Category: Philosophy

Bogeymen

On By Christopher LansdownIn PhilosophyLeave a comment

The classic Bogeyman is a tale told by parents to frighten children into good behavior. There is another type of Bogeyman, however. It is a tale told by adults to themselves to explain why they’re already frightened.

We live in a fallen world, which means that we are separated from God. This is a terrible state for us to be in and more to the point we instinctively know that it is a terrible state for us to be in. In this state we are not happy and since we want to be happy we seek to know why we are not happy. Of course, if we came to the right answer we would go to church, receive the sacraments, and make progress on being happy. But not everyone does this, and the people who don’t still have a deep-seated emotional need to have an explanation for why they are unhappy. So they come up with one that isn’t true.

This explanation for why they are unhappy is what I call a Bogeyman. Bogeymen invariable have a few key traits. In particular they always:

  1. Are something which is reasonably powerful.
  2. Are something that is in theory beatable.
  3. Are something that is not in practice beatable.

If something is not powerful, it has no explanatory value for unhappiness. If it is not in theory something the unhappy person can overcome, then misery is assured and the Bogeyman leads to despair, which (most) people know to be wrong. If it is something that is beatable in practice, it will be beaten, the unhappiness will not go away, and so another Bogeyman will need to be found. Vaguely analogous to the Peter Principle, Bogeymen will be defeated until an undefeatable one that satisfies conditions 1 and 2 is found.

Bogeymen can be nearly anything that satisfies these three criteria. Groups of people are very popular, such as Republicans, Democrats, the Rich, drug users, popular entertainers, foreigners, racists, men, women, etc. Social conditions such as poverty, inequality, factory farming, industrial pollution, etc. have been not uncommonly used. Widely held social theories like capitalism, Marxism, nationalism, internationalism, Catholicism, etc. work well as bogeymen too.

This is not to say that a person will have no legitimate complaints about the real thing they are using as a Bogeyman. They almost certainly will, since real complaints work much better than imaginary complaints to create the skeleton of a scary figure. Rare is the imagination so powerful it can keep a menacing figure in view without any recourse to reality. But though the complaints are real, they will never be considered in any sort of balance. A person who focuses their fears onto a Bogeyman is inherently a utopian—someone who believes that perfection can be achieved in this life—and utopians can never consider imperfections in the world as permanent compromises. Utopians don’t mind temporary compromises, of course—hence the guillotine and the gulag—but a permanent compromise because the world will never be perfect? That is unthinkable. If that were the case, happiness would be impossible.

It’s a problem of looking for happiness in the wrong place, of course. This transitory world is not the sort of place in which you can find happiness. But if a man gives up looking for God, the wrong places to find happiness are all that are left.

Theoretical Empiricists

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, PhilosophyLeave a comment

If you go to the right places on the Internet it is fairly easy to come across Dawkinsian atheists who claim to be empiricists. They are not empiricists, of course—most haven’t done a single basic experiment themselves, let alone all of the basic experiments—but they will certainly claim to be, if not by name. When this is pointed out to them, they will take refuge in what might be called a collective empiricism: as long as someone has empirically verified it, and it is theoretically possible to empirically verify it again, that’s OK.

Being a retreat this isn’t well thought out, of course. Why should the bare theoretical possibility of an experiment being run again make human testimony about a previous experiment more believable? Still, that’s really a minor point; this new version doesn’t do what they want it to, anyway. They are hoping to divide knowledge up into reliable knowledge and everything else. It doesn’t do anything like that; their “knowledge” is just as unreliable as every other form of knowledge they denigrate, except for the kinds it’s less reliable than. What it does do is codify the reductionism which they practice. They want life to be simple, and so they rule out, as a simple matter of choice, types of knowledge which they don’t want to deal with. In practice, those are most types of knowledge. Ironically, given the high respect in which most such people hold mathematical physics, this includes mathematics.

What they are really trying to limit knowledge is the substitute for knowledge proposed by Kant. Basically, come up with a theory and then test it against experience. According to this concept of knowledge, nothing is actually known. Things are guessed at, and the best you can do is feel reasonably confident in your guesses when applying them to the parts of life in which you have tested them before.

The curious thing about this is that not even Kant tried to limit knowledge to this; he only limited knowledge of real things to this. That is, of things which exist. He fully recognized the universal validity of logic and reason; all he doubted was noesis, that is, perception of reality. Being the end of Modern Philosophy, he doubted that the senses could be trusted at all, and so the mind could not know anything which existed outside of it. But things which do not exist, such as hypothetical statements like the theorems of mathematics, he still thought fully knowable.

The Dawkinsian reductionists have eliminated this as well. They take somewhat seriously C.S. Lewis’s argument that if reason is the product of blind material processes, there can be no reason to trust it. (They probably didn’t actually hear his version of it; the problem is fairly obvious with only a moment’s thought. Unfortunately Lewis’s conclusion was that Dawkinsian evolution is self-refuting, which is not true. Dawkinsian evolution may be true, and if it is, it is intellectual suicide, but it is not self-contradictory.)

Given this semi-radical skepticism, the modern materialist is actually abjuring all knowledge. He doesn’t deny it, he merely disavows it. He’s uninterested. He will proceed with what amounts to a betting scheme, taking the Kantian approach as simply his preferred method for dealing with what may well be an irrational universe. Trouble emerges because—having no use for it—he redefines the word “reason” to mean this sort of bet, and “reasonable” to mean betting in the same manner as him. Thus anyone who makes any sort of real knowledge claim is “irrational”. The most common knowledge claim to excite this sort of opprobrium is to claim to know that God exists, probably mainly for practical reasons—Dawkinsian Atheists tend to strongly dislike traditional morality, which they associate with Christianity for mostly historical reasons—but also because God is known entirely through means which the Dawkinsian Atheist rejects (reason and testimony).

This phenomenon also gives rise to some very strange results when applied to mathematics, which the Dawkinsian Atheist must accept, despite his obvious rejection of it, because Physics (the field of study) is dependent upon mathematics. The compromise which this sort of extreme skeptic tends to employ is absurd in the abstract, but fits with his adopted approach to life: he tests mathematical theorems experimentally. I recently saw a rather striking example of this when just such an atheist offered to experimentally prove that 2 + 2 = 4 using apples. It’s really beside the point that such a demonstration would fail using sub-atomic particles if two are electrons and two positrons; it’s actually most interesting that he doesn’t understand that 2 + 2 = 4 by definition. There are actually several definitions of the Natural Numbers, but the most common is using the piano axioms. Briefly: suppose there’s something, call it one. Suppose there’s a next number after it, call that two. Suppose there’s a next number after that, call it three. And so on. Addition is defined by succession, so 2 + 2 is 4 because the number after the number after two is called four. No other possibility is conceivable, because this is simply the definition of the successor of the successor of 2. But this is not really a thinkable thought for the Dawkinsian atheist, so he’s stuck offering to do demonstrations with apples.

Actually, he’s not quite stuck doing that; he can also ridicule people for doubting. “If you don’t think that 2 + 2 = 4, the IRS would like to talk with you,” he says, and smirks in derision. He’s not interested in the definitions of the numbers, or of what additional actually is; all he cares about is practical results, because he has disavowed knowledge in favor of a betting scheme. And he can’t know that he’s betting his soul, because he doesn’t believe he has one. Pray for them.

Incidentally, these people correspond fairly well with the men Aristotle described as wanting to be horses. Each man, as a rational creature, has a duty to the truth: to seek it out and to know it as far as it has been given to him to do. These men find that unpleasant; they wish to do only the simpler tasks of caring for the body. They want the wail of Ecclesiastes to be true: they want man to be only the cleverest of the beasts that crawls the earth. Pray for them.

There are Four Vocations

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy1 Comment

In Star Trek: The Next Generation there is an episode where Captain Picard has been captured and is being tortured. In order to break his will, he is shown four bright lights, told that there are five lights, and severely punished every time he says the correct number. American culture sometimes feels like that with vocations, though instead of insisting that there are five it insists that there is only one: marriage.

One is an especially unfortunate number of vocations for our culture to have settled on since a single choice is no choice at all. Marriage thus becomes prescriptive and considering the very idea of vocation appears strange, if not outright mentally ill. Shoehorning all people into marriage also damages marriage, which might fairly be said to be splitting at the seams. The high rate of divorces generally and annulments within catholic culture testify to a great many people whose vocation was not marriage—or if it was, having thoroughly misunderstood what marriage was—going through the motions of marriage mostly because they thought that they were supposed to in order to be human. (Fornication carries so few consequences in American culture that going through the motions of marriage cannot be for gratification of sexual desires.)

There are four vocations—marriage, committed single, consecrated religious, and holy orders (priesthood/diaconate)—because people are not all the same. In America we tend to look at this backwards: the person first, then the vocation to fit the person, just like you pick a job based on whether you like horses more than bridges, or cooking food more than both, etc. A more accurate way to look at it is that the vocation is part of the person, and therefore their personality is suited to their vocation. (It is more accurate because the “being” in “human being” is really a verb, like “running” or “swimming”, though really the only distinction between verbs and nouns is that verbs are relatively short-lived actions and nouns are very long lived actions. God’s name is not “The Thing” but “I am”, and so far as we exist we are all made in the image of God.)

Trying to cram people into the wrong vocation will necessarily hurt the people thus crammed. The proper definition of sin is “privation of form”, or slightly more intelligibly to those not familiar with scholastic philosophy, “diminishment of being”. We can all see what is meant if you consider the loss to a pianist of having his hands mangled in an accident. He simply ceases to be a pianist at all. He might be or become many other good things, of course. He might become a great piano teacher. He might fall back on the degree he got in college of astrophysics and do excellent work examining the stars. He might concentrate on managing investments for family and friends which he had been doing in his spare time. He may become a much better man than ever he would have been as a pianist, but none the less he who once was a pianist is no longer; in that regard he is now less than he once was. His being has been diminished.

By analogy, sin diminishes a person too. Human beings were given language to enable us to tell the truth. To use language to tell a lie makes us less, because now we cannot be trusted and all our words convey less truth than they used to. So it goes with all sin; it is to make ourselves less than the fullness of what we are supposed to be. That God saves us means that this diminishment may not always be permanent, and it may not always be catastrophic, certainly it will not destroy us if we turn away from it and embrace God’s gift of salvation.

I think this analysis makes it obvious why a person being crammed into the wrong vocation diminishes them; it doesn’t destroy them and it certainly will provide many opportunities to practice the virtue of patience, but it will result in their life not being all that it could have been. But we must be clear that this does not mean that a person so crammed will grow new abilities and personality traits; they will have to make do as best they can with a personality which was adapted to something else. Swimming might here be a good analogy; the human body can swim, and some people can swim much better than others, but the human body is not made for swimming, and the fastest of us are slow compared to very average fish. A man who should have been a celibate priest might make a good husband and father, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have made a better priest. The reverse is of course true, too, but that mistake is well understood within our current culture.

