By The Way, Rep. Crenshaw

Galileo 'Gonzalez wanted to get screened after attending a large protest against police brutality. “It was ridiculous how hard it is to get a test,” he said.' It took 50+ calls to make an appt & 9 days for results. https://t.co/PmIdYNfdnI @ShannonNajma @mgutierrezjr

— Ren Larson 🌵 (@renLarson_) June 29, 2020

This is a Federal government responsibility.  The CDC authorizes the tests and the testing.  What have you done to make testing more available for Texans?

Nothing?  That's what I thought.

Fuck you.

"These things that pass for knowledge...."

PBS is advertising a "history of science" which seems to include the old canard that the Church opposed the discoveries leading to modern cosmology.  The truth, as ever, is too complicated for even a PBS show.

It's a long article at New Advent, the article titled "History of Physics," but it eliminates the simple dichotomy of religion v. science, superstition v. reason, whatever black/white, good/bad cleavage you want to apply.  The same people who claim religion has been at war with science since the Middle Ages overlook the fact Gregor Mendel was a monk, a Jesuit posited the Big Bang Theory, and that up until the Enlightenment most of the praised scientists from the Medieval era to the Protestant Reformation (and many beyond that period), were Catholics.

Take this one line, for example, from the New Advent article:

Kepler himself admitted that in his first attempts along the line of celestial mechanics he was under the influence of Nicholas of Cusa and Gilbert.

I pluck that sentence because this article incorporates into the "History of Physics" the school of Paris; Aristotle; Plato and Pythagoras; Leonardo da Vinci; the Great Western Schism; Ptolemy, and Nicholas of Cusa.

How many of those have your heard of, and what do you know about them?  How many of them do you think will be mentioned in a one-hour PBS show?

Christian science, the article says, took root in C.E. 325, with Origen in Alexandria.  Most of the sources for information about the physical world soon rested heavily on the work of Plato and Pythagoras.  Aristotle wasn't known to the Western world until the 13th century, so you have to wait about 1000 years to get him.  By the way, Aristotle was convinced the planets and stars, and the Sun, rotated around the earth.  It was the only way that made sense to him.

The Ptolemaic system came to the knowledge of Christian scholars (I hesitate to call them "scientists;" the word is an anachronism much before the late 19th century) around 1134.  Jumping around history peripatetically (there's a joke in there somewhere), Averroism arose "which consisted in a superstitious respect for the word of Aristotle and his commentator."  Curiously, there's something important in that:

Averroism had rendered scientific progress impossible, but fortunately in Latin Christendom it was to meet with two powerful enemies: the unhampered curiosity of human reason, and the authority of the Church.

Here, let me finish off that paragraph, and introduce the "School of Paris" at the same time:

Encouraged by the certainty resulting from experiments, astronomers rudely shook off the yoke which Peripatetic physics had imposed upon them. The School of Paris in particular was remarkable for its critical views and its freedom of attitude towards the argument of authority. In 1290 William of Saint-Cloud determined with wonderful accuracy the obliquity of the ecliptic and the time of the vernal equinox, and his observations led him to recognize the inaccuracies that marred the "Tables of Toledo", drawn up by Al-Zarkali. The theory of the precession of the equinoxes, conceived by the astronomers of Alfonso X of Castile, and the "Alphonsine Tables" set up in accordance with this theory, gave rise in the first half of the fourteenth century to the observations, calculations, and critical discussions of Parisian astronomers, especially of Jean des Linières and his pupil John of Saxonia or Connaught. 

Coming back to the motion of the spheres, and giving us a taste of the kind of discussions that were going on (again, that you'll never hear in a popular history of science in the "Dark Ages"):

The University of Paris was very uneasy because of the antagonism existing between Christian dogmas and certain Peripatetic doctrines, and on several occasions it combatted Aristotelean influence. In 1277 Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, acting on the advice of the theologians of the Sorbonne, condemned a great number of errors, some of which emanated from the astrology, and others from the philosophy of the Peripatetics. Among these errors considered dangerous to faith were several which might have impeded the progress of physical science, and hence it was that the theologians of Paris declared erroneous the opinion maintaining that God Himself could not give the entire universe a rectilinear motion, as the universe would then leave a vacuum behind it, and also declared false the notion that God could not create several worlds. These condemnations destroyed certain essential foundations of Peripatetic physics; because, although, in Aristotle's system, such propositions were ridiculously untenable, belief in Divine Omnipotence sanctioned them as possible, whilst waiting for science to confirm them as true. For instance, Aristotle's physics treated the existence of an empty space as a pure absurdity; in virtue of the "Articles of Paris" Richard of Middletown (about 1280) and, after him, many masters at Paris and Oxford admitted that the laws of nature are certainly opposed to the production of empty space, but that the realization of such a space is not, in itself, contrary to reason; thus, without any absurdity, one could argue on vacuum and on motion in a vacuum. Next, in order that such arguments might be legitimatized, it was necessary to create that branch of mechanical science known as dynamics.

The articles of Paris made a vacuum conceivable, replacing (eventually) the "ether" which Aristotle argued for, and which was the accepted understanding until at least the late 13th century.  And what does that have to do with the Church?

Aristotle maintained that the first heaven (the firmament) moved with a uniform rotary motion, and that the Earth was absolutely stationary, and as these two propositions necessarily resulted from the first principles relative to time and place, it would have been absurd to deny them. However, by declaring that God could endow the World with a rectilinear motion, the theologians of the Sorbonne acknowledged that these two Aristotelean propositions could not be imposed as a logical necessity and thenceforth, whilst continuing to admit that, as a fact, the Earth was immovable and that the heavens moved with a rotary diurnal motion, Richard of Middletown and Duns Scotus (about 1275-1308) began to formulate hypotheses to the effect that these bodies were animated by other motions, and the entire school of Paris adopted the same opinion. Soon, however, the Earth's motion was taught in the School of Paris, not as a possibility, but as a reality. In fact, in the specific setting forth of certain information given by Aristotle and Simplicius, a principle was formulated which for three centuries was to play a great rôle in statics, viz. that every heavy body tends to unite its centre of gravity with the centre of the Earth.

