The experience of Mohammed in the cave of Mount Hira, when he saw human life as transitory as the beat of a gnat’s wing in comparison with the splendor and power of the Divine Unity, has shaped the existence of a great part of the human race ever since. For a people which has heard thrice a day for a thousand years the voice of the muezzin proclaiming the unity of God cannot live the same life or see with the same eyes as the Hindu who worships the life of nature in its countless forms, and sees the external world as the manifestation of the interplay of cosmic sexual forces.
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Source: Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion (London: Sheed & Ward, 1929), 76–77.
Showing posts with label worldview. Show all posts
Showing posts with label worldview. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Cardinal Mercier on the Importance of a Sound Philosophy
Gentlemen, it is just because the philosophy that forms our intellectual
environment so easily influences our whole being that it is so important that
the student and seeker after truth should be equipped with a sound philosophy.
Yes, a philosophy that grips facts and holds fast to them when it is brought
into play in the domain of metaphysics, where it soars to the absolute. The
philosophy of Aristotle, developed and defined by St. Thomas Aquinas, has
pre-eminently the characteristic of healthy, sound realism.
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Source: Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, Modernism, trans. by Marian Lindsay (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1912), accessed June 30, 2015, chapter 1, http://www.catholicapologetics.info/modernproblems/modernism/mermodernism.htm.
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Source: Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, Modernism, trans. by Marian Lindsay (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1912), accessed June 30, 2015, chapter 1, http://www.catholicapologetics.info/modernproblems/modernism/mermodernism.htm.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Questioning the Our Father
Our Lord gave us the Our Father, the most beautiful and perfect expression of prayer possible in any human language. It begins by addressing God as "Our Father." Can we believe that this expression was arbitrary or ruled by cultural biases? Isn't such a doubt precisely that—a lack of faith in the divinity and hence the transcendence of Christ, the God-Man who unites all mankind and culture in Himself perfectly, transcending every divide, even the divides of sin and death? Is it possible that the Man who came to give us life to the full should stifle the potential growth of the spiritual life of so many because He chose a culturally-relative term rooted in Patriarchy?
Rather, if we take seriously that Jesus is God, that His self-consciousness included the divinity in all of its clarity and comprehension, and if we take seriously that God's perfections are the eminent expression of all transcendental qualities in the created order (or rather that the created order shares in and reflects these qualities that find their perfect source and expression in God's nature), then ultimately the implication of calling God our Father is that paternity finds its perfect expression in God the Father, and all fatherhood is a model of God's Fatherhood (à la Platonic philosophy).
Since the Bible uses maternal expressions, pronouns, and descriptors for God, we must also hold that maternity somehow finds its perfect expression in the inner life of the Blessed Trinity, the giver and the receiver, the male and female, the yin and the yang (to be a bit bold). Fr. Norris Clarke, S.J., explored this dimension of being's self-fecundity: all being is in itself, from another, and towards another (esse in, esse ab, esse ad).
We need to examine and understand seriously the implications of calling God our Father and that God Himself has told us to do so: the implications for the Church as a Bride of Christ, creation as a "palace for the Bride" as St. John of the Cross so beautifully put it, for each individual in relation to God, for the life of the Trinity. God bridges the infinite gap between fallen creation and Himself, and therefore He determines its parameters. Isn't it, then, a lack of faith that makes one question the validity of calling God a Father? It betrays an uncritical commitment to a specific modern, Western ideology that comes, actually and shockingly, at the expense of and to the detriment of faith.
The final reflection is that God is the universal cause who reveals Himself in the particulars of history. We are scandalized at the particularity of the Israelites—so-called chosen by God. We are scandalized by the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. We are scandalized by the origins of the Church and that it is headed on earth by a man who resides in Italy. We are scandalized that God would speak to us in our own language, adopting and purifying our own expressions so as to return them to their true referent in Himself. This is the scandal of particularity through which God has willed to reveal Himself. Shouldn't we accept it out of unquestioning faith?
Rather, if we take seriously that Jesus is God, that His self-consciousness included the divinity in all of its clarity and comprehension, and if we take seriously that God's perfections are the eminent expression of all transcendental qualities in the created order (or rather that the created order shares in and reflects these qualities that find their perfect source and expression in God's nature), then ultimately the implication of calling God our Father is that paternity finds its perfect expression in God the Father, and all fatherhood is a model of God's Fatherhood (à la Platonic philosophy).