To some degree I think that part of the problem in understanding this is the degree to which catholics have acculturated to the predominantly protestant culture of America. In the aftermath of JFK, catholics went from being distrusted and hated to being accepted, and this caused many of the problems which are always associated with comfort. Chief among those problems is laziness. Comfortable people become very reluctant to hold onto difficult truths, and that people are not all the same is a difficult truth to hold onto.

Now, it is easy to be misled because “tolerance” is a common catchword, and we’re asked to be tolerant of seemingly everything. But these are all superficial differences which are accepted, and they are accepted precisely because they are superficial. Pretending that everyone is basically the same is much easier than loving people who are different, which is why one of the immediate actions of “tolerance” is to angrily call all discussion of difference bigotry. It may possible be that much of the “tolerance” we see is the overcompensation of self-loathing bigots, but much of it is that this “toleration” consists primarily of pretending that there are no differences. To discuss real differences is to shatter this illusion, and since they have no metaphysical system in which (real) difference is not defect, this has no other interpretation to them.

There is another problem which our culture has that tends to deny any of the celibate vocations, and (unsurprisingly) it is derived from an essentially secular origin. The basic principle is that a person must have a committed sexual partner in order to be a full human being. It’s a crazy idea, and one might be tempted to think that it comes from watching far too many romantic comedies, but in fact I think it derives from the belief in an imminent soul made up of the accumulation of a person’s experiences, rather than a transcendent soul which pre-exists but changes with experiences. The former is the only real metaphysical possibility absent an intelligent creator, hence its prevalence in our largely secular culture. An imminent soul has no inherent value, however. It can only be valued if known, and it can only be known with a very great investment in time, and that very great investment in time will only be made if a person is loved, but they can’t be loved before they are known and so something must attract another person prior to knowledge and the only two candidates are desperation which would take anybody, and sexual attraction which is at least a little selective. Desperation is of no value because it is entirely focused on the self, not the other, which is why it will take anyone. Hence sexual attraction is the only option for a worthwhile life. And hence celibate vocations are a form of suicide, and why parents might discourage their children from throwing their lives away in that manner. In the best case, these might be noble sacrifices, like being an organ donor or the soldier who jumps on a grenade to save his fellows, but still, one hopes that the noble soul who sacrifices himself will be someone else’s child.

Accordingly, I think that the first thing we must do to help everyone get into their proper vocations is to attack the idea of homogeneity. Sex is nice and all, but massively overvalued, so to get it into its right proportion in human life, I think that we need to undermine the idea that sex is something which makes a human life whole. It’s a powerful and very animating idea, which is why I think relatively little headway will be made while it is still dominant. It’s not a very sensible idea of stated directly, however, so I think it is vulnerable to mockery. And I think that there is merit to Saint Thomas More’s saying that the devil, being a proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.

I think that this is also very important for recovering an authentic understanding of the vocation of marriage. Far too many people go into marriage looking to get something out of it, rather than looking at it as a way to pour themselves out like a libation. Marriage and raising children have their enjoyable parts, to be sure, but the idea that marriage is some sort of odd hybrid between entertainment and psychotherapy is very destructive to human happiness. Children are wonderful to watch and play with, but it is proper they will take a great deal from one that they will never give back, and they will in their youthful ignorance cause a great deal of suffering which will form a heavy cross to carry. Pretending that marriage is something which will help to carry crosses, rather than something which will fashion them and load them onto one’s back, is to set people up for disappointment and misery. It is true that husband and wife will help each other, but they will also be one of the biggest sources of the other one’s problems. This does not mean that husband and wife will inevitably quarrel—though so far I’ve never heard of husband and wife who haven’t—but that the two are signing up to do something very difficult together, and the magnitude of problems are always proportional to the magnitude of the undertaking from which they arise. Marriage is a thing which should be viewed like enlisting in the army during a war, not like booking a Caribbean vacation.

Though it should be noted that most soldiers survive going to war, whereas marriage has a 50% mortality rate.

The Terrible Effects of Sola Fide

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Christianity, PhilosophyLeave a comment

I have called protestantism proto-atheism largely because the denial of reason which you find with people like Martin Luther (who famously said that reason was the devil’s whore) and John Calvin (whose doctrine of the total depravity of man makes reason at best unattainable for men) sets it on that course. However, I have recently realized that there is another way in which protestantism is proto-atheism, embedded in what the doctrine of Sola Fide often becomes. (I would like to emphasize that I am talking about protestantism and not protestants, many of whom share little in common with Martin Luther and have a healthy respect for reason.)

According to Peter Kreeft, there is a way in which the doctrine of Sola Fide is in fact compatible with orthodox Christianity (it’s towards the end of that video if you’re looking for it). I have grave doubts that this expansive and non-obvious meaning of Sola Fide was what Martin Luther meant but since he’s dead that’s purely a question between him and God. What is relevant to us, however, is that a great many evangelicals and fundamentalists (and some other protestants) are quite sure that this orthodox interpretation is wrong. They hold that all that is needed to get into heaven is for a person to believe that Jesus is the son of God and died for their sins. Often this takes the form of “accepting Jesus into your life” by saying a prayer where you formally accept Jesus as your personal lord and savior. Often (but not always) it involves some feeling of “knowing that you are saved”. To distinguish this from possible other versions of Faith Alone, I will refer to this version as Belief Alone.

One of the problems which immediately crops up with salvation by belief alone—if you think about it for more than a few seconds—is that after people die and come to meet God face-to-face on the day of judgment, everyone will believe. (As the saying goes, Satan believes.) It is, therefore, not possible that there is anything operative in belief that contributes to or makes up part of the substance of salvation. Worse, since most evangelicals and fundamentalists seem to conceive of heaven and hell as two alternative rooms, one with a party one with far too many sharp things in the hands of unpleasant creatures with odd senses of humor, and in no way think of salvation as any sort of improvement from an imperfect state to a perfect state, belief during life can only be a criteria like how having all six colors of pie piece allows you to attempt to win the game in Trivial Pursuit. It is a purely arbitrary rule.

The only possible purpose of this arbitrary rule—if entry into the infinite party room being only for people wearing the wristband of belief has any purpose at all—is to function as a test of obedience. But, the question must be asked: obedience to whom?

Now this is where the rejection of reason (more formally, fideism) comes up again. If evangelicals and fundamentalists (etc) believed in natural theology, i.e. reason’s ability to approach God, this test of obedience would be very harsh, but it would at least be a test of obedience to God, because a natural man unaided by divine revelation through miracle can still learn of God through reason and thus such belief could—by a great stretch of the imagination—be some sort of test of the individual’s worth. How it can be a meaningful concept for a fallen creature to merit salvation is still something that would need to be explained, but there would at least be some hope for how salvation through belief alone would not be completely self-contradictory (not to mention completely evil).

But when you add in fideism, it is not possible for one to use reason to arrive at the truth. The ticket into the party room thus consists of belief in something one has no reason to believe. Whatever the person proposing this idea may say about asking you to have faith in God, what he is really doing is asking you to have faith in him. Moreover, because—according to him—you cannot know who God is, it cannot be God in whom you believe. You cannot believe in what you cannot know. The end result is that this is nothing other than a demand that you obey the person who is making the demand of you.

As I understand it in the typical case the one making the demand is a person’s parent, but since the demand did not originate with them—they are just passing it on—this really ends up being a demand for absolute fealty to a person’s society. This leads to atheism in two ways.

The first is that this demand is so unreasonable that a reasonable person will utterly reject it. This is why so many of the people who come to the Catholic church from fundamentalism or evangelicalism do so by way of atheism. It is also why modern atheists so often seem like fundamentalists who have simply switched their holy book from the bible which they interpret in light of popular books about it to their high school biology textbook which they interpret in light of popular books about it. (I mean that last part metaphorically, not literally.)

The other way that salvation by belief alone leads to atheism is that it is a form of idolatry. Idolatry is worshiping a created thing in place of the creator, and in this case the created thing is the society. Idolatry is a matter of fealty, i.e. priority, but not necessarily of belief, so this is not simply atheism by name, if it often seems to look like it in practice. What leads it to become avowed atheism is the existence of a another society which the person wishes to be a part of. Sometimes it’s another sub-culture. Often it’s the larger culture of the society in which the fundamentalist/evangelical lives. Whatever it is, this sets up a conflict, and if the other culture wins, a strong rejection of the idol becomes necessary, because it is a jealous idol. Since its official belief in God is part of that idol, it will become rejected when the idol does. The attitude of total fealty to society may not, however, and I believe that this is where we get most of our evangelical atheists from. They have transferred their complete devotion from fundamentalist/evangelical society onto whatever new society they identify with, and will attack believing in God with the same ferocity that they used to attack not believing in God. And their theological knowledge will not have improved from the transition.

The Argument From Design

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy1 Comment

Until 150 years ago, or so, the argument for God’s existence from design was probably one of the more commonly understood arguments of natural theology. (Natural theology consists of the things we can say about God by the light of our own reason and nature, in contrast to revealed theology, which are the things God has told us about himself.) After the rise of NeoDarwinism (by which term I refer to the Dawkinsian creation myth and not the scientific theory of evolution), the argument from design is still intuitively understood by many people, but it has generally become misunderstood formally. If you were to ask an atheist on the level of Richard Dawkins—who is among the best of the worst atheists—what the argument from design was, if you lucked into a calm and concise one you’d get something like this:

If you look at the natural world, many things in it are very simple, like rocks, but many of the things in it are far more complex than can reasonably be supposed to be assembled by blind chance. Things like plants and especially animals are too complex to be an accident, and so they must have been created by an intelligence more complex than they are. Since we, too, are part of the natural world, there must be something more intelligent than us which made us, and that thing is God.

This is not at all the classical argument from design, such as you can find in the Summa Theologica, though I will grant you that you can find something like it from young-earth creationists. It is, fundamentally, a god of the gaps argument. God of the gaps arguments are more repugnant to orthodox Christians than to atheists because they are an insult to God: they claim to show that God exists because the natural world doesn’t work and needs to be constantly fixed. This is a relatively new idea; it really only makes sense in the context of modern mathematical physics. Before that attempt to fit the workings of the universe into the human head, no one ever supposed that the universe didn’t actually work.

(At least next to nobody. There is probably some ancient Greek philosopher who argued that, because for pretty much any argument there is an ancient Greek philosopher who argued it. And technically (original) Buddhism is based on the idea that the universe doesn’t work, but at a higher and qualitatively different level than what I’m talking about here. Also, Buddhism is fundamentally atheistic. Since it holds that everything is an illusion, it holds that its gods are not real, and it certainly denies any uncreated creator. It’s much more akin to the zero-energy hypothesis.)