Funny, but the School of Paris didn't upset anyone in the Church hierarchy.  Something else interesting here:

Aristotle maintained the simultaneous existence of several worlds to be an absurdity, his principal argument being drawn from his theory of gravity, whence he concluded that two distinct worlds could not coexist and be each surrounded by its elements; therefore it would be ridiculous to compare each of the planets to an earth similar to ours. In 1277 the theologians of Paris condemned this doctrine as a denial of the creative omnipotence of God; Richard of Middletown and Henry of Ghent (who wrote about 1280), Guillaume Varon (who wrote a commentary on the "Sentences" about 1300), and, towards 1320, Jean de Bassols, William of Occam (d. after 1347), and Walter Burley (d. about 1348) did not hesitate to declare that God could create other worlds similar to ours. This doctrine, adopted by several Parisian masters, exacted that the theory of gravity and natural place developed by Aristotle be thoroughly changed; in fact, the following theory was substituted for it. If some part of the elements forming a world be detached from it and driven far away, its tendency will be to move towards the world to which it belongs and from which it was separated; the elements of each world are inclined so to arrange themselves that the heaviest will be in the centre and the lightest on the surface. This theory of gravity appeared in the writings of Jean Buridan of Béthune, who became rector of the University of Paris in 1327, teaching at that institution until about 1360; and in 1377 this same theory was formally proposed by Oresme. It was also destined to be adopted by Copernicus and his first followers, and to be maintained by Galileo, William Gilbert, and Otto von Guericke. 

This is impossible, of course, because religion is unitary and unchangeable, and only science changes when observation affects theory, ultimately altering it.  Right?  Oh, and back to Aristotle and that notion of "ether":

If the School of Paris completely transformed the Peripatetic theory of gravity, it was equally responsible for the overthrow of Aristotelean dynamics. Convinced that, in all motion, the mover should be directly contiguous to the body moved, Aristotle had proposed a strange theory of the motion of projectiles. He held that the projectile was moved by the fluid medium, whether air or water, through which it passed and this, by virtue of the vibration brought about in the fluid at the moment of throwing, and spread through it. 

The dynamics written of here allowed us to begin to better understand the universe as it is, rather than as we might reason it to be.  Oh, and finally, we catch up to Nicholas of Cusa:

About the time that Paola of Venice was teaching at Padua [15th century], Nicholas of Cusa came there to take his doctorate in law. Whether it was then that the latter became initiated in the physics of the School of Paris matters little, as in any event it was from Parisian physics that he adopted those doctrines that smacked least of Peripateticism. He became thoroughly conversant with the dynamics of impetus and, like Buridan and Albert of Saxony, attributed the motion of the celestial spheres to the impetus which God had communicated to them in creating them, and which was perpetuated because, in these spheres, there was no element of destruction. He admitted that the Earth moved incessantly, and that its motion might be the cause of the precession of the equinoxes. In a note discovered long after his death, he went so far as to attribute to the Earth a daily rotation. He imagined that the sun, the moon, and the planets were so many systems, each of which contained an earth and elements analogous to our Earth and elements, and to account for the action of gravity in each of these systems he followed closely the theory of gravity advanced by Oresme.

These ideas had a clear influence on da Vinci.

Eventually you get to Copernicus, but I don't find any mention of his posthumously published masterpiece causing a stir in the Church, or being labeled as heresy by the Holy Father or the Bishops


Granted, this is one article from a distinctive point of view, but it is the work of scholars, and does not simplify the history of ideas, even as it presents only major thought and ideas over the course of centuries.  It necessarily reduces and traduces, but it is an encyclopedia article, not a definitive history.  Yet, for all that, it includes more history and validated information than the commonly accepted "The Church fought the science and the science won" presentation.  The idea that is the true version of history rests on gross oversimplifications, most especially on the idea that  religious notions are fixed and immovable, especially about the physical universe, and scientific ideas are fluid and changeable as nature's truth is revealed through its discipline.  Except that is not a truth, but an idee fixe of non-historians and other benighted souls who take their information from what "everybody knows" and what "some people say."  In this discussion, the only idea fixed and immovable, is that one that has no basis in history or reality.

Ironic, no?

Don't make him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry....

Over the weekend, on the news, someone argued that information could be "leaked" that was 90% accurate, and about 10% fake, and such a leak could do a lot of damage.  They were talking, of course, about social media and Russia and "hacking," and I thought it interesting the false information part of that assertion didn't raise a few more eyebrows, or merit further notice.  John Podesta, if memory serves, said that some percentage of his e-mails that were leaked were fake.  Wikileaks claims information wants to be free, but Wikileaks is not an intelligence service, nor a scholarly service, sifting fact from fiction.  There is a great deal of common knowledge out there that is simply false, including the idea that Galileo was severely punished by the Pope for being a heretic.  That hoary chestnut popped up again as "fact" in an article about the Papal Observatory on The Daily Beast.  It's one of those zombie lies that will never die, because everyone knows it is "true."  It's no surprise, then, not even something new under the sun, that leaked documents contain outright fabrications designed to do damage beyond revealing what someone wants to keep concealed, is not allowed to blunt the fact the documents say so.

It's a danger that never seems to have occurred to Julian Assange or any of his defenders.

I point this out because apparently this is not just a problem in the news cycle when a new trove of documents is dumped on the internet:

Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter.

Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.

McFarland had an agenda in mind:  defeat discussion/concern about climate change.  What better way to do that than to slip the boss false information.  The TIME magazine cover is a zombie lie; it's been circulating on the Internet for years.  But hey, if it's useful!