Since the Bible uses maternal expressions, pronouns, and descriptors for God, we must also hold that maternity somehow finds its perfect expression in the inner life of the Blessed Trinity, the giver and the receiver, the male and female, the yin and the yang (to be a bit bold). Fr. Norris Clarke, S.J., explored this dimension of being's self-fecundity: all being is in itself, from another, and towards another (esse in, esse ab, esse ad).
We need to examine and understand seriously the implications of calling God our Father and that God Himself has told us to do so: the implications for the Church as a Bride of Christ, creation as a "palace for the Bride" as St. John of the Cross so beautifully put it, for each individual in relation to God, for the life of the Trinity. God bridges the infinite gap between fallen creation and Himself, and therefore He determines its parameters. Isn't it, then, a lack of faith that makes one question the validity of calling God a Father? It betrays an uncritical commitment to a specific modern, Western ideology that comes, actually and shockingly, at the expense of and to the detriment of faith.
The final reflection is that God is the universal cause who reveals Himself in the particulars of history. We are scandalized at the particularity of the Israelites—so-called chosen by God. We are scandalized by the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. We are scandalized by the origins of the Church and that it is headed on earth by a man who resides in Italy. We are scandalized that God would speak to us in our own language, adopting and purifying our own expressions so as to return them to their true referent in Himself. This is the scandal of particularity through which God has willed to reveal Himself. Shouldn't we accept it out of unquestioning faith?
Monday, June 30, 2014
Distinction: Points of View vs. Worldview
There is a difference between specific points of view on various matters and a worldview that frames those points of view. Specific points of view are formed by premises and conclusions about some matter and use a discourse provided by the worldview behind them. The worldview itself is the narrative that makes all points of view for an individual coherent, or at least attempts to do so. Clearly, many individuals hold within their own worldviews conflicting points of view, of which conflict they may not be cognizant; and this for several possible reasons: 1) ignorance; 2) lack of self reflection; 3) lack of understanding the implications of other points of view or a worldview (related to ignorance); 4) a psychological factor that presses them to accept the conflict, such as guilt, resentment, or desire, etc.
Therefore, when a person, for example, says that they are Christian, or spiritual, or an atheist, or a supporter of something, and when two people attempt to discuss an issue, although they may happen to use similar words in their conversation, these words may be nuanced by radically different worldviews and narratives and hence carry different meanings. These different meanings, however, may contain enough similarity between the two people that their differences go unnoticed. This phenomenon is most clearly seen when people "talk past each other" in a debate. The reason is not simply that a word must be defined, but the context of the word must also be defined. When both the words used and the context in which those words are placed have been defined and displayed clearly, a conversation may begin.
The process of listening to another involves differing degrees of self-reflection, in which the discourse of another person is compared with one's own in order to spot differences and similarities and hence make progress in conversation. Listening requires the realization that there must be a synchronizing of some kind in order to advance in the conversation.
Sometimes for this synchronizing to occur, either or both of the participants must undergo a process of growth—in knowledge, in reflexivity, in maturity, etc.
Thus many younger Christians who don't understand what Protestantism is in contrast with Catholicism because they don't even know the basic history of their own religion, such Christians will never understand the stresses that Catholicism places on certain aspects of Catholic faith, such as justification, salvation, the Sacraments, the Pope, apostolic succession, the communion of Saints, etc.
Therefore, when a person, for example, says that they are Christian, or spiritual, or an atheist, or a supporter of something, and when two people attempt to discuss an issue, although they may happen to use similar words in their conversation, these words may be nuanced by radically different worldviews and narratives and hence carry different meanings. These different meanings, however, may contain enough similarity between the two people that their differences go unnoticed. This phenomenon is most clearly seen when people "talk past each other" in a debate. The reason is not simply that a word must be defined, but the context of the word must also be defined. When both the words used and the context in which those words are placed have been defined and displayed clearly, a conversation may begin.
The process of listening to another involves differing degrees of self-reflection, in which the discourse of another person is compared with one's own in order to spot differences and similarities and hence make progress in conversation. Listening requires the realization that there must be a synchronizing of some kind in order to advance in the conversation.