The classical argument from design is not based on probabilities and certainly does not depend on the idea that natural things do not fit together. It in fact contradicts the idea that the unfolding of nature couldn’t have been according to a natural process precisely because it argues from the fact that natural processes actually work. A fundamentally broken world would undermine the classical argument from design. So, without further introduction, here is a version of the classic argument from design (my words):

If you look at the world, it exists imperfectly according to a rational hierarchy of being. Things at lower levels work together to the advantage of better things, and these better things in turn order and improve the lower things. Quarks work together to form protons and neutrons. Protons, neutrons and electrons work together to form atoms. Atoms work together to form molecules. Molecules work together to form bodies. These bodies include plants, which turn sunlight into food, and animals, which eat the food the plants make. Some animals keep the other animals from over-eating the plant food. Other animals spread the seeds of the plants, as well as nutrients which the plants need. There are also less clever and more clever animals, with a rational animal at the apex, who directs the lower animals as well as the plants toward a harmonious function.  In all of this there is a rational order where the parts fit into each other and work together to create a good whole. This rational design reflects and points to a rational mind which orders the natural world according to the good. Any such rational mind which is itself a part of nature, such as a super-intelligent space alien or a little-g god or extra-cosmic aliens in a universe that created our big bang, or whatever, would themselves be a higher step in this rational order, since they are a part of it by virtue of shared time and causality. There must, therefore, be some rational mind which is not part of it, which stands utterly apart from it, like how Shakespeare stands apart from Hamlet or the characters in The Mousetrap (the play within the play). This rational mind which is utterly apart from all of the rational creation with a shared causality is what all men call God.

(Where the natural world varies from the rational order, this constitutes is a rebellion of the rationally ordered creature against its creator, possibly very indirectly since things are supposed to receive their rational ordering according to the other things within their shared hierarchy. Thus we clearly live within a fallen world, but that means we live within a rationally ordered world that has partially broken, not within an irrational world that doesn’t work at all.)

To see the difference between this world and an irrational world, consider how any of the components could have gone wrong. Suppose up quarks weren’t compatible with down quarks: we’d have neither protons nor neutrons, and consequently neither atoms nor molecules nor bodies nor plants nor animals. All there would be is a vast sea of sub-atomic particles without any interesting organization. (And please bear in mind I’m only saying that world would be irrational; I’m not saying anything about how likely or unlikely it is—its probability is utterly irrelevant.) Or suppose electrons couldn’t orbit an atomic nucleus: the result would be an ever-dispersing gas of particles fleeing from each other since nothing held them together. And again, I don’t care whether that possible world is more or less likely than ours, I only care that it would be far less interesting, because that is just another way of saying it would not be rationally ordered. What interests us is intelligible order—no one is fascinated by noise.

The same can be seen if we look at evolution. Dawkinsian atheists love to talk about how order emerges from chaos because of simple rules, in this case the simple rule being natural selection. This is fair enough so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far because mere order is not the same thing as rational order. In science fiction one encounters stories of nan0bot catastrophes where self-replicating nanobots which can use their environment for raw materials get out of control and turn the entire world into unimaginably many copies of themselves. This is called the grey goo scenario. But we in fact already have self-replicating nanobots which can use their environment for raw materials. They’re called bacteria. So why isn’t there a bacteria-goo scenario, where some bacteria hit on the winning combination of genes/proteins and turned everything into a copy of itself? A single species that has smashed all others is very compatible with survival of the fittest. (Yes, I know that survival of the fittest is only an approximation of the biological theory of evolution, but the more proper theory doesn’t differ in this regard.) Perhaps domination might be bad for the bacteria, but that downside could only emerge once they’ve wiped everything else out, at which point there would be no other species left to balance things out again. This also applies to other layers in the hierarchy of being. Why aren’t all plants poisonous? It would not be hard for a plant to have eliminated the first herbivore, and to have made a herbivore-free world. If wolves ate every last prey animal, they would starve to death, but only after they ate the last one. Then there would be neither predator nor prey and just an animal-free world left. (And it’s no answer to say that the changes happen so gradually that balance is always maintained because we know that evolution often happens very quickly. The gradual accumulation of changes is more a just-so story for children than it is a description of how evolution has typically worked, and certainly is not a description of how it can work.)

Now once again, I’m not talking about what is more probable, but what is more rationally ordered. (That is why it’s irrelevant that one species could balance out against another’s recently gained advantage; that’s only a question of probability.) A world in which a super-bacteria ate everything else and so was the only thing left (and then died off if it wasn’t an autotroph) would be very orderly, but its extreme homogeneity would not be a rational hierarchy. It would be just as complex as the world we live in, since it would have just as many moving pieces, but it would be far less interesting. And as the way that every foreign animal introduced into Florida seems to kill off the native species shows, evolution does not of its nature tend to produce a more interesting world. It won’t for the same reason that the history of warfare shows weapons all converging on the same basic designs: optimizing for one thing rarely has more than one solution.

Now, the reason why probability does eventually enter the discussion is that for any configuration of matter, it is always possible that it got that way by sheer accident (“randomly”), and so a world organized according to a rational hierarchy of being must, of necessity, look like a possible accidental outcome of blind matter. (This is less true if one recognizes the existence of free will, but since people wish to entertain the notion that free will might actually be an illusion, the similarity is unavoidable.) Thus one must ask of a thing that is organized according to a rational hierarchy: how likely is this to really just be a pure accident rather than what it appears to be? But please note that this question is utterly different from a god-of-the-gaps argument. We are not asking whether this world could work without God. We’re asking whether this world that looks like it was made by God could in fact be an accidental similarity only. We’re asking whether the portrait of a man we’re looking at might have been the result of a canvas and some tubes of paint falling off of a table and the resulting mess just happened to look like a skillful portrait of the man. That could have happened; the right colors could have been on the table, and the dog might have carried the tubes of paint off back to its bed to chew on them. An excellent portrait of a man is not impossible without a painter. But between a skilled painter and a freak accident, my money is on the painter.

That being said, this is why the argument from contingency is much stronger than the argument from design: the argument from contingency shows that it is absolutely impossible that there is no God. This is also why Dawkinsian atheists value evolutionary anecdotes so much—vivid stories capture the imagination and make the whole thing seem more plausible. It’s also why Dawkins spends so much time angrily sneering. His alternative is to say, “Come on, guys, it’s not technically impossible!” and that would be poor salesmanship.

In closing, I would like to show the version of this argument which you can find in the Summa Theologica:

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

There is a great difference of expression between my version of the argument and Saint Thomas’ version, but they mean roughly the same thing. Most of the differences arise from a very different standard education. We are not taught about goodness or what the relationship between different types of beings is, and very little about intelligence and less about rationality, so in a modern context such things must be explained at length, whereas in Saint Thomas’s time, anyone with even a tiny bit of education was familiar with those concepts. Our scientific knowledge, by contrast is far more advanced. Everyone has heard of protons and neutrons and electrons, and most people have heard of quarks.

Addendum

There are two addenda which I should discuss briefly: the weak anthropic principle and the infinite multiverse.

The weak anthropic principle is, roughly, “if the universe weren’t configured in its present way, we wouldn’t be asking why it was configured this way.” Typically its phrasing is adapted to the needs of the moment, but it always means as little. Probably the strongest statement of it—and this isn’t saying much—it is technically possible that our evaluation of a thing is influenced by having grown up in a world where that thing having happened. Usually it’s said in a way to suggest that our evaluation most likely was so influenced, but this is pure showmanship, without any admixture of a reason to believe it’s true. “I believe it, so you should too if you want my respect,” intimates the Dawkinsian atheist, as if any self-respecting person wouldn’t question his life choices if a Dawkinsian atheist did respect him.

The infinite multiverse hypothesis family of hypothesis that claim, essentially, that every possible world exists in a parallel universe. Basically, take Occam’s Razor and reverse it: unnecessarily multiply entities. I think that this originated with the question of why our physical constants (the charge of basic particles, the gravitational constant, etc) were the way that they were, and so one answer proposed—presumably by someone who read too much science fiction—was that every possible world happened, and we’re just in one that turned out to produce life. How anyone gets past the instant destruction of science, I can’t imagine. If every possible world happens, then there are an infinite number of worlds where all scientific experiments came up with their results by accident. There are infinite number of worlds where some spiky demon-monster with amazing nano-technology to keep you alive whips you in a pit of fire until the heat-death of those universes for not believing in Jack T. Chick tracts. And so on. And there is precisely no way to tell which of these parallel universes you are in. Since there are infinitely many of the bad universes, there isn’t even a way to tell how likely any of these bad universes is. And all of this is relatively obvious with a few seconds of thinking about it, which should tell you how seriously any of the proponents of the infinite multiverse hypothesis actually take the idea.

Awful Authorities

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy3 Comments

I was reading an article by Richard Dawkins about why there is almost certainly no God. It’s impressive in how aggressively he misunderstands the subject matter, but it’s even more impressive how much he misunderstands what people have said about it. The way that he casually assumes he completely understands scholastic terminology—as if the scholastic philosophers like Aquinas were writing in conversational English—is a masterwork of arrogant stupidity, to be sure, but that’s not what I want to talk about. It would also be interesting to consider Dawkins as a Martin Luther Lite—Martin Luther was both supremely arrogant and not very bright—but at the moment I’m more interested in the people who accept Dawkins as an authority on religious matters. (I mean authority in the logical sense; to accept his characterization of an opponent’s arguments instead of reading those arguments in full in their original context is to accept Dawkins as an authority in this sense.)

To anyone capable of understanding brilliant thinkers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Nietzsche, or Heidegger, Richard Dawkins is notable only for how utterly average he is. To put it colloquially, as a philosopher, he’d probably make an OK—but not great—bricklayer. An intelligent atheist who has studied philosophy and religion would be embarrassed by Richard Dawkins. So why do so many people respect and follow him?

The answer lies, I think, in how varying intelligence levels relate to intelligibility. This is especially observable in how people of varying intelligence levels follow arguments. Logical arguments for non-trivial things are very rarely made with every step in the argument being stated explicitly. It would take far too long, and explicitly stating connections between statements which are obvious makes an explanation seem dull, plodding, and even insulting. But which connections are obvious and which need to be stated explicitly depends on both the intelligence and the knowledge of the person trying to follow the argument. (For brevity, I will concentrate on the intelligence side of that, though the reality is more complicated because of the knowledge dimension, but the generalization from intelligence to intelligence-and-knowledge is relatively straight-forward.)

While explaining steps in an argument which are obvious to the reader can make the argument ponderous and boring, omitting steps which the reader cannot supply will make the argument entirely unintelligible. People can’t explain something at a higher level of intelligence than what they possess and most people will naturally explain an argument at the level of detail which they don’t find ponderous.  Now, while I think that intelligence is distributed among the population more like a poisson distribution than a bell curve, even if it is a bell curve, the inability to read (by lack of mental capacity, not whether one has been taught) forms a lower-level cutoff even to a bell curve, so either way, there is a large fraction of the population which is towards the effective bottom of the intelligence scale.

Given all of this, the most natural thing in the world is for people popular among people of average intelligence to be very slightly above them in intelligence. The slight edge will give them things to explain, but being very close means that (without much effort) their explanations will be intelligible. It is of course possible for a more intelligent person to condescend (in the etymological sense of the world—to come down and be with) to his less intelligent brethren; G.K. Chesterton is a great example of this because he was both  brilliant and quite popular. Still, the gift to understand people unlike oneself is relatively rare, as is the gift of being a good writer, and these two together with the willingness to expend the energy to condescend are rarer still. Still, it does happen, and so popularity does not give us any ability to predict the intelligence of the popular person.