A news story tucked into Trump’s hands at the right moment can torpedo an appointment or redirect the president’s entire agenda. Current and former Trump officials say Trump can react volcanically to negative press clips, especially those with damaging leaks, becoming engrossed in finding out where they originated.

That is what happened in late February when someone mischievously gave the president a printed copy of an article from GotNews.com, the website of Internet provocateur Charles C. Johnson, which accused deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh of being “the source behind a bunch of leaks” in the White House.

Oh, those mischief makers!  Because the upshot was:  Walsh no longer works there.  Long knives?  Or Dennis the Menace and one of his pranks!  That Dennis!

If you can't draw a straight line now between Trump and any number of international actors who want to manipulate the U.S. President, you haven't been paying attention.  Comey's firing is a serious problem (and being taken more seriously every day, if today's news is any indication); but this is absolutely frightening.  In fact, NATO has already noticed:

“It’s kind of ridiculous how they are preparing to deal with Trump,” said one source briefed extensively on the meeting’s preparations. “It’s like they’re preparing to deal with a child — someone with a short attention span and mood who has no knowledge of NATO, no interest in in-depth policy issues, nothing,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re freaking out.”

Still, despite these changes, experts are wary of how Trump will react to NATO meetings and their long-winded, diplomatic back-and-forth among dozens of heads of state, which can quickly balloon into hours of meandering discussions. One former senior NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described these meetings as “important but painfully dull.”

Rank-and-file diplomats always try to push for shorter, more efficient meetings at NATO. “It’s not so unusual that they strain to try to keep it interesting and short and not dragged down into details,” said Jim Townsend, who served as the Pentagon’s top NATO envoy until January. But what is unusual is the president.

“Even a brief NATO summit is way too stiff, too formal, and too policy heavy for Trump. Trump is not going to like that,” said Jorge Benitez, a NATO expert with the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.

Howard Fineman insists we should not underestimate Trump, that he's proven more powerful than he is acknowledged to be.  Actually, Trump just proves how tenuous our systems are, and how much we've come to rely on them to save us from our own indifference and self-interests.  We expect an "invisible hand" to solve all our problems with something we call "capitalism."  We expect "checks and balances" to magically control our government.  We elect a man who "tells you what's on his mind," and he has to employ a staff of flacks to explain whatever the President says is not what he meant.

Saturday Night Live got in right in the Lester Holt interview cold open:  "nothing matters anymore."  Until we make it matter, the man-child will continue to be in control simply through temper tantrums.

Giordano Bruno's problem was he annoyed everybody

Just to pick up with that poster, which I was rather surprised to find on-line:  it's a perfect example of how science wants to re-contextualise religion in order to make science both its replacement and its superior.

Because this is what happened to Giordano Bruno:

At the age of eleven he went to Naples, to study "humanity, logic, and dialectic", and, four years later, he entered the Order of St. Dominic, giving up his worldly name of Filippo and taking that of Giordano. He made his novitiate at Naples and continued to study there. In 1572 he was ordained priest.

It seems, however, that, even as a novice, he attracted attention by the originality of his views and by his outspoken criticism of accepted theological doctrines. After his ordination things reached such a pass that, in 1576, formal accusation of heresy was brought against him. Thereupon he went to Rome, but, apparently, did not mend his manner of speaking of the mysteries of faith; for the accusations were renewed against him at the convent of the Minerva. Within a few months of his arrival he fled the city and cast off all allegiance to his order.

Bruno was not a guy who got along with people:

From this point on, his life-story is the tale of his wanderings from one country to another and of his failure to find peace anywhere. He tarried awhile in several Italian cities, and in 1579 went to Geneva, where he seems to have adopted the Calvinist faith, although afterwards, before the ecclesiastical tribunal at Venice, he steadfastly denied that he had ever joined the Reformed Church. This much at least is certain; he was excommunicated by the Calvinist Council on account of his disrespectful attitude towards the heads of that Church and was obliged to leave the city. Thence he went to Toulouse, Lyons, and (in 1581) to Paris.
....
In 1583 he crossed over to England, and, for a time at least, enjoyed the favour of Queen Elizabeth and the friendship of Sir Philip Sidney. To the latter he dedicated the most bitter of his attacks on the Catholic Church, "Il spaccio della bestia trionfante", "The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast", published in 1584. He visited Oxford, and, on being refused the privilege of lecturing there, he published (1584) his "Cena delle ceneri", or "Ash-Wednesday Supper", in which he attacked the Oxford professors, saying that they knew more about beer than about Greek. In 1585 he returned to France, and during the year which he spent in Paris at this time made several attempts to become reconciled to the Catholic Church, all of which failed because of his refusal to accept the condition imposed, namely, that he should return to his order. 

He went to Germany in 1587 but was excommunicated by the Lutherans (!).  He was finally extradited from Venice to Rome to stand trial before the Roman Inquisition:

 In the spring of 1599, the trial was begun before a commission of the Roman Inquisition, and, after the accused had been granted several terms of respite in which to retract his errors, he was finally condemned (January, 1600), handed over to the secular power (8 February), and burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome (17 February). Bruno was not condemned for his defence of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skilful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.