Sometimes for this synchronizing to occur, either or both of the participants must undergo a process of growth—in knowledge, in reflexivity, in maturity, etc.
Thus many younger Christians who don't understand what Protestantism is in contrast with Catholicism because they don't even know the basic history of their own religion, such Christians will never understand the stresses that Catholicism places on certain aspects of Catholic faith, such as justification, salvation, the Sacraments, the Pope, apostolic succession, the communion of Saints, etc.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Tolerance is Imposition
There cannot be a "non-imposing" worldview. A person may in fact or in the concrete circumstances of his life not bother anyone else with what they do, but this fact may be due simply because of a lack of opportunity to stand up for anything. To demand tolerance is to make an imposition as vigorous as the Christian demand for repentance and conversion. Of course, repentance and conversion cannot be forced but only urged. Christian dogmas imply an ethical standard that has political effects, touching upon issues within medicine, science, and human relations (e.g. marriage). To tell another person that they cannot force their views on others is itself a forcing of a view, namely, the view that we shouldn't force our ideas on others. Thus the internal logic of tolerance is incoherent and self-destructive.
Every worldview implies an ethical standard because every worldview says something about what it means to be a human living on earth. Not every worldview, therefore, is congruent with or complementary to every other worldview. Some are diametrically opposed.
Some may attempt to solve the antithesis between two worldviews through a higher synthesis, but such a synthesis implies the particularity of each worldview, i.e. that each worldview that has been synthesized contained enough elements of particulars and not enough metaphysical principles that gave intellectual coherence to the particulars.
If someone tells you not to shove your ideas on others, you can simply ask and point out, "By telling me not to shove my ideas on others, what are you doing to me now? Shoving your idea on me that others shouldn't shove their ideas on others."
Every worldview implies an ethical standard because every worldview says something about what it means to be a human living on earth. Not every worldview, therefore, is congruent with or complementary to every other worldview. Some are diametrically opposed.
Some may attempt to solve the antithesis between two worldviews through a higher synthesis, but such a synthesis implies the particularity of each worldview, i.e. that each worldview that has been synthesized contained enough elements of particulars and not enough metaphysical principles that gave intellectual coherence to the particulars.
If someone tells you not to shove your ideas on others, you can simply ask and point out, "By telling me not to shove my ideas on others, what are you doing to me now? Shoving your idea on me that others shouldn't shove their ideas on others."
Sunday, December 29, 2013
"Do Atheists Exist?"
An excellent article by Nicholas Frankovich on the "religion" of atheism, the fundamental religious consciousness of man, and the Western philosophical tradition related to God's nature and existence.
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[...] The Sunday Assembly, a “godless congregation” founded in East London last January by standup comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, now boasts affiliates in Brighton, Bristol, Oxford, Canberra, Melbourne, New York, and Portland, Ore. On September 21, it announced a “global missionary tour”: This past fall, interested individuals in 22 cities across the Anglosphere held Sunday Assembly meet-ups. [...]
Half ironically, the founders allow that the Assembly is a church, dedicated to benevolent acts and the search for transcendence. Though they draw the line at “religion,” insisting that it and atheism are mutually exclusive, the openness with which they borrow ecclesial atmospherics and nomenclature suggests that they see their atheist outfit as not entirely secular either. You might call it a third way, an alternative to religion and secularity both, much as the Church of England was historically a “via media” between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Speaking the language of the many who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” the Assembly draws on an increasingly widespread understanding of religion as something like what “the letter” of the law was for Saint Paul — “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). If “religion” remains the inevitable word for a certain moral and philosophical seriousness, however, atheism is, or should be, counted as religious after all. [...]
And so the Sunday Assembly, its rejection of the label “religion” notwithstanding, joins a distinguished parade of institutions demonstrating that religious practice persists as an anthropological fact even where belief in God is muted or absent.
We live in a post-secular age, having run up against the limitations of procedural liberalism, which, while regulating the market on which God and the Devil compete for souls, remains scrupulously disinterested in the outcome. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, an atheist, created a stir twelve years ago when he began to argue that the secular state has an interest in the distinctive contributions that Judaism and Christianity make to the political order. The Italian philosopher Marcello Pera, also an atheist, goes further, proposing a Christian civil religion to replenish the Judeo-Christian matrix from which the West derives the moral values on which liberal democracy depends. [...]