But this does make Richard Dawkins’ popularity intelligible. A person who is in no position to judge whether Dawkins is right about religion will get the pleasure of being presented an intelligible thing, which can be convincing if it is in no way thought about. The less intelligent a person is, the more effort it takes to think about whether new information is congruent with what else is known about the world, making it especially unlikely for a person of average intelligence to think about whether Dawkins’ explanation is not only self-consistent but also consistent with the rest of the world.

Thus what Dawkins is doing may be regarded as a sort of unintentional seduction. His poor understanding has some explanatory power which is made very intelligible by it having been assembled specifically to appeal to an average intellect (his). It is then explained in a very intelligible way because he explains it at the ideal pace for a person of average intellect to understand it (i.e. at the pace he would want to read it).

This suggests that the best way to counter it is by presenting arguments which are similarly maximally intelligible to people of average intelligence. This is quite distinct from the strongest arguments against Dawkins’ position, and this is why I am leary about relying too heavily on cosmological arguments. They are incredibly powerful, but they are not simple. They rely on things like understanding that there cannot be an actual infinite regress. I love the argument from contingency, and in fact when I teach The Catholic Moral System in RCIA that is my starting point precisely because we can learn so much about God from it. But if people don’t always perfectly follow it, still, when I speak about the conclusions like God existing outside of time and space, or that God is perfectly happy and doesn’t need us, or that God’s relationship to us is one of pure gift from Him to us with no reciprocity, it works for them to take my word for it that this is catholic dogma, or even to recognize the truths as true once stated as the verbal formulation of something already intuitively known. They wouldn’t be in the Rite of Catholic Initiation for Adults if they didn’t already believe the faith is true, or at least very strongly suspect it (people are welcome to use RCIA to learn more about the faith and drop out if they think it was a mistake).

When it comes to people who are skeptical about the faith, I think that they will generally need something which they can not only accept, but something which they can fully recognize as true. For that reason, I don’t think that the argument from contingency (or other cosmological arguments) are the ideal way to go in arguing with most atheists. A much more intuitive argument is the argument from design, but since one of the pillars of Dawkinsian atheism is a creation myth based on the scientific theory of evolution plus a little astronomy, the argument from design is much less effective than it should be.

(I should mention that I’m not talking about a god of the gaps argument like you find supported by people like Michael Behe in Darwin’s Black Box. Rather, I mean that if you look at the world, it is imperfect but in the main rationally ordered according to a hierarchy of being. A hierarchy implies that there is something at the top. More colloquially: the universe looks like a work of art, and art implies an artist.)

Since this very natural proof for God is no longer very effective, I think that a better approach would be to argue from morality. This is an argument which is not yet well developed. Atheists generally dismiss the version of it which runs, “why would you be good if you weren’t afraid of going to hell”, and indeed this is not a great argument, though the way that the atheists dismiss it is worse. “I don’t need God to be good,” Christopher Hitchens famously said, and it would have sounded better if it wasn’t coming from a drunkard who abandoned the mother of his children to take up with another woman. But in any event this misses the point, because no one ever asked atheists how they will do something moral if they happen to feel like doing it, but why they would do it even if they don’t feel like doing it. I’ve never yet heard an answer to that question, except a few indignant yet half-hearted attempts to prove that everyone feels like doing the right thing in all cases. (Except the mentally ill, who should be medically treated, of course.)

That being said, despite the weakness of the atheist answer to even a childish argument from morality, I think that a more adult form of it would be vastly better. In particular, the fact that we recognize morality at all means that the world matters. The existence of morality proves that the world is real and not reducible to the meaningless arrangement of sub-atomic particles that New Atheists would have us believe. The New Atheists have a number of just-so stories to explain away morality as post-hoc rationalizations for instinctual behavior, but that’s obviously not true, and in general I don’t think that these arguments could persuade even a child. Work is needed, to be sure, to explain how morality is necessarily tied to God, but I suspect if done well this line of argumentation is more likely to be persuasive to the sort of person who finds Dawkins credible on religion.

Reductio ad Absurdum Isn’t Straw

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

Reductio ab Absurdum is a criticism of a position which shows that it is false by demonstrating that absurd conclusions follow from it. A Straw Man is a fake position that sounds like someone’s real position which is constructed by an opponent because it’s easier to disprove than the person’s real position. (It is often the case that the straw man is accidentally constructed because the attacker has never understood his opponents real position.) These two are often confused for each other, which is a bit odd, and I think that a big part of the explanation for why is Kantian epistemology. (I wrote about Kant’s substitute for knowledge here, and this blog post won’t make much sense unless you read that first.)

The relevant part of Kantian epistemology is that each of the several contradictory universal theories held by a person are held only in the areas of life in which the person believes that they produce correct results. In all other aspects of life, the universal theory is ignored. To continue with the example of neck-down darwinism, survival of the fittest is not even considered in the realm of politics, and all men being created equal is not even considered in the realm of science. Each theory has its proper domain, not in the sense of the domain where it makes claims, but rather the domain where its claims are heeded. This is the key ingredient in reductio ad absurdum being called a straw man.

Suppose Fred and James are arguing, and James holds a Kantian epistemology while Fred does not. Fred points out that James’ materialism implies that no action is any more moral than another, because no human action creates or destroys matter. James says that this is a straw man, because he never said that. Yet Fred never claimed that James said that, he claimed that James would have to say that if he were being consistent with what he (James) did say. Why is James so convinced that his is a straw man?

It’s because morality is not someplace that James applies materialism. To James’ mind, showing that one of his universal theories has implications is not enough to prove that James believes those implications. Instead, it must be shown that James actually believes that the universal theory should be applied to that part of life. James sees Frank’s reductio argument as a straw man because James does not believe his universal theory (materialism) should be applied to this part of life (morality), and so its implications in that area of life are in no way his position.

It’s difficult to know what to make of James’ contention that this is a straw man of his position. In a sense he’s right, because that implication of materialism is not his position. But that’s because materialism is not his position, despite the fact that he has claimed it to be. It’s not his position because he does not actually have a position. His claim to believe that truth is unknowable and so the best we can do is refining our theories as we “test” them against evidence is basically a methodological form of blank skepticism. It makes no positive claims of any kind, other than the self-evidently true ones about what at the moment appears to be the memory of past experiences, and as such attributing any positive claim to it is mistaken. This is an utter failure of rational thinking, but that’s really the only criticism which can be leveled against it. By claiming no more knowledge of the world than is possessed by a worm, it cannot be proven wrong about anything. The real problem is that the people who claim to believe this are essentially committing the moral crime of stolen valor. Just as a deserter pretending to be a decorated war hero is reprehensible, so is a putative earthworm who still wants to be treated like a man. Such skeptics would be consistent enough if they didn’t complain about being treated like worms. In practice, they complain about it quite loudly. They rely on the fact that we don’t believe them to live a much better life than they are entitled to according to their philosophy of the world. In argument, they take advantage of good manners. If we were to take their words seriously, the only correct response amounts to, though it is possible to state it less bluntly, “shut your mouth among your betters, dog”.

Kant’s Version of Knowledge

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized13 Comments

For those who don’t know, there is a school of philosophy called, unfortunately enough given the passage of time, Modern Philosophy. It had several features, but the main one was that it denied that knowledge was really possible. It was rarely that explicit, and oddly enough started in the 1600s with René Descartes’ proof that knowledge is possible. It ended with Immanuel Kant’s work in the 1700s trying to come up with a workable substitute for knowledge. It’s a common school of philosophy, these days, and no one has ever been able to figure out how its adherents are acting in good faith—especially since its adherents deny that good faith is really possible—but everyone acts like they are anyway since they seem to claim to, and academia is a very polite place (in front of students, anyway). There’s a joke about Modern Philosophy which runs:

Modern Philosophy was born with Descartes, died with Kant, and has been roaming the halls of academia ever since like a zombie: eating brains but never getting any smarter for it.

The most pernicious effect of Modern Philosophy—and I say this despite Modern Philosophy’s causative relationship to the existence of Post-Modernism—is the version of knowledge which Kant came up with in order to try to solve the problems of Modern Philosophy. (In technical terms, Kantian epistemology.) What Kant proposed was, roughly, the following:

We can’t have any direct knowledge of things apart from ourselves, so the best that we can do is to ape the scientific method: create theories of the world and then test them, refining them over time as we get more evidence.

Kant went on to say that we must believe in God, free will, and the immortality of the soul, because the alternative hypotheses predict an irrational world, which is not what we live in.

Most everyone else who takes Modern Philosophy seriously was quite happy to believe that we live in an irrational world, and so they will happily reject all three. (Interestingly, Kant was reputed to be a creature of extreme habit that never varied; I don’t know if that was of any significance to his intuitions.) But this has become the dominant idea of what knowledge is. It is not a direct communion of the mind with things outside of the mind, which everyone up until this point had meant by knowledge whether they affirmed or denied it.

The tricky thing to recognizing this is that Kant was very intelligent, and of a philosophical disposition. Most people are not very intelligent, and more importantly most people are not of a philosophical disposition. The result, taking these two things into account, is analogous to what has happened in physics after Newtonian mechanics was shown to be false.

Someone unfamiliar with how physics is conducted might think that once Newton’s laws of motion were shown to be wrong, they would have been discarded, but they were not. The reason they were not is that they are not very far from correct in low-mass and low-velocity situations, but they are much easier to compute. Since most everything that happens on the earth is in a low-mass, low-velocity situation compared to where the errors in Newtonian mechanics become noticeable, people just go on using Newtonian mechanics whenever they know that the error would be small. Basically, they know that the laws are wrong, but since there is always measurement error and other sources of imprecision in practice, the laws can be used anywhere we know that the error would be so small as to be insignificant compared to our measurement tolerances.

People do the same thing with the theories of reality which they substitute for knowledge. Instead of, like Kant, coming up with one consistent theory which is the best theory they can possibly come up with, they will use several theories—which they know to be quite wrong in some cases—and just make sure to restrict their application of these theories to the parts of life where these theories produce correct results. (Also, emotional reaction is commonly used as the test of whether the theory is right—does the theory say something that makes people feel worse than the alternative.) Neck-down Darwinism is probably the best example. (If you’re not familiar with it: below the neck evolution explains everything about the human body, but above the neck all men are created equal.)

The result is that people are completely unfazed when you point out the contradictions in their beliefs. They already knew that their beliefs contradicted. They just have some sort of rule (possibly a rule-of-thumb) for which belief they apply in the cases of contradiction. Most of them take this as part of the nature of knowledge: since a universally correct theory is impossible (so far) to construct, the best that you can do is several contradictory universal theories which are only applied where they have been experimentally verified to produce “correct” results. Many people with Kantian epistemology consider it a sign of mental weakness to be unaware that your own beliefs contradict; only the small-minded or extremely inexperienced think that one theory covers everything.