A modern day philosopher, or a thinker of any note, he was not:

Thus, his system of thought is an incoherent materialistic pantheism. God and the world are one; matter and spirit, body and soul, are two phases of the same substance; the universe is infinite; beyond the visible world there is an infinity of other worlds, each of which is inhabited; this terrestrial globe has a soul; in fact, each and every part of it, mineral as well as plant and animal, is animated; all matter is made up of the same elements (no distinction between terrestrial and celestial matter); all souls are akin (transmigration is, therefore, not impossible). This unitary point of view is Bruno's justification of "natural magic." No doubt, the attempt to establish a scientific continuity among all the phenomena of nature is an important manifestation of the modern spirit, and interesting, especially on account of its appearance at the moment when the medieval point of view was being abandoned. And one can readily understand how Bruno's effort to establish a unitary concept of nature commanded the admiration of such men as Spinoza, Jacobi, and Hegel. On the other hand, the exaggerations, the limitations, and the positive errors of his scientific system; his intolerance of even those who were working for the reforms to which he was devoted; the false analogies, fantastic allegories, and sophistical reasonings into which his emotional fervour often betrayed him have justified, in the eyes of many, Bayle's characterization of him as "the knight-errant of philosophy." His attitude of mind towards religious truth was that of a rationalist. Personally, he failed to feel any of the vital significance of Christianity as a religious system. It was not a Roman Inquisitor, but a Protestant divine, who said of him that he was "a man of great capacity, with infinite knowledge, but not a trace of religion."

If you don't catch the full import of that final sentence:  nobody much liked him.  And what he left behind was gobbledygook.  And what he was executed for, had everything to do with his stated theological opinions, and nothing to do with his secular, non-theological opinions.

But it makes a more convenient story for "science" to make him a martyr of medieval religious dogma and anti-empirical ignorance; even if it isn't a fact, at all.

An no, Galileo wasn't imprisoned for promoting the Copernican system.  A brief quote from the long article at New Advent tells the true tale of that:

 Nevertheless it was a churchman, Nicholas Copernicus, who first advanced the contrary doctrine that the sun and not the earth is the centre of our system, round which our planet revolves, rotating on its own axis. His great work, "De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium", was published at the earnest solicitation of two distinguished churchmen, Cardinal Schömberg and Tiedemann Giese, Bishop of Culm. It was dedicated by permission to Pope Paul III in order, as Copernicus explained, that it might be thus protected from the attacks which it was sure to encounter on the part of the "mathematicians" (i.e. philosophers) for its apparent contradiction of the evidence of our senses, and even of common sense. He added that he made no account of objections which might be brought by ignorant wiseacres on Scriptural grounds. Indeed, for nearly three quarters of a century no such difficulties were raised on the Catholic side, although Luther and Melanchthon condemned the work of Copernicus in unmeasured terms.

I would note the objections from the Protestants Luther and Melanchthon.  Most of the stories of the perfidious Catholic church fighting to dispel the light of science come from Protestant cultures, where there is still no love lost for Catholicism.  Which means a lot of the popular history of the Middle Ages turning into the Renaissance is filtered through some very cloudy lenses.

And a lot of nonsense is still taken as fact; when, in fact, it has its roots in Protestant anti-Papist sentiments.

Filling the gaps with Silly Putty

This is, in part, moving in tandem with what Anthony is posting just now.  It is also, in part, just my reading of Armstrong's The Case for God.  Last night I got to the section on Newton, which makes me want to research a question I'd never thought before to ask:  "When did God become omnipotent and omniscient?"

Because the answer may end up being:  Newton.

That is, he continues from age to age, and is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things and he knows what happens and what is able to happen.

That is not Newton speaking of Newton; or Newton speaking of the scientist.  That is Newton describing God, a God he asserts because it explains the mechanical universe Newton has "created."

First, a word of explanation.  Newton, in Karen Armstrong's telling, unified the theories of Kepler (on planetary motion), Descartes (on physics) and Galileo (on terrestrial movement).  He understood gravity as "the fundamental force that accounted for all celestial and earthly activity."  (Armstrong, p. 202).  Mechanics, argued Newton, was the model which explained all the functions of the universe.  But to be truly universal, mechanics must explain ALL the phenomena of the universe.

Though these bodies may, indeed, continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves by these laws.

Newton, quoted in Armstrong, p. 203.

Newton was a genius, but he wasn't omniscient.  Still, he wanted an answer to all questions, and he thought he had it.  See if this doesn't sound familiar today:  "When I wrote my treatise about our Systeme, I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the beliefe in a Deity and nothing can rejoyce me more than to find it usefull for that purpose."  The mathematical balance of the universe "forced [Newton] to ascribe it to ye counsel and contrivance of a voluntary Agent...very will skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry."  Gravity "may yet put ye planes into motion but without ye divine powers, it could never put them into such Circulating motion as they have about ye sun."

Inertia held the planets in motion, yet they "must have required a divine power to impress them."  And what put the Earth so perfectly placed around the sun and set it spinning on its axis so well that the planet neither burned from too long a day, nor froze from too long a night?  The only answer Newton had was:  God.  Newton was less interested in establishing a scientific explanation of the universe, than he was in establishing what we would now deride as "intelligent design."

None of this is to say Newton got his theology right. In fact, he got it all wrong, because he reduced God to the universe humans could find an explanation for. As Armstrong puts it:  "God's existence was now a rational consequence of the world's intricate design."

Before we go much further, let's just consider what this has to do with God's omniscience and omnipotence.  The latter is a consequence of God's presence in the universe.  God, said Newton, is "omnipresent not virtually only but substantially."  Gravity was not just a force of nature, but the action of God.  Moreover, the God who "continues from age to age, and is present from infinity to infinity," and who "rules all things," is a God of dominion.  This is not a God who is other, or kenotic; this is a God whose primary characteristic is "Dominion," (Newton's term), and such a God must have "intelligence, perfection, eternity, infinity, omniscience and omnipotence."  (Armstrong, p. 204.)  Because without it, how can such a God keep the universe operating?

(Sidebar that belatedly occurs to me:  I remember a seminary professor talking derisively of people who imagined Jesus of Nazareth being both human and God, eating and drinking while also busily keeping all the planets spinning in their courses.  I only know understand the concept he was mocking was Newton's, not Christianity's.  Well, not until Christianity adopted it; which soon after Newton, some did.)

