even Mr. Gale declines to include it in his book, saying it needs separate consideration). What Mr. Dawkins clearly goes after is a caricature of religious faith drawn from his impressions of fundamentalist Christians and, like Mr. Dennett, Mr. Dawkins imagines that all the religions of the world are basically Christianity, of this peculiar and very narrow nature (and one that doesn't even resemble most of the doctrines of fundamentalist Christianity). Small wonder then there are no references in the index to Huston Smith, Jaroslav Pelikan, or even Martin Marty (Fundamentalisms Observed). Mr. Dawkins has so clearly failed to do his homework that, were this thesis to be presented to me as a completed research paper, I'd fail the student for failing to do any real investigation of the subject.

Were I as ignorant of science as Mr. Dawkins is of theology and philosophy of religion (as well as psychology, sociology, anthropology, to name a few fields), I'd be embarassed to write a book about the philosophy of science and put my ignorance between hard covers and then ask people to pay good money for it.

But perhaps that's why I'm not a prominent anything.

The King is dead. Long live the King.

I was looking for a bit of information on Michel Foucault, and turned to The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (Pantheon Books, New York 1984). I was going for something else (which I'll get back to later), but this passage from the introduction seemed to speak more plainly to the kerfluffle over the Wieseltier review of the Dennett book "Breaking the Spell." Atrios picked up Leiter's critique, and Pharyngula weighed in, and still the issue has generated more heat than light.

So, in the interest of shedding a bit more light, let's start with Rabinow's introduction to Foucault's work.

The context here is a debate on Danish TV (and try to imagine that in America, even on PBS) between Chomsky and Foucault. Rabinow begins by characterizing Chomsky's position:

For Noam Chomsky, there is a human nature. This point is fundamental: unless there is some form of relatively fixed human nature, true scientific understanding is impossible. Starting from his own research, Chomsky asked: How is it that on the basis of a partial and fragmentary set of experiences, individuals in every culture are able not only to learn their own language, but to use it in a creative way? For Chomsky, there was only one possible answer: there must be a bio-physical structure underlying the mind which enables us, both as individuals and as a species, to deduce from the multiplicity of individual experiences a unified language. There must be, Chomsky insists, a "mass of schematisms, innate governing principles, which guide our social and intellectual and individual behavior. . . there is something biologically given, unchangeable, a foundation for whatever it is that we do with our mental capacities." Chomsky's scientific career has been devoted to uncovering these structures. His aim: a testable mathematical theory of mind. His lineage: Cartesian rationality.

Stop right there, and take that in. Rabinow is discussing this issue on philosophical grounds, the underpinnings beneath all assumptions about what "reason" is and how "reason" functions and why reason is important. He places it as the underpinning of Chomsky's analysis, and puts his view in the context of Cartestian rationality. Which, frankly, is where these discussions need to occur, but don't.

If you wade through the comments at Pharyngula, for example, you will find all kinds of arguments about where reason comes from; but no coherent discussion about what reason is. All the assumptions are that "science" represents "reason," and all agree on what "science" is (have they even read Francis Bacon, much less Thomas Kuhn or Richard Rorty?). Pay attention, too, to the comment about Chomsky's assertion about "human nature." If that universal is removed (and philosophers and some anthropologists would gladly show you how to do that, should you ask them), Chomsky says true scientific understanding is impossible. That seems to be a crucial issue in Dennett's work, and yet no one raises it. Why not? Because the investigation would stop right there? Is that a "scientific" analysis? Or proceeding from comforting assumptions?

Michel Foucault rejects Chomsky's view of both human nature and science. In a methodologically typical fashion, Foucault avoids the abstract question: Does human nature exist?, and asks instead: How has the concept of human nature functioned in our society? Taking the sciences of life during the eighteenth century as an example, Foucault draws a distinction between the actual operational categories within a specific discipline at a particular historical moment and those broad conceptual markers such as "life," or "human nature," which, in his opinion, have had very little importance in the internal changes of scientific disciplines. According to Foucault, "It is not by studying human nature that linguists discovered the laws of consonant mutation, or Freud the principles of the analysis of dreams, or cultural anthropologists the structure of myths. In the history of knowledge the notion of human nature seems to me mainly to have played the role of . . . designat[ing] certain types of discourse in relation to or in opposition to theology or biology or history." Foucault is highly suspicious of claims to universal truths. He doesn't refute them; instead, his consistent response is to historicize grand abstractions. In the last analysis, he doesn't take a stand on whether or not there is a human nature. Rather, he changes the subject and examines the social functions that such concepts have played in the context of practices "such as economics, technology, politics, sociology which can serve them as conditions of formation, of models, of place, etc. . . . what [it is] in social forms that makes the regularities of science possible." (emphasis added)

Which, in part, is where Thomas Kuhn's "paradigms" come in. But to read the comments on the web, you'd think science was one seamless paradigm of constantly unravelling knowledge of absolute truth, progressing ever "forward." Or what Wieseltier called "contemporary superstitions."

For Foucault, there is no external position of certainty, no universal understanding that is beyond history and society. His strategy is to proceed as far as possible in his analyses without recourse to universals. His main tactic is to historicize such supposedly universal categories as human nature each time he encounters them. Foucault's aim is to understand the plurality of roles that reason, for example, has taken as a social practice in our civilization not to use it as a yardstick against which these practices can be measured. This position does not entail any preconceived reduction of knowledge to social conditions. Rather, there is a consistent imperative, played out with varying emphases, which runs through Foucault's historical studies: to discover the relations of specific disciplines and particular social practices.