The truly sinister thing about this epistemology is that it deprives the victim of the obvious means of escape. For most wrong theories of the universe, running into an unresolvable (actual, rather than apparent) contradiction is evidence that the theory is wrong, and a sign that alternatives must be sought. Someone suffering from Kantian epistemology won’t even pause at contradictions, so God alone knows how they will know to look for something better.

The Problem with Agnostic Atheism

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy, Uncategorized3 Comments

Going back at least as far as Bertrand Russell, there has been a strain of atheism which proponents call agnostic atheism, and a more literal English rendering might be know-nothing atheism. The most sympathetic rendering is something to the effect of:

There is insufficient evidence to prove the existence of God, and the default in the absence of evidence that a thing exists is to assume it does not, so until such evidence exists I’m going to go with the default position that God does not exist.

In practice it can be phrased more parsimoniously:

I assume that there’s no God, and I won’t defend that position.

Quite a bit of effort has gone into explaining why they won’t defend that position. There are all sorts of arguments about the “burden of proof”, which may or may not apply to any particular debate (where it is possible to have rules about who has the burden of proof), but this entirely misses a very significant point. Human beings, as rational creatures, have a duty to the truth. A man who does not seek the truth to the best of his ability is simply a failed human being.

The agnostic atheist takes a position which is basically a form of modified radical skepticism. Most of them are scientismists and consequently they—or at least the ones who’ve put any thought into it—take a position that reason works very slightly, enough that it is possible to use it where confirmation can be gotten by way of control. I.e. they will believe in technology. This is akin to the wife who will only believe that her husband loves her if he constantly buys her the expensive presents she wants but will not specify. She will believe in his love only if she can control it. Past this, all else depends too much on the use of reason to be believable.

The agnostic atheist is, to all appearances, in this basic position. Agnostic atheists mostly deny anything that they don’t want to believe in except that which no one but a devout skeptic would deny. Usually they’ll make a few exceptions for things like political beliefs, but will get angry with you if you point out the contradiction to them. Not impressive, but in itself nothing very remarkable. Plenty of people know little and think about their beliefs less.

But the curious thing about the agnostic atheist is that he thinks himself on the high end of functional, as a rational being, and expects the rest of us to take that view too. In fact, he has demonstrated nothing beyond his not suffering from catastrophic brain damage. He is not as non-functional as it is possible for a human being to be—especially when considered as a clever beast—but he hasn’t really demonstrated any of the higher function of a rational creature: to know. Worse, his banging on about the burden of proof highlights just how little appreciation he has for his duty to investigate. As a rational creature, it’s not our job to do his thinking for him, it’s his job to do his thinking for himself. His complaining loudly and vociferously that we haven’t done a sufficiently good job of doing his thinking for him only calls attention to how little of it he has done for himself.

This manifests further in how very little thought agnostic atheists ever seem to put into considering what the world is, according to their theory of it. Just ask them some time about any particular implications of their views, and they won’t know anything about it. Any of the obvious problems such as, “if there’s no meaning in life, why is murder (that you can get away with) bad?” Most of the time you’ll get some vapid response about not wanting to murder people, as if their lack of ambition is a solution to the general philosophical problem.

And there is something especially telling in the odd insistence which some agnostic atheists place on the idea that all babies are atheists. I think that this is a significant misunderstanding of both babies and knowledge, but it is at least true that babies do not propositionally affirm the existence of God, since they don’t propositionally affirm anything at all. But so what? How can anyone be proud of knowing no more than a baby does? It’s very rhetorically strange for an atheist to say, “Intelligent people might believe in God, and even partial idiots might believe in God, but complete idiots are all atheists!” But it does get to the point. They are claiming to be in a state which is not distinguishable from being an utter failure as a rational being. Which raises the question: are they?

The way to tell, of course, is to find out what they do believe in. What knowledge have they gained in however many decades they’ve been alive, so far? And if the answer is none—that they know nothing, that there are only bets that have generally worked for them reasonably well in the past, or there are sense experiences which they routinely anticipate, or whatever skeptical substitute for knowledge they might have—then perhaps they simply are failed human beings. If a person shirks their duty to learn about the world, they genuinely can avoid learning about it. They can achieve a sort of anthropoid approximation to a cow chewing its cud in its field, unaware of and uninterested in any of the important questions like:

  • what is good?
  • What is the relationship between goodness and happiness?
  • Why is there something rather than nothing?

The agnostic atheist is in a relatively unassailable position. He does not, in fact, know whether there is a God, and he is in fact assuming that there isn’t one. But he has achieved this unassailable position by a sort of intellectual suicide. He’s done just enough thinking to get to a place where he will never do any more thinking, and there he remains, loudly proclaiming that we should be impressed with him because he knows no more about the world than does an infant in its mother’s arms.

Whether it is possible for us to help him out of this position, and if so how on earth we are to do it, I have no idea. It may be impossible for man. It is all the more fortunate, then, that all things are possible for God. Pray for them.

Bad Philosophers

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

I recently read up on Russell’s Teapot. A super short version Russel gave was:

Nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice.

Upon further reading about it, I discovered that Russell was the first to formulate what might be called the Insufficient Evidence Argument against God’s existence. There are various wordy versions of it, but they can be sufficiently summarized as:

There isn’t enough evidence to prove God exists.

The clever thing about this argument, from the perspective of rhetoric, is that the only practical answer is “yes there is,” which is weak because it’s mere contradiction. A simple contradiction will end the conversation, and so it is generally bad form.

There is a more complex answer possible, but the problem is that it’s very complex. Specifically, it is possible to debate the standard of evidence. That is, to debate what is and what is not sufficient evidence to establish the truth of a proposition, such as, “God exists.” But while this is a viable line of argument, most people are simply not up to it. Whether it is too difficult for them, or they are simply not fitted to it by personality, this is solidly within the realm of epistemology, the branch of philosophy which studies knowledge. Now, as has been observed, if a man won’t do philosophy for himself, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a philosophy, it only means that he has a philosophy he hasn’t thought out for himself. The big question is, therefore, who has thought it out.

This brings me back to Bertrand Russell. Russell’s Teapot is a cleverly dressed up form of question begging. (I’m not sure what the name is for the practice of creating a clever metaphor in order to distract from the fact that you are begging the question; it’s basically asking somewhat to watch the straw man waving his hands while one begs the question.) The example discusses a proposition which no one ever had a reason to believe. This is a fair way of dismissing the Invisible Pink Unicorn, but has no relationship to historical religions. He’s using a fancy metaphor to distract from the fact that he’s refusing to consider the evidence for historical religions.

And the real problem I have is that Russell was certainly too well educated to have honestly claimed that there is no evidence for historical religions. Now, I do not know what the state of Bertrand Russell’s soul is; that gets to culpability for what he did, for which no one but God has sufficient knowledge. Certainly, I hope for Russell’s salvation as I hope for the salvation of all human beings. But it is possible to evaluate Russell’s actions, and I do not see any plausible case for him having been an honest man. This made me very suspicious of how he lived the rest of his life, in particular, I had the strong suspicion that he probably lived in conveniently immoral ways. So I looked up his biography on Wikipedia. (Not the most reliable source, to be sure, but it’s a start.)

So, after a little reading, it turned out that the man was an adulterer; he fathered children outside of both of his first two marriages. (I don’t know about his third marriage; I stopped reading at that point.) It would be silly to say that I was not shocked since I went into the article expecting to find something like that, but alas I did find something like that. Which got me to thinking about the relationship between atheism and immorality.

I am not, in general, sympathetic to the idea that atheists become atheists because they want to be immoral. First, it is not very true to my experience of atheists, some of whom are indeed as moral in their behavior as most religious people. Second, this is not very true to psychology. When someone wants to do something immoral, he will generally come up with some reasoning why this case is an exception to the general rule, he will not attempt to redefine morality. Bank robbers do not approve of stealing in general; at the very least they don’t approve of stealing from them or (typically) their families.

But Bertrand Russel was not an ordinary atheist; he was a very intelligent one. There are two main implications of that that are relevant to the present discussion, one contingent on the historical context of him being an university-educated Englishman born in 1872 and one contingent only on him being a fallen human being. In the first case, he lived at a time when there was still among the educated English some idea that they were at the dawning of the age of reason and that once God had been thrown off philosophy would be free to construct new and wonderful things that the age of superstition only hinted at. The second case concerns an odd mistake many people make with regard to the results of intelligence. It is often supposed that intelligent people are more likely to be correct than unintelligent people. It is true that they are more likely to understand things, certainly, but intelligence is not the same as wisdom, and intelligence does not guarantee a correct answer, only a complex answer. Intelligent people are quite likely to make mistakes. Indeed, their intelligence makes it more likely that they will be able to come up with convincing arguments for their mistakes. If you want a truly huge error, it actually requires an intelligent person to make it.

I will need to do more reading before I think it safe to conclude that Bertrand Russel was the father of the modern know-nothing atheism that talks about God as a sky-fairie. According to wikipedia he was influenced by David Hume, who didn’t really believe in knowledge (he said that all we thought of as knowledge was merely anticipated sense experience), so perhaps Hume was originated this line of thinking. I’ll need to do more investigation into Hume (I’ve only read about 30 pages or so of Hume’s work). But if Russell did inherit his know-nothing atheism, it is at least clear that he gave it a polished, modern expression it didn’t have before, and this brings me back to the question of morality and atheism.

For most atheists, I think that immorality is a side effect. Most will notice at some point that if God is dead, all things are permitted, and after all human nature isn’t good so there’s no real foundation for any sort of morality. Most atheists in my experience will wail about how morality doesn’t depend on God, and that they don’t need God to be good, but they then proceed to do approximately no moral philosophy of any kind except occasionally noting that some depravity which doesn’t cause bodily injury to anyone doesn’t cause bodily injury to anyone. In general if they don’t face temptation, they won’t give into it, and I suspect often enough how they were raised will even carry them through temptation. But their children tend to be in a bad place because they don’t raise their children the way that they were raised. (Why do so few people notice that degeneration tends to happen by generations? It’s right there in the word!)

I have a sneaking suspicion that this was not the case for Bertrand Russell, though. He was in the right time and place for God to have been in his way academically. God’s rules were in the way of where he wanted to put his genitals. And he was clever enough to come up with a convincing way to help him forget about God. This has the effect of simultaneously making that forgetfulness attractive because it proves his intelligence, but also significantly reduces the time and effort it takes to forget God. It is more tempting to do easy things than it is to do hard things. And once he came up with the clever arguments, people who were far less clever than he could use them. People often understand far more complicated things (especially when explained to them) which they couldn’t come up with on their own.

Worse for those repeating Russell’s arguments, the objections to an argument you understand but can’t make yourself are often unpersuasive because you (naturally enough) assume that the guy who came up with the argument could come up with a response, if he were around to do it. A person’s ability to see the brilliance of the one who made the argument he couldn’t have come up with himself supports regarding the creator of that argument as an authority. The less intelligent followers of someone like Russell have, in essence, little defense against him. This is (part of) why intelligent people have so much responsibility to use their intelligence well.

The Butler Did It?