It's easy to retroject this back onto God in the Scriptures.  The problem is, God is not omniscient in the Hebrew scriptures, and it's unclear whether even Aquinas thought God to be as Newton required.  Two examples from the Hebrew Scriptures will suffice:  "The heart is devious, beyond all fathoming. I, God, test the heart," says Jeremiah.  The other, and perhaps most famous, example, is God finding Adam and Eve in the Garden and learning, belatedly, that they have eaten the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (which, if ever a story in scripture was meant to be an allegory based on a metaphor, surely this one is it!).  Literalists will tie themselves into knots trying to explain how an omniscient God can be surprised.  But maybe the problem is in our concept, not in the story.  Maybe the problem is, as Karen Armstrong argues, that we decided God was not "other," but was so familiar he could plan out our lives for us, and even give us what we ask for if, like Joel Osteen, we just ask for wealth and happiness (which comes from wealth, apparently, first and foremost).

It seems the "God of the Gaps" was born, not from theology retreating before science's approach, but from science's encroachment into theology.  And when that went sour, science blamed theology.  Nice work if you can get it, and get it science pretty much did.

I'm beginning to reappraise my discomfort with Bultmann's efforts to "demythologize."  I still agree with Armstrong, that mythos (as she defines it, and she doesn't define it all that well) is essential to human existence, because we are religious beings (religion is innate to human beings, not imposed upon them.  Jefferson will get a rather thorough trashing before we are finished, if only because he is the poster child for many modern atheistic misunderstandings.  By the way, per Armstrong, Jefferson was a Deist, not an atheist.  We'll get back to that, because there is a thread from Newton to Jefferson we have to follow.).  But to understand mythos correctly, it may be that we need to demythologize in order to get there.

Those comments may seem a leap, but Armstrong goes on to describe the God of Newton, and more importantly, the Christianity of Newton.  Nature replaces revelation, the Book of Nature replacing (almost) the Scriptures.  In The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology, Armstrong says Newton argued that "Noah had founded a faith based on the rational contemplation of nature.  There had been no revealed scriptures, no miracles, and no mysteries." (If you can't already see the connections to Jefferson and the Deists, be patient; connections will be made.)  This faith had been "the true religion till ye nations corrupted it," and science was the only means for properly understanding the sacred:  "For there is no way to come to ye knowledge of a Deity but by ye frame of nature."  The fundamental religion had been corrupted with "Monstrous Legends, false miracles, veneration of reliques, charmes, ye doctrine of Ghosts or Daemons, and their intercession, invocation & worship and other heathen superstitions." (Newton, quoted in Armstrong, p. 205).

Do you now hear Newton echoed in Jefferson and the other Deists of Revolutionary America?

Such things were superstitions not just because they offended scientific reason, but because they offended the clockwork universe.  Miracles are, by definition, disruptions in the natural order.  The God who is the mechanical universe cannot disrupt the natural order; that's asking God to violate God's self.  The idea offends reason.  Which explains why Jefferson cut all such stories about miracles out of his "Jefferson Bible."

But Newton didn't accomplish this by overwhelming the theologians.  The church, or some leaders of it, embraced this idea as the new and rational theology the world needed. Not surprisingly (well, unless you think of Cotton Mather as the caricature of a Puritan rooting out sexual desire and witches his entire life*), Cotton Mather took to Newton's theology.  Puritans were already strongly anti-Papist (they were "Puritans" because they wanted to purge, or "purify," the Church of England of it's liturgical trappings and Roman Catholic ideas).  He liked it because it seemed, like the Puritans themselves, to return the church to an original state; and because Puritans liked nothing more than to condemn anything even vaguely connected to Rome as superstition (and so they banned Christmas celebrations, or even the observance of Christmas, for as long as they could).

Intelligent design, springing from Newton, became the standard of science itself.  Robert Boyle, physicist, chemist, and founding member of the Royal Society, thought the mechanistic universe proved the existence of a celestial Engineer.  Richard Bentley, in his Boyle lectures, argued that:

almost everything in the World demonstrates to us this great Truth; and affords undeniable Arguments, to prove that the World and all Things therein, are the Effects of an Intelligent and Knowing Cause.

(Quoted in Armstrong, p. 207)

The problem is obvious.  As Armstrong observes:

Where Basil, Augustine, and Thomas had insisted that the natural world could tell us nothing about God, Newton, Bentley, and Clarke argued that nature could tell us everything we need to know about the divine.  God was no longer transcendent, no longer beyond the reach of language and concepts.  As Clarke had shown, his will and attributes could be charted, measured, and definitively proven in twelve clear and distinct propositions.

(Armstrong, pp. 207-208)

If I wanted to look at this from a distinctly historical perspective I'd link these Newtonian theologians back to the Scholastics of the late medieval period, who made much the same claims, only without a clockwork universe to base them on.  That these claims have fallen apart, thanks to the very science they were based on, is obvious.  The question now is:  with what Renaissance will we recover from these neo-Scholastics?

* a corrective for that which even Armstrong overlooks is the work of Mather himself.  It seems rather clear from his accounts of life in Salem that the witch trials, much as he may have helped foment them, took on a life which controlled his rather than he controlling them.  It's likely Mather learned a few theological, and pastoral, lessons from those events.  It's clear he wasn't a McCarthy-esque figure, rooting out witches until some finally shamed him into standing down.

Pilate's Question

Last chance for gas

There are two critical points to be drawn from the Thomas Lessl essay.  This is one:

Religious culture, by contrast, must then be shown to exhibit features which make it unsuited for survival in a changing human environment.

This is the other:

...the values that are championed in the Galileo legend are shared with the broader culture of modernism.  Modernity looks to the scientific culture as a kind of moral exemplar which upholds in some ideal fashion its values of rationalism, liberalism, and individualism.  The more general culture of modernism is similarly unlikely to protest such aberrations of historical consciousness because it shares with science a belief in binary oppositions between reason and faith, knowledge and authority, and between Scripture and the light of nature.