Now, am I saying at this point that Foucault is right, and that Chomsky and the "scientific" view of the world, is wrong? Not at all. Foucault's reasoning takes him, as he acknowledged in the interview, too close to Nietzsche for me. Much of what he says I disagree with for other reasons, as well. Still, his analyses are powerful, and insightful, and have to be taken into account. As my favorite seminary professor used to say, "Life is messy," and that messiness extends to our intellectual understanding. We understand better by broadening our awareness of the scope of human thought, not by narrowing it. And it seems to me that Foucault's point about human nature is a valid one: we like to consider it "absolute," but we define it in terms of those things we either wish to accept, or wish to challenge. And if we think those arguments gets us closer to the Truth, we are deluding ourselves.

But still, Foucault makes a valid point, one relevant to this discussion, and one that explains why Wieseltier's review should generate so much energy:

For Foucault, knowledge of all sorts is thoroughly enmeshed in the clash of petty dominations, as well as in the larger battles which constitute our world. Knowledge is not external to these fights; it does not constitute a way out of, or above, the fray in the way Chomsky views it. Rather, for Foucault, the "will to knowledge" in our culture is simultaneously part of the danger and a tool to combat that danger. Following Nietzsche, Foucault asserts that knowledge did not "slowly detach itself from its empirical roots, the initial needs from which it arose, to become pure speculation subject only to the demands of reason. . . .Where religions once demanded the sacrifice of bodies, knowledge now calls for experimentation on ourselves, calls us to the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge." Foucault confronts this challenge, this threat, by refusing to separate off knowledge from power.

"Follow the money," William Goldman had "Deep Throat" say. What he meant was: "Follow the power."

Hard Cases Make Bad Law

 (Robert Sapolsky’s book on free will was reviewed in The New Yorker. I quote from that review below.)

And vague and glittering generalities make poor grounds upon which to rest conclusions.

The steps of his reasoning are familiar: if everything is determined, there is no freedom; if there is no freedom, there is no moral responsibility. Science tells us that everything is indeed determined. Ergo, no freedom; ergo, no responsibility. Are we bound to agree?

Sapolsky again. What Daniel Dennett thought he did for consciousness, Sapolsky now claims to have done for “free will.” Which he basically defines this way:

Every now and then, it occurs to Sapolsky that the parties to the debate may be talking past each other, and he makes an effort, a little grudgingly, to clarify his terms. “What is free will?” he asks early in the book. “Groan, we have to start with that.” 

What follows is not a definition but a challenge. A man, Sapolsky invites us to imagine, “pulls the trigger of a gun.” That’s one description. Another is that “the muscles in his index finger contracted.” Why? “Because they were stimulated by a neuron,” which was in turn “stimulated by the neuron just upstream. . . . And so on.” Then he throws down the gauntlet: “Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will.”

Reading that my mind obviously turned to current events, and so to Gaza and Israel. Does even Sapolsky really want to run his thought experiment through the slaughter of Israelis: children, women, elderly, all killed for no apparent reasons except anger and hatred. And probably the desire to kill. Are all of these factors illusions, and the only explanation the sum of their biological pasts (whatever the hell that means. And since his argument is supposed to be based in science, how do you begin to quantify such a sum?)?

I’m not leaving out the Israeli response, either. Except to say they at least pay lip service to the idea of a qualified response. Hamas seems interested only in slaughter and outrage, suffering death and calamity as a means to an end (especially when it’s someone else’s death and calamity, be they Israeli or Palestinian). Is that end determined by the sum of their biological pasts? Do they have that radically a different past (or is it individual pasts?) than the Israelis?

That way lies a return to eugenics, since this is supposed to scientific reasoning.

Consider these questions. How does my response to a student who has failed to meet a deadline change when I discover that she sprained her wrist the day before? How do I respond to a piece of fruit chucked at me when I discover that the chucker is two years old? How vehemently do I press for a tough prison sentence when I learn that the defendant was abused as a child? Is there a difference between someone jumping into a pool and being pushed in? Between falling in after he stepped on a banana peel and falling in because he was drunk? 

In each of these situations, we can ask whether the person in question had or lacked something called “free will.” But look back at the factors that seemed to undermine the exercise of free will: rotten luck, immaturity, circumstance, coercion, accident, and incapacity. When the terms on the obverse side of the contrast are so disparate, it’s hard to be confident that there really is a single thing called “free will” whose presence or absence we can meaningfully debate.

In other words, “It’s complicated.” But that’s not an out, because the question remains: what do we mean by “free will”? I accept it isn’t a “single thing,” but consider that neither is “love.” I love coffee; and my wife; and my daughter; and writing. But no single definition of “love” covers the uses I just made of the word in that sentence. Should we invent new words with more precise meanings for each phrase in my sentence, each object of the word “love”? Well, first, language doesn’t work that way (who would adopt the new words, and how would they use them?); second, cadence that precise in our usage of words? I say I love my daughter; but does that place you in my experience of my daughter? Only relationally, I’d argue. By which I mean analogously to your relationship with your child. The difference between a parent and a non-parent is one that simply can’t be bridged by language, or even more crudely by reducing human relationships to scientific terms. 

We do this all the time, in other words. If that gives philosophers fits, that’s their problem. Nobody said this was going to be easy.

Sapolsky says “Groan, we have to start with that.” He means definition, and yes, we do. John Fowles wrote: “Whole sight, or all the rest is desolation.” Until we know, or try to grasp, in whole what we are talking about, all we see is desolation. In Sapolsky’s case, it’s the empty wasteland of an effort to reduce everything to terms he can understand. Dennett did pretty much the same thing with “consciousness,” as I recall. In neither case was it a fruitful enterprise.