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, Philosophy, Uncategorized, Writing5 Comments

By an unimportant series of coincidences, I was looking up the origins of the phrase “The butler did it.” The top two relevant results I got were for a trope on tvtropes.com and an article on Mental Floss. The tvtropes article links a Straight Dope on the same subject. All three note that examples of a murder mystery in which the butler was the murderer are rare, but what’s curious is that all three mention a list of rules for murder fiction which SS Van Dine (the pen name of the author who wrote the Philo Vance mysteries) wrote for American Magazine. Though I do have a sneaking suspicion that the two more recent ones may be based on the Straight Dope answer, it is odd that all three cite these rules of detective fiction as if they are authoritative either to what makes a good detective story or to what common tastes were.

Murder Mysteries have been popular for more than a hundred years now, and the idea that there are rules that everyone follows, or that all fans of the genre follows, is absurd. There have been commonalities to detective fiction, to be sure. Giving the readers enough clues to figure out who did it is very common, and very popular, but by no means universal among enjoyable detective fiction. Paranormal, supernatural, and other sorts of detective fiction have been popular. Solutions which could not possibly have been guessed by the reader can be enjoyable as the gradual revealing of an answer. I don’t tend to go for those myself, but pretending that one author’s preference in the 1920s is somehow normative doesn’t accomplish anything.

Within the context of mysteries which aim to be solvable by the reader, most rules (such as Knox’s 10 commandments) aim to give guidance to mystery writers for thinking about the construction of their mysteries. The rules are not meant in an absolute sense, but rather to give sign posts where extra thought is probably required. If the butler, rather than one of the guests, is the murderer, the writer will need to include him as a character enough that the reader thinks that it’s within the spirit of the story to consider the butler.

Now, some might object that it is snobbish to think that the butler is not a possible suspect because he’s just a servant, and indeed it would be, but all problems come with unstated rules, and solving them relies on knowing what these unstated rules are. Consider the classic illustration for teaching people to think outside of the box: Four dots, arranged like the corners of a square, with the instructions to “connect these four dots using only three straight lines without lifting your pen, ending where you started”. The classic solution is to use three lines forming a right triangle where one side goes through two vertices and the other two sides go through one vertex each. This is supposed to surprise people and teach them to “think outside the box” because the rules never said that the end of the lines have to be on one of the four dots. “Don’t limit yourself!” The self-help guru says cheerfully.

The problem with this conclusion is that these sorts of problems are trivial if we’re not helping the person who stated the problem by figuring out what the rules they didn’t state are. No thought would be involved if I just picked up a paint brush and connected all four lines with one thick line. I could even hold my pen against the paper the whole time. Some versions of this mention to not fold the paper; but I haven’t see any rules against cutting and taping the paper. The rules never specified a euclidean geometry; one could easily draw a square then define a geometry in which there were only three straight lines. One could draw new dots and point out that the rules did specify which four dots were the four it was talking about. I could draw three unconnected lines with a pencil while never lifting a pen. etc.

The people who hold this question up as a major revelation are actually practicing a cheap parlor trick. They are really just asking you to try to read their mind and magically know which implied rule they are suspending without telling you. If you were to draw three straight lines plus one curved line, they would balk, rather than applauding you for your willingness to think outside the box in the way that they wanted you to.

The same problem can apply to the butler as the culprit. It would be too easy to assume that the servants are off limits as suspects simply because they all have the opportunity to commit the murder without being noticed, and since detective fiction so often focuses so heavily on alibis, figuring out who had the opportunity is often a large part of the puzzle. Hence this complaint in the tvtropes article:

The butler is the avatar of the most unlikely suspect that, of course, turns out to be guilty because the author wasn’t creative enough to come up with a better way to surprise the reader.

This is a problem only if the butler is the least likely suspect because no time was spent on the butler. Authors who don’t figure out the mystery ahead of the detective, and so who come to the reveal and then have to solve the puzzle for themselves, as it was written so far in order to come up with the ending can run into this. The butler is a good candidate both because he would be surprising since he wasn’t a real character up to this point, and because the servants all have means and opportunity for murder in a great house. This is cheating according to the rules the author implied; to do a good job making the butler the culprit, the author would have had to include the butler as a character in a way that made it clear he wasn’t off limits.

I suspect that this is primarily a problem in mysteries where the author doesn’t know who the culprit is, because it’s all too easy as the evidence is being discovered and alibis are being produced to have accidentally ruled out all of the actual suspects by the end. If that happens, the author will need to introduce a previous non-character who hasn’t been ruled out simply because the author hadn’t thought of the character as a suspect before. I can’t see how such a story can be well crafted; if the author doesn’t know what’s going on, it seems far too likely the story will be inconsistent and not hang together well, though for any technique there is probably someone who can pull it off decently.

But for an example of art criticism which simply wants there to be rules in order to make the task of art criticism easier, consider this from the Mental Floss article:

While The Door was a hit for Rinehart and her sons, who released it through a publishing house they’d just started up, her pinning the crime on the butler has gone down in history as a serious misstep…That The Door was a commercial success while flaunting a hallmark of what some considered lousy mystery writing made it an easy target for jokes. Stories and books like “What, No Butler?” and The Butler Did It soon turned murderous manservants into shorthand for a cheap ending.

Of course this attempt to invoke normative rules of fiction makes heavy use of the passive voice. “Has gone down in history as a serious misstep,” and “flaunting a hallmark of what some considered lousy mystery writing” buys authority with anonymity. There are indeed things which do not need to be attributed—that people will talk about the weather in default of another topic in common does not need to be established with evidence—but common opinion of literary techniques certainly doesn’t fall into that category.

This attempt to have rules of fiction, or more properly rules of art criticism, is not really about the fiction. It is about the desire for stability and intelligibility by a person not willing to do the work of understanding, or without the courage of owning up to their own prejudices and so attempting to displace those preferences onto everyone else.

Incidentally, I looked up the two works cited. “What, No Butler?” seems to be a short story by Damon Runyon. I can’t find much information about it; according to Wikipedia it was in a book called Runyon on Broadway. It was performed on radio in 1946 and that performance is available on youtube. I don’t know when it was originally published. The story does have humor in it, but to call it satire seems like quite a stretch. Early in the story, the character Broadway (who I believe is a theater critic) says authoritatively upon finding out that a man was murdered that the butler did it. When he’s told that the victim didn’t have a butler, he insists that they have to find the butler, because in every play he sees with a murder in it, the butler did it. No one pays attention and he is dismissed because this is stupid advice. In the end we learn that the murderer was a neighbor of the victim, who heard that the victim was rich and so he broke in to the apartment with a duplicated key and killed the victim when he was caught in the act. When asked why he would stoop to robbery, he explained that he was out of work and wasn’t likely to get it again soon. He had served some of the best families in New York, and couldn’t accept just any old employer, because he was an excellent butler. Very clearly, in context, this was not a criticism of the butler as a culprit, but playing with the audience’s expectations to set up a joke.

In 1957 P.G. Wodehouse published a book called Something Fishy. When Simon & Schuster published it in America they used the title,  The Butler Did It. Wikipedia gave this plot summary:

The plot concerns a tontine formed by a group of wealthy men weeks before the 1929 stock market crash, and a butler named Keggs who, having overheard the planning of the scheme, years later decides to try to make money out of his knowledge.

(Tontines are in themselves an interesting read. It’s easy to see why they would show up frequently in older detective literature.)

According to the further description of the plot, Keggs is long retired by the time the book takes place. His being a butler is incidental to the story, so far as I can tell, and doesn’t seem like it can be taken as any sort of criticism of detective fiction where the butler is the murderer. This seems doubly true given that The Butler Did It was not the original title, and was only changed because it would resonate better with Americans.

And now that I mention that, it occurs to me that all of the discussion of butlers, from Rhinehart’s story to the supposed criticism of it is all American. Aside from Poe’s character of Dupin starting the genre of detective fiction, much of the most influential detective fiction is British. Now I wonder whether “the butler did it” is a primarily American phenomenon. In any event it does seem to be a very curious example of a saying without much basis, used at least as often to joke about the saying as even to say anything about detective stories.

If I had to guess, I suspect that it originated with someone who was complaining that detective fiction is very formulaic. If so, it is ironic that they picked to exemplify this putative formula a feature which is extremely uncommon in detective fiction.

Having said that, it occurs to me that this idea could even have originated to mean nearly the opposite. It could have started as a parody of the sort of person who doesn’t know how detective fiction goes, and who leaps to the butler as the obvious suspect because he had the means an opportunity for the murder. It would make a more effective criticism of a naive reader than of murder mysteries. “Pffh. He’s the sort of guy who decides ten pages in that the butler did it!” As it stands, I see no more evidence for any other theory of where the phrase came from.

 

Pascal’s Wager Is a Better Bet Than It Seems

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy1 Comment

Before I begin, let me mention that there are much better reasons for worshiping God than Pascal’s Wager, especially as Pascal posed it. It would be far, far better for a person to take their time investigating the truth than to choose, indifferent to the truth, a course  based solely on the mathematically expected value of the outcome. But since most New Atheists (Horsemanites, as I’ve heard them called) seem rather indifferent to the truth anyway, they might as well at least make a sensible bet with their lives.

A very brief version of Pascal’s Wager, which will suffice for this discussion, runs as follows:

God either exists or he doesn’t and you must live as if one of those two alternatives is true. If God does exist and you live that way, you can be infinitely happy. If you do and God doesn’t exist, you lost out on at most a finite amount of happiness. If you don’t and God does exist, you lose out on infinitely much happiness. If you don’t and God doesn’t exist, maybe you gained a finite amount of happiness.

At this point the standard objection is “but that’s true of any god, and since this argument gives you no way to pick between them, the odds of you picking correctly are tiny, so after we cancel all the infinities atheism seems like the best bet”.  (Theists who dismiss Pascal’s Wager will usually omit the last part.)

Leaving aside that it is mathematically invalid to cancel infinities (∞ – ∞ is undefined), there is both a major and a minor problem. The minor problem is that you can break this down to: believe in any god vs. atheism, then it holds for any god, at which point it might be true that you have no better method than rolling dice to pick. Even if this objection were true, atheism would still be the worst choice possible.

The major problem with this is that it is a category error in comparing God with gods. God is self-existent, eternal, unchanging, perfectly happy, and the creator of everything that is (which we can interact with, at least). Moreover, these traits are not separable. God cannot lack for nothing and be unhappy. God cannot be the cause of his own existence and lack for something. And so on; it is beyond the scope of this blog post to explain why all of these are connected. If you’re interested, you’ll have to read the Summa Theologica or find a friend who can understand it and have them explain it to you. (There are other philosophers besides Saint Thomas Aquinas who can explain it, but he’s the best.) Thus anyone who posits a God with any of these attributes really posits them all. These attributes also uniquely define God, so whatever name one might apply to God, it names the same thing.

Thus there are three categories of choices: a self-existent creator, a contingent but powerful being in the universe, and nothing beyond human beings.