Part of the historical irony here is that the very idea of rationalism was one promoted and preserved by the church through the so-called "Dark Ages."  The survival of Plato and Aristotle, the two pillars of Western civilization to which all Western philosophy (including science) is still just a footnote, is due to the church.  Two of the fundamental scientific theories today, genetics and the Big Bang Theory, originated with Catholic clergy.  Even the atheist Bertrand Russell had to acknowledge the supreme reasoning ability of Thomas Aquinas, a man whose work, it has been fairly said, we are still catching up with.  All of this, of course, must be swept aside in favor of the narrative that religion=superstition, and science=truth.

Rationalism, liberalism, and individualism, are all products of Christianity in Western culture.  If you doubt it, read Socrates' argument for why he must be executed in "Crito."  Consider the arguments against Antigone's actions in the eponymous play.  There was no room for the sacred individual, the Thoreau defying a poll tax, the MLK accepting arrest to prove a greater moral point, in ancient Greece.  The idea was not only unthinkable, it was anathema.    If Socrates is an heroic figure in Plato's telling, it is because he accepts the death sentence of Athens, not because he nobly escapes what he knows is an unfair verdict (even the citizens of Athens say so).  It was Christianity which taught us the virtue of the individual, however lowly.  Chaucer's Wife of Bath is notable because she isn't noble; and yet her virtues make her laudable.  It would take Thomas Gray and finally William Wordsworth to overturn the Great Chain of Being more suitable to monarchic rule and to usher in the Day of the Individual, the Byronic hero:  but without the groundwork of Christianity, the emphasis on the worth of the least among us, the example of the Creator of the Universe born in a manger, that shift in emphasis is almost unimaginable.

It certainly didn't happen anywhere else in the human world.

The idea that man is set apart by virtue of reason is a Greek ideal, but it was championed by the Church throughout the collapse of civilization after Rome fell, and carried on into the Renaissance, where the Church was the greatest patron of both the arts and the sciences.  Why else is all the greatest Renaissance art religious art?  As for liberalism, what is more "liberal" than the Protestant Reformation, which began the turn toward local control, first with the princes in Germany who supported Luther, and then with the cities like Geneva, and even the Puritans of the 17th century who wanted to be free of the British crown to worship as they saw fit, and live as they wished.   The American experiment didn't spring from the brow of Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison: its roots were in Christianity as much as anywhere else.  If it was reason that guided the "Founding Fathers," it was a form of political* reason championed by Protestantism for centuries before the Enlightenment caught up with it.

But it is the "changing human environment" which is the most interesting part of the narrative.  That changing environment, at least since the Industrial Revolution, is largely the product of science.  Global warming, weapons of mass destruction, industrialization which has exacerbated poverty anew in large portions of the world and made weapons as ubiquitous as sunlight; all can be laid at the feet of science, the triumph of modernism.  Fundamentalism itself is a reaction to modernism.  To think even more modernism is needed to eradicate fundamentalism is to think what will extinguish the fire  is more kerosene.

Which returns me to the question:  what is science doing to alleviate the conditions of poverty?

E.O. Wilson thinks it's all about "the meaning of existence."  E.O. Wilson is a fool.  His argument is rooted in the very ignorance and false dichotomy Lessl examines.

I think it’s time to be audacious. The central questions of religion and philosophy are three in number: Where do we come from, what are we, and where are we going? Usually these are just the beginnings of long discussions, but that’s no longer the case. We now have a pretty good picture of how humanity arose in Africa, what intermediate forms existed, the rate at which these forms evolved, and the circumstances in which they evolved.

So I can say, right now, that of those three great questions, we have most of the answer for where we come from. And in this book I take up the question: What are we? We’re starting to close in on that one. We need to know where we came from and what we are to have the self-understanding to sensibly plan where we’re going. Right now, we don't have any idea where we’re going.

First, if you're going to be audacious, know what you're talking about.  His idea of "the central question of religion and philosophy" (notice how he dismisses both by lumping them together. Away with abstract thought!  Science has acquired truth, and banished ambiguity!) wouldn't survive contact with an Introduction to Philosophy course at a community college (I know; I taught that course for a few semesters).  Starting from a definition that favors his conclusion, he quickly erects a structure we used to call "Castles in the Air."  We used the term derisively, and always attached the warning:  "Don't try to move in!"

Mr. Wilson, of course, does.  After all, like Daniel Dennett who has already explained consciousness, in one short summary of his trilogy of books, he explains that science has, or soon will, answered all of those questions.  QED!  Empiricism ergo sum!  Thus did Samuel Johnson refute Berkeley!

Nobody except a few places on the internet is taking Wilson seriously.  He is right about one thing:  we don't have any idea where we're going; and if he is going to be our guide, God help us.

Remember the Dove ad from the SuperBowl about caring Dads, which gets us to "Dove Men Care," the line of products being sold by Dove?  If it were being presented for humor, that kind of confusion of definition would be a pun.  English is an enormously flexible language:  we use the same word, despite the huge fund of words available to us, to mean different things in different contexts.  Care for your child is not quite the same thing as care for your skin.  We know that.  Here Wilson argues we all want to know "where we come from."  His answer?  Africa.

Next question?

If I point out that's not exactly what the question asked, Wilson undoubtedly will dismiss my question as irrelevant and return to insisting the only valid answer to the question is:  "Africa." He doesn't continue the confusion; he doesn't answer that "where we are going" is back to Africa; or to any point in space or time at all.  He plays the game of words as it suits him, but pretends he's not playing any game at all.