Contingent gods, that is, powerful beings who exist because something made or begot or otherwise caused them, have the problem that they have no way of granting infinite happiness. How they lack this ability depends on whether they are temporal or aeveternal (in a created eternity, like angels).

If the gods are temporal, they can’t give infinite happiness because true happiness cannot come from changeable things. It’s complicated to prove in detail, but the very short version is that continual novelty gets old, and if you try to appreciate things for what they are, they won’t be those things for long. Worse, nothing in time is really itself because the moments of its existence are disconnected, so its reality is at best completely inaccessible because it is shattered across time. You can only love what you can know, and you can’t know what you have no access to.

If the gods are not temporal, but rather aeveternal, it is more complicated to show that they cannot give infinite happiness, though it is also academic because no one has ever claimed the existence of an atemporal but contingent god. I suspect that this is because an atemporal contingent being immediately points to what it is contingent upon and an infinite logical regress is too obviously absurd since it can’t be hidden in the separate moments of time. Still, the core of the proof lies in the nature of free will (if one doesn’t believe in free will, this whole discussion is moot because there is no choice to make, you must do what you must do). Free will, which is a contingent substance that can originate causality, cannot depend for its existence on another contingent thing, since non-contingent things do not have the ability to create ex nihilo, and so the contingent aeveternal god would not have the power to convert our souls into aeveternal souls, thus its possibility for happiness cannot be transmitted—by its own power—to us.

Since contingent gods cannot give infinite happiness, they are  properly in the same case as atheism: they too are a bad bet, since the maximum payout is only finitely much happiness. Thus we are really only left with two categories: God, and no God. Little-g gods are just a distracting sub-category of no God.

Properly considered, then, Pascal’s Wager does evaluate in favor of betting on God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. There are much better reasons to believe in God, but since even the devil should be given his due, so too should this argument.

Is Selfishness Ayn Rand’s Highest Virtue?

On By Christopher LansdownIn PhilosophyLeave a comment

Out of curiosity, I’ve been reading Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Shrugged is generally considered Rand’s magnum opus, and the place where she best describes her philosophy (Objectivism). So far I’ve read about 60 pages and I made an interesting discovery.  Objectivism is best known for holding that the highest virtue is selfishness, but I think that this is a mischaracterization. It’s not selfishness which is the highest virtue in Rand’s view, but honesty. The confusion arises from Rand’s belief—natural enough in an atheist—that true altruism is not possible. If selfishness is the only option, there are only two ways to be selfish: honestly, and dishonestly.

Before I proceed, I’d like to clarify what I meant by saying that a disbelief in altruism is natural enough in an atheist. I don’t mean that atheists are generally selfish people. In my experience they’re no more selfish than anyone else, but this is in spite of their beliefs, not because of them. That is, to their credit most atheists are quite inconsistent with what they profess to be true. There are many types of atheism, of course, but none of them have any glue to bind one individual to another, except mutual need. But in truth man is a communal being and so our highest good is found in being individuals in community with each other. But since atheism cannot give a grounding for that, they can only come up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain it. We have a heard instinct, or an instinct for altruism, or an instinct to benefit the species—well, so what? It’s not like they argue that we must always follow our instincts. Or they claim our highest selfishness is fulfilled by working together. Except that a child of five can come up with counter-examples, because people cannot be relied upon to reciprocate. But Atheists never raise this question because they’re not trying to find out what the logical consequences of what they hold to be true are, they’re trying to rationalize doing what they know to be true, in spite of what they claim is true.

OK, back to Rand. The first thing that tipped me off to her holding honesty as the highest virtue was the rather inexplicable way that Rand clearly admires her heroes for being utterly unable to comprehend why anyone does anything different from them. Despite straining their brains to the breaking point, simply cannot understand lying, cheating, stealing, and laziness. This point is hammered home several times for each good character; these titans of industry are lionized for being utterly incapable of understanding how people work, or even getting along with most people tolerably well. They’re continually mystified at how the people who operate their machines and buy their products think and act. Incompetence at understanding or interacting with the bulk of humanity is a very odd trait in an overman. How on earth can Rand praise her heroes for what they don’t know?

In fact, there is only one time when anyone praises a person for their ignorance: when that ignorance is innocence. When you ask a man if he would sell his grandmother into slavery, the correct answer is not, “how much are you offering?” If a man were telling us the story of one time when someone offered to buy his grandmother, and the man knew how much was being offered, we’d all be suspicious of him. So the question arises: what is it that Rand’s characters are innocent of? They don’t seem to have many virtues, and they do seem to have a fair number of vices. In fact, they pretty much all seem to be awful people. But part of this awfulness is that they are ruthlessly honest. I should qualify, because when I say honest it’s not a question of being dedicated to the Truth. They’re all afflicted with a terrible sort of tunnel-vision where the only thing in the world they acknowledge to have any value are their primary passions in life. A dedication to the Truth requires humility, because humility is only being honest about yourself. What Rand’s characters have is the more modern sort of honesty, which consists of telling people whatever you think and feel, without any concern for what effects your words will have. But they’re not simply blunt with others; they strive to be blunt with themselves, too. And this is what I mean when I say that they strive to be honest.

This honesty that they strive for is, I believe, the basis for Objectivist ethics. Every person is selfish, since what else can they be? But they can be honest or dishonest in their dealings with each other. Stealing is dishonest, as is breaking bargains or using physical force to make someone do something that they don’t want to do. Why are these dishonest? Really it’s because they genuinely are, but mostly people recognized these things as dishonest mystically—the moral law is written on all men’s hearts—and this is just self-evident. The Objectivists claim to have “objective knowledge” which is certain and reliable, so they can’t really appeal to “come on, we all know that lying, cheating, and stealing is dishonest”. Instead they try to ground this in the worth of the individual. A=A. Since a thing is itself, and not something else, each thing has unique value. Therefore no individual is intrinsically more important than another, and taking what belongs to another without that other’s consent has no rational basis. (Really, it’s that any transaction in which an individual has less than when he started would not be permissible, but the only practical thing to do is to leave it up to each individual what he considers of value, and whether any particular trade is a fair trade.) Of course not a single one of those conclusions follows from the premises stated before it, but that is none the less the approach used. It will sound OK if you say it quickly and don’t pay much attention because you’re committing the fallacy “P is true. This argument proves P. Therefore this argument is a good argument.”

This interpretation of Objectivism makes it vastly more consistent than it at first appears. It’s goal is not to promote selfishness, but really to constrain selfishness. Atlas Shrugged is full of the villains doing horribly selfish things and covering over those things with lies that what they’re doing is serving the greater good. It’s very clear from context that no one actually believes any of their platitudes about social welfare and the greater good; they’re doing what everyone in the Soviet Union did—quoting the official party line to justify whatever it was they were doing anyway. I knew people who lived in the Soviet Union, if granted they lived in it thirty or more years after Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged. It really was advantageous to memorize useful parts of Lenin’s writings. No one believed them, but going against the prevailing cultural norms was dangerous; if one could make these norms seem to be on one’s side, one gained power. This is almost explicitly what all of the villains are doing. They mouth platitudes while vying for self interest. It’s even noted many times that the heroes think that everyone in the room understands some secret meaning except themselves. This is very true. The words about social responsibility do not (directly) convey the meaning, and the heroes are just too innocent to intuit the real meaning.

All of this is obscured by the fact that Ayn Rand didn’t believe that altruism was a real thing. When she seems to be arguing in favor of self-interest, what she’s really arguing in favor of is every limiting themselves to that self-interest which respects the individual, as opposed to self-interest which seeks to deprive others of what is theirs to enrich oneself at their expense. But since she didn’t believe that altruism is a real thing, it never occurred to her to explain that it wasn’t real, or that this non-thing was not what she was arguing against. It would be like explaining that Santa Claus doesn’t exist in a conversation about whether it’s best to sign name tags on presents as being from Santa Claus.

I suspect that Rand did have to admit the logical possibility of altruism, but she dismissed true altruism as being destructive. And in an atheistic context, she’s right. We have what we have, and since creation is impossible, life is a zero-sum game. If we give of ourselves to another, we must have at least equally less (there can be transmission losses). The world is no better off for this, and in fact may well lose an individual if this goes on to the point of destruction. If human beings are valuable, this represents a real loss to the world.

Ultimately, altruism only works because of the nature of God. God, being self-existent, creates the world out of pure generosity. He makes it so that he can fill it up with life; he makes it so that he can give to it. Human altruism is a participation in the divine altruism. We are given the gift of being God’s giving to each other; he fills us up that we may overflow into each other. Because of this, we are not diminished by giving, but actually increased by giving. In the end, it is only possible to love another man because God loved him first.

Navel Gazing

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized1 Comment

It has always struck me as very strange that navel gazing has a bad reputation. The first thing that should occur to a person looking at his navel—other than perhaps gratitude to his mother—is that it is obvious that he did not create himself. From there, it should be obvious that his parents—having navels—didn’t create themselves either, and so on back until one comes to a necessary being. That is, something that is uncreated, utterly different from us, existing outside of time and space, and which was the sufficient condition for us. That is, gazing at one’s navel should lead pretty directly to contemplating God.

Consider this passage about Hank Rearden from Atlas Shrugged (italics mine):

He had burned everything there was to burn within him; he had scattered so many sparks to start so many things—and he wondered whether someone could give him now the spark he needed, now when he felt unable ever to rise again. He asked himself who had started him and kept him going. Then he raised his head. Slowly, with the greatest effort of his life, he made his body rise until he was able to sit upright with only one hand pressed to the desk and a trembling arm to support him. He never asked that question again.

I’m pretty sure that the fool in this passage actually answered his question, “me.” Had he just looked at his navel, he’d have realized that he did not start himself, nor in the early part of his life keep himself going. Looking at his navel should have told him in three seconds that all that he is was a gift others which is impossible to repay. It should have made him realize that he can’t earn what he was freely given; the best he can do is to be worthy of what he was given, to safeguard it and keep it from harm, because sin is the privation of being.

Incidentally, he might also have ceased to be an objectivist because it is not our nature to exist on our own, but in community. Objectivists see clearly enough that the individual has worth that the community must respect and may not trample upon, but they miss that it is not good for man to be alone. We find our highest good in the fulfillment of the entirety of our nature, and that includes being in community with other creatures. We will never be happy if we lose sight either of the individual or the community.

Where Objectivists really go wrong is a problem common to all secularists: we have a nature, and therefore a highest good, but we are fallen creatures, so we will never attain our highest good on this side of death. This is a contradiction, and one that can only be resolved by something unfallen which can repair our fallen world. We can’t fix ourselves, for the simple reason that we can’t give ourselves what we haven’t got. Trying to build an ideal society under conditions in which it is impossible to build an ideal society will always result not just in failure, but in spectacular failure.

What Happens When The Devil Will Take the Hindmost

On By Christopher LansdownIn PhilosophyLeave a comment

One of the near universal instincts which human beings have is that—whatever may be the path to salvation—we can’t all be damned. “All”, of course, is defined in terms of the group, not all human beings as a species. And by “be damned”, I mostly mean, “perish”.  And of course the if stated directly, as a proposition, it is obviously false. Despite all that, it is still a foundational belief for a great many people.