Not exactly what Wittgenstein meant about "language games," but close enough; and at the same time, precisely the problem.  Wilson is apparently as ignorant of the work of Wittgenstein and other modern philosophers, as he is of religion.  In fact, he's proven himself ignorant of these two great realms of human thought.  Knowing nothing about them, he doesn't need to know anything.  His knowledge is complete, and being complete it is supreme.  Like Dawkins, Wilson is content to believe what he knows is all that needs to be known, and all other human knowledge is just so much nonsense which he doesn't need to clutter his beautiful mind with.  But leaving his mind so carefully uncluttered, he makes mistakes which would doom a student in that Intro. Philosophy class; and in fact, mistakes that make his entire argument farcical.

Did I ever tell you the story of a doctor who bought some land in the country, to build his second house on?  It's a true story; the lawyer who the doctor had to come to told it to me.  Doctor went out to the property, pointed to a lovely spot on his land that would be perfect for the house, and ordered construction to begin.  Construction duly began, and when it was finished, the property owner of the contiguous lot brought maps to the doctor proving at least half of the house was on the next lot.  The doctor came to the lawyer, desperate to know what his legal option were.

He didn't have any.  He either got the landowner to sell that much of his lot to the doctor; or he tore down at least half of his new house.  He was a very good M.D.  He was a very bad land surveyor and lawyer.  Had he spent 10 minutes consulting people with knowledge he didn't have, he'd have saved himself a lot of grief.

We don't know where we're going; and we're in a rush to get there.  I've seen the wisdom of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospels denigrated as "Bronze Age thinking."  The same people making that argument rely on Plato and Aristotle to even construct a kind of thought they consider "reasonable."  They also use a lot of the thinking of Aquinas, from the 13th century, without realizing it.  The Renaissance designated the "Dark Ages," but without the scholasticism and the monks and the Church, the Renaissance would have had no knowledge to rediscover; it would have been as lost as the library of Alexandria (and let's not forget it was the Muslims who saved Aristotle for the 13th century to rediscover).  I used to think it was peculiarly American, this rush to consider the generation before us ignorant and benighted, and to believe true knowledge only began with our ignorance.  I've come to see it's universal, and the very idea of "progress" is laughable.

Where are we going?  With people like E.O. Wilson and most of the chattering classes of the world to guide us, we're going around in circles.  The truly radical nature of the gospels and the Hebrew scriptures those gospels are rooted in:  the unbrokered kingdom, the first last and the last first, freedom for the captive and release of the prisoners, the year of Jubilee and care for the widow and orphan; justice beginning with how much care we show to the least of us, and how we are all in this together, strangers and aliens all:  that nature is rediscovered in pockets every generation, by people who really do read the Bible.  Not just the "Biblical stories" or the stories of war and slaughter, but the whole magnificent record:  that is how it is known, and it is known in the community for whom it is valued, to whom it speaks.  If it is rooted in the Bronze Age, then so are we all, even in the Atomic Age or the Internet Age.  The environment has changed only on the surface:  just beneath that surface, nothing has really changed at all.

If that truly radical nature of the Scriptures is hidden again and again, perhaps we should ask why.  Perhaps we should examine deeply why the preferential option for the poor disturbs us so.  Perhaps we should reconsider what justice really means.  Perhaps we should think more about what we can do for others, and less about what we can do for ourselves.  Perhaps we should think about why it is so hard to think about that.  It's a much more important question than Pilate's question:  and that is the question E.O. Wilson, and so many others, are asking.  Just by asking it, they cannot get the answer:  because truth is not known or defined:  truth is lived.

That's the great secret of the scriptures.  "How should we then live?"  Ask that, and you are nearer the truth than anyone who thinks truth is reducible to three silly questions that are, in fact, just more abstractions.


*Political in the sense Aristotle meant:  having to do with the "polis."  Not "political" in the common modern sense:  having to do with partisanship.

A Palate Cleanser

I think the market is a great green god....

Because I have more to say about Thomas Lessl and Galileo and science and modernity.  But as an interlude, a word from Charlie Pierce:

Sooner or later, it's up to the voters to decide to stop being stupid about their own self-interest, and to stop falling for scams about how the Poors and Browns are the ones stealing all their money.

Yes, but since that particular scam has been run since at least the days of Reconstruction, and since even now the "preferential option for the poor" is to make them rich (or else blame them for not being rich, because morals), and it is still news to people that Dr. King was murdered during his leadership of a march for economic, not just racial, justice....

Well, don't expect that situation to change anytime soon, despite the very best efforts of Senator Professor Warren; who is, after all, only one Senator.

The fix is in; and animus towards the poor and against the minorities (now "illegal immigrants" represent that rising tide which will swamp all our boats; but even that term is not about race, because it's never about race) is bone deep in America, and digging deeper every year.

The prospects for peace are awful.

How should we then understand?

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Dancing about Architecture

Now see if you can pick up the spare....

Let me see if I can remember this correctly.  I want to be fair to the science; I'm not trying to be critical of physics here.

According to the eminent physicist/mathematician on Science Friday this afternoon, "dark energy" is real, and we know what it is.  What it is, is a number.  It is a number in an equation.  And that number is the cosmological constant first suggested by Einstein (they finally worked out the number itself much later) in 1917.  It is a number, but it is real.  It does not have a particle attached to it (quantum mechanics, if I understand correctly) or a field, because then it would be variable.  It is a constant.  It is real.  And it is a number in an equation.

But it's real.

And they complain that theologians bicker about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Theology, contrary to popular opinion, has never been concerned with describing reality in the way physics (for one) tries to.  Yes, the Roman church tried to silence Galileo, but that was the church hierarchy acting, not the church doctors.  The distinction is important, especially if we remember Gregor Mendel was a monk, and the big bang theory was postulated by a Jesuit priest.  Theology is not concerned with contradicting or being confirmed by science; nor is it limited to "faith seeking understanding," the formulaic phrase I was given in seminary (and which never satisfied me.  It made "faith" into a think akin to James' famously dismissive formulation).  Theology is the attempt to understand the human relationship to the divine, to, in Johannes de Silentio's terms, "the god."  Theology is the study of that relationship, and how humans can understand it, and how humans can understand the nature of God based on the accepted Christian (since it is a Christian field) revelations.

It is no more a complete statement of the nature of God than I can make a complete statement of the nature of my wife (lovely though she is).  Theology is comparable to me trying to understand my relationship to my wife; an act sometimes necessary in any marriage, and sometimes wholly unnecessary (and in a happy marriage, more commonly the latter).  Theology is not a definitive statement on anything; but then the things most important to us are not really amenable to definitive statements.  Do I love my daughter because she carries my genes?  Do I love my wife because she was able to help me pass my genes on to another generation?  And before my daughter; did I love in anticipation of the birth?  Now that she is an adult, do I no longer love my wife, the purpose of my love being fulfilled?

Surely my love for my family is better explained than in terms of "selfish genes."  My relationship to my wife matters much more to me than the cosmological constant, or how it can be both a number and real at the same time, or how time can be without beginning or end, yet to say the same for God is a patent absurdity.  Yet if I say it about God, I am speaking of the ineffable in terms of human understanding.  And if I say time is infinite because the evidence of the universe is that there are multiple universes existing one after the other in time (not continuous in space) because, rather like the Hindu myth of creation, they expire and start over, a cycle without beginning or end, am I not still speaking of the ineffable in terms of human understanding?

And yet if you say this condition of the universe is known because the physicists say so, is that any different than saying the nature of God is known because the priests say so?  Am I not as illiterate in physics and math as the medieval peasant was in literacy itself?  Do I not have to accept that it is so, that the cosmological constant is a number and yet real, while it is still just a number in an equation?  If I accept that, am I not merely accepting it on faith, on trust that the physicist is certain it is true and can be trusted, and so I can trust it without ever understanding whatever proof supposedly upholds it?  Or even what it means when I'm told numbers in equations are real?

"Happy Birthday, Rene."--ntodd

And how better to honor Descartes  than with a poem by Beckett?

Whoroscope / Samuel Beckett

What's that?

An egg?

By the brothers Boot it stinks fresh.

Give it to Gillot.

Galileo how are you

and his consecutive thirds!

The vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a

            sutler!

We're moving he said we're off--Porca

            Madonna!

the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-

            potatoey charging Pretender.

That's not moving, that's moving.

What's that?

A little green fry or a mushroomy one?

Two lashed ovaries with prostisciutto?

How long did she womb it, the feathery one?

Three days and four nights?

Give it to Gillot.

Faulhaber, Beeckman and Peter the Red,

come now in the cloudy avalanche or Gassendi's

            sun-red crystally cloud

and I'll pebble you all your hen-and-a-half ones

or I'll pebble a lens under the quilt in the midst

            of day.

To think he was my own brother, Peter the

            Bruiser,

and not a syllogism out of him

no more than if Pa were still in it.

Hey! pass over those coppers,

sweet milled sweat of my burning liver!

Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboard

            throwing Jesuits out of the skylight.

Who's that? Hals?

Let him wait.

My squinty doaty!

I hid and you sook.

And Francine my precious fruit of a house-and-

            parlour foetus!

What an exfoliation!

Her little grey flayed epidermis and scarlet

            tonsils!

My one child

scourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood--

blood!

Oh Harvey beloved

how shall the red and white, the many in the

            few,

(dear boodswirling Harvey)

eddy through that crack beater?

And the fourth Henry came to the crypt of the

            arrow.

What's that?

How long?

Sit on it.

A wind of evil flung my despair of ease

against the sharp spires of the one

lady:

not one or twice but…

(Kip of Christ hatch it!)

in the one sun's drowning

(Jesuitasters please copy).

So on with the silk hose over the knitted, and

            the morbid leather--

what am I saying! the gentle canvas--

and away to Ancona on the bright Adriatic,

and farewell for a space to the yellow key of

            the Rosicrucians.

They don't know what the master of them that

            do did,

that the nose is touched by the kiss of all foul

            and sweet air,

and the drums, and the throne of the faecal

            inlet,

and the eyes by its zig-zags.

So we drink Him and eat Him

and the watery Beaune and the stale cubes of

            Hovis

because He can jig

as near or as far from His Jigging Self

and as sad or lively as the chalice or the tray asks.

How's that, Antonio?

In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up

            that egg.

Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?

Anna Maria!

She reads Moses and says her love is crucified.

Leider! Leider! she bloomed and withered,

a pale abusive parakeet in a mainstreet window.

No I believe every word of it I assure you.

Fallor, ergo sum!

The coy old froleur!

He tolle'd and legge'd

and he buttoned on his redemptorist waistcoat.

No matter, let it pass.

I'm a bold boy I know

so I'm not my son

(even if I were a concierge)

nor Joachim my father's

but the chip of a perfect block that's neither old

            nor new,

the lonely petal of a great high bright rose.

Are you ripe at last,

my slim pale double-breasted turd?

How rich she smells,

this abortion of a fledgling!

I will eat it with a fish fork.

White and yolk and feathers.

Then I will rise and move moving

toward Rahab of the snows,

the murdering matinal pope-confessed amazon,

Christina the ripper.

Oh Weulles spare the blood of a Frank

who has climbed the bitter steps,

(Rene' du Perron….!)

and grant me my second

starless inscrutable hour.

The poem came with notes, of which this is my favorite: 

1. Rene Descartes, Seigneur du Perron, liked his omelette made of eggs hatched from eight to ten days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says, is disgusting. He kept his own birthday to himself so that no astrologer could cast his nativity. The Shuttle of a ripening egg combs the warp of his days.