If we’re not all going to be damned, it raises the question of who will? Since it’s not all, it must be the people who stand out in some way. And there are two sub-groups of people who stand out: the best, and the worst. There’s something important to note about the best, but I’m going to save that for last. Clearly between the two, it is the worst who are the most likely candidates for damnation. This has obvious effects, like reality shows that showcase the worst people to reassure the rest of us that we’re in the middle, not the bottom. But it also has another, less obvious, but more pernicious effect. It makes most people very unwilling to stand out from the group at all.

If one stands out, there are—logically speaking—only two ways to do it. One can be better or one can be worse. To be merely different would be possible only if the characteristic in question had no moral implications. This should be possible, but in a complicated world where one does not comprehend the remote consequences of one’s actions, everything probably has some sort of moral implications. According to the people who charge double for the chocolate they sell, their competitors use slave labor and pass the savings on to you. Failing to cut the rings on a six-pack holder may strangle a seagull. Driving to the beach causes global warming, and buying a t-shirt may support a sweat shop. Buying a dress shirt made by a tailor might cause your co-worker to become self-conscious about their cheaper, less well-fitting shirt. Everything is problematic, so the only safe thing is to stick with the group. If you stand out, you might be better, but since it’s much easier to be worse, odds are good that if you risk being different, it will mean you’re worse.

The overriding principle thus becomes conformity. What will save one, in a confusing and uncertain world, is blending in with the group. It doesn’t really matter what group, of course. The only requirement is that it be a respectable group—not generally respectable, of course, only respectable to the individual. Any group for which one can feel affection is respectable in this sense, and any group one is used to who is reasonably accepting can have affection felt for it, so there is an inevitable mix of the people who happen to be around and the ones that one is willing to spend time with. Once the group has been selected, people outside of this group are irrelevant, except insofar as they affect the group, e.g. they vote for laws that the group must obey. These can be small groups—tribes, villages, etc—but in the west they are generally much larger and more amorphous. Patriotic Americans, Christian Fundamentalists, Democrats, Atheists, geeks etc. can all be such groups.

This group identity becomes the thing to which the individual will have primary allegiance. It is the one thing which they will never contradict or forsake. It is also the source of most of the contradictions which the individual will believe. The christian fundamentalist holds that the bible is literally true, but it says that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Jesus. This is resolved through verbal tricks which don’t fool anyone, but which aren’t supposed to. They serve only to put space between the contradicting halves until the argument can be escaped, because their culture does not admit the real presence in the eucharist, and it doesn’t admit non-literal interpretaitons of the bible. There is no way to reconcile these, so it is not reconciled.

This becomes very clear in the case of atheists—most, not all, obviously, but just about all of the “new atheists”—who hold science to be an authority, but who also live like human beings. Science—in the sense of subculturally approved popular science—holds that the mind is nothing but neurons. So it is nothing but neurons, and therefore free will does not exist. On the other hand, people make choices and must be held responsible for them, so they do. There’s no way to reconcile these things, so no attempt is made to reconcile them. (Technically, there is compatibilism, but the less said about that the better.) Science is an authority, but at the same time the great thing about it is that it corrects all of its errors. There is no way to reconcile these things—the definition of an (intellectual) authority is something which cannot be wrong. Here there is a slight attempt made to reconcile the two: “it’s the best we have”. What happens when your best isn’t good enough is never addressed, nor can it be. Anything but slogans would just point out the contradiction. So all we get are slogans. Neither side of the contradiction can be given up, because the culture demands both. The only response you get to challenging any of this is to be cast out into the darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, because that’s the only possible response. If you don’t accept both halves, you are simply not part of the group. The group dis-identification can be creatively named, of course. “Denier”, “irrational”, etc. A thorn by any other name pricks just the same.

There is still the question of whether this is an initial error, or a consequence of other errors. Any individual may of course come here as the result of rejecting God and so looking for him in the world, and in what else but the culture can one hope? Still, I think that for the majority of people who fall into this mistake, it is one of the first mistakes which they make, because it is taught to them as children. Teaching children to fit into the culture in which they live is one of the duties of a parent. It starts early, and if parents leave off teaching how to not fit in, their children must be very lucky indeed to learn it. One would suppose Christianity—which has as a central theme that God is more important than culture, and one must be dependent on God and independent of Man—would crush this, but some (many) people turn attendance at church into a cultural practice. It’s one of the shared rituals that bind people together. It doesn’t matter if you understand, it matters that you attend.

So this, I contend, is the source of most Atheists’ error. It is a primary allegiance to their culture, brought about by a training to conform to their culture, and a deep-seated belief that in the great race of life, the devil will take the hindmost, so the only safe thing to do is to hide in the crowd.

Descartes’ Best Proof of God

On By Christopher LansdownIn PhilosophyLeave a comment

Descartes proved the existence of God several times in his writings, but unfortunately the proof for which he is best known is his worst proof. It is of course not surprising since it was his first proof; according to his description, the Discourse on Method was a prototype for Meditations on First Philosophy. This proof, somewhat improved upon in the Meditations, was basically an ontological proof, and as has been observed (by Saint Thomas Aquinas, I have heard), the only one to whom an ontological proof for God is really viable is God Himself. What seems widely missed, however, is that Descartes also employed a variant of the proof from contingency.

This is actually a very natural thing for Descartes to have done, given what he had established as known at this point in the Meditations. He knew something existed which is capable of thoughts, and that these thoughts exist as successions in time. They change, and thus clearly are contingent. A contingent thing is all that’s really necessary for proving God, so why bother dragging in an argument about actual conceptions of infinite perfection which in any event it would be easy to argue no one actually has? My contention is that Descartes included this in the Meditations simply because he got attached to it having labored so hard on it in the Discourse. It thus forms the bulk of the words in his proof for God in meditation 3, but I maintain that one can simply excise the ontological proof found in meditation 3 and you are left with an intact proof from contingency. Accordingly, I will reproduce the relevant parts of meditation 3, without adding anything, but omitting all of the extraneous bits. I am here assuming that the reader possesses a copy of the Meditations on First Philosophy, and has already read it, so for brevity I am not going to reproduce what I have excised. (Cogito ergo sum, it will be recalled, came in meditation 2, so that will also not here appear in the quoted material.)

Now, it is manifest by the natural light that there must at least be as much reality in the efficient and total cause as in its effect; for whence can the effect draw its reality if not from its cause? And how could the cause communicate to it this reality unless it possessed it in itself? And hence it follows… what is cannot be produced by what is not… I am here desirous to inquire further, whether I… could exist supposing there were no God.

And I ask, from whom could I, in that case, derive my existence? Perhaps from myself, or from my parents, or from some other cause less perfect than God… But if I (were independent of every other existence, and) were myself the author of my being, I should doubt of nothing, I should desire nothing, and, in fine, no perfection would be awanting to me; for I should… thus be God… And though I were to suppose that I always was as I now am, I should not, on this ground, escape the force of these reasonings, since it would not follow, even on this supposition, that no author of my existence needed to be sought after. For the whole time of my life may be divided into an infinity of parts, each of which is in no way dependent on any other; and accordingly, because I was in existence a short time ago, it does not follow that I must now exist unless in this moment some cause create me anew as it were, that is, conserve me. In truth, it is perfectly clear and evident to all who will attentively consider the nature of duration, that the conservation of a substance, in each moment of its duration, requires the same power and act that would be necessary to create it, supposing it were not yet in existence; so that it is manifestly a dictate of the natural light that conservation and creation differ merely in respect of our mode of thinking (and not in reality).

All that is here required, therefore, is that I interrogate myself to discover whether I possess any power by means of which I can bring it about that I, who now am, shall exist a moment afterward: for, since I am merely a thinking thing (or since, at least, the precise question, in the meantime, is only of that part of myself), if such a power resided in me, I should, without doubt, be conscious of it; but I am conscious of no such power, and thereby I manifestly know that I am dependent upon some being different from myself.

But perhaps the being upon whom I am dependent is not God, and I have been produced either by my parents, or by some causes less perfect than Deity… Then it may again be inquired whether this cause owes its origin and existence to itself, or to some other cause. For if it be self-existent, it follows, from what I have before laid down, that this cause is God… But if it owe its existence to another cause than itself, we demand again, for a similar reason, whether this second cause exists of itself or through some other, until, from stage to stage, we at length arrive at an ultimate cause, which will be God.

And it is quite manifest that in this matter there can be no infinite regress of causes, seeing that the question raised respects not so much the cause which once produced me, as that by which I am at this present moment conserved.

I think that it is possible to get side-tracked by Descartes observations about the power to create and the power to maintain being the same power. I think he is largely correct, but it is a topic not often remarked on. The alternative is more or less silly if you don’t employ physical metaphors like dominoes to mask over what’s really being said. In an eternal Godless universe, each moment contains the existence of all subsequent moments to it, but does not contain its own existence. It has an infinitude of causes, but not its own. So when it hands on this infinitude of causes to the next moment, it somehow subtracts the cause of that moment before handing it on. It’s an infinite chain of parents who live by eating their children. The more common objection of atheists for a Godless world without a beginning always smuggles in some common cause between moments, or just in changes—such as space and gravity in the case of the dominoes metaphor—but if you subtract the smuggled in common independent cause, it amounts, in essence, to summing zero an infinite number of times to try to get a positive number. Or as often as not to pure nonsense where words are used as a smokescreen: one can always say, “but what if it doesn’t?” in response to anything, without having any conception of a coherent alternative.

In any event, while Descartes was certainly fond of his ontological proof, I think a careful reading of the above material will show that the real spine of his proof is the proof from contingency. The parts I excised in the ellipses serves, I think, to anticipate and counter the objection which I have run into, “why does the non-contingent thing need to be intelligent? Why can’t intelligence be an emergent property?” Rather than use the substance of free will and rational thought as an answer, as Saint Thomas did in the Summa Theologica,  Descartes tried to use the concept of God—which he maintained could not come as an inference from sense perception in the manner Hume would later insist all knowledge did—to prove that there was something which emergent properties could not account for. I think that this is unnecessary as all people have a direct experience of cognition and a very indirect experience of material causality, and so the objection can be dealt with merely by pointing out that the objector doesn’t believe the intelligence they have can be the result of emergent properties any more than anyone else does, but Descartes may simply have been more generous (or more ambitious) in dealing with the sort of people who would argue that emergent properties are the origin of everything immaterial.

Of course, I have no better window into Descartes’ soul than does any other human being, and the epitaph on his grave which he requested (“he who hid well, lived well”) certainly is a point to the side of those who thought Descartes intended to start Modern Philosophy. My point is not really to weigh in on that debate. Rather, it’s that Descartes certainly produced a good (in the sense of coherent and valid) proof of the existence of God, even if he let it get snowed under by his attachment to the ontological proof and anticipation of a myriad of not very sophisticated objections. Thus there is no middle ground between him having innocently wrecked the world, and him having been a villain on par with Iago.