The third part of the Assembly’s motto, “Live better, help often, wonder more,” reflects a value attractive to souls seeking relief from the cool, or chill, as they experience it, of the secular climate in which they live. “Our modern culture is restless at the barriers of the human sphere,” Charles Taylor writes in A Secular Age. “The sense that there is something more presses in.”
Wonder more: No one disputes that atheism is compatible with wonder at the physical universe and how it works. Wonder at how it came to be just so, however, soon leads to wonder at how it came to be at all, a question that atheists typically sidestep. [...]
[T]he atheist seeking to communicate an accurate answer to the question “Why is there not nothing?” will find himself borrowing theologically inflected terminology. Inescapably, he affirms the most fundamental of theological precepts. He agrees with it implicitly. He asserts that he doesn’t. His disagreement is first of all with himself.
A dramatic declaration of atheism is usually an assertion of disbelief in a god no one else believes in either. Judging the shadowy masculine presence at the center of the Hebrew Bible to be a tyrannical father figure and a lie — Richard Dawkins calls him “the most unpleasant character in all fiction” — atheists who cross over into militant antitheism make quite the show of manfully defying the Lord’s authority to command them. They plant their flag in the ground. There they stand, they can do no other.
They lose their footing when they recoil as they do, reflexively, from classical theism as well. They don’t trust it. If it’s related to Him, they’re not interested; they won’t be seduced. They plug their ears to keep from hearing too distinctly the siren song of sweet reason, which they dodge, rather than confront. Either they see plainly or they intuit that God in his aspect as God of the philosophers is ground on which reason offers no apparent means of escape or resistance. We might as well try to refute the multiplication tables. They are what they are.
“I Am That I Am” is the conventional translation of the enigmatic Hebrew expression by which God in the burning bush identifies himself to Moses (Exodus 3:14). In the Greek of the Septuagint, “I am” is egō eimi. Jesus scandalizes his critics when, shifting to the present tense in a context in which you would expect the past tense, he answers them, “Before Abraham ever was, I am” — egō eimi (John 8:58). In first-century Jerusalem, that statement is either blasphemous or a theophany. [...]
The discernment of God as what Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century would term “ipsum esse subsistens” — the “Ground of Being,” in the parlance of Christian mysticism and theology — developed organically over the course of more than a millennium, with no clear moment of birth, although it was mature certainly by the High Middle Ages. Where the approach to God had been anthropological, it was now also philosophical — ontological, to be more precise. [...]
Many people who would never think to participate in the rancor of public antitheism are nonetheless susceptible to the zeitgeist in which atheism flourishes. It’s what they know. Doesn’t it speak well enough for them too? They start from the proposition that God is a person and rule it out as implausible. The argument that God can only be personal because he can’t be less than we are may be cogent in itself, but it needs a lot of unpacking. It has as its premise the God of the philosophers. To begin to make theism intelligible to a modern atheist, you have to bracket the God of the patriarchs and start from the premise.
Atheism is religion for people in a hurry. They’re quick to assume they understand someone who, engrossed in the question of why there isn’t nothing, says a few words to indicate what he sees the question pointing to. They mistake his verbal gesture for an answer that’s intended to close the question or do it justice. To see what he’s trying to get at, they would have to enter into the wonder that the question elicits in him and dwell there for a moment. The closest thing the question has to an answer is the wonder itself. [...]
For their rejection of all “gods” in the familiar sense of the term, Christians in ancient Rome were sometimes accused of being atheists. Now the misunderstanding is turned on its head: Atheists hold the Christian, and indeed any modern theist, to be most glaringly wrong in his understanding that God is a person, like a god of pagan antiquity. Training their sights on the notion of an anthropomorphic god, they excite and distract themselves. God as Being itself barely registers with them. [...]
To ask what [the atheist] means by “nothing” will provoke some eyeball-rolling at first, but the longer you think about it, the more you realize just how stubbornly inscrutable a concept “nothing” is, like “time,” which gave Saint Augustine so much trouble: “I know what time is until you ask me for a definition of it.” [...]
By “nothing,” it turns out, Krauss [an atheist physicist who sought to disprove the ontological argument in his book A Universe from Nothing] meant only the vacuum state, which in quantum theory is a field characterized by the occurrence of fleeting electromagnetic waves. In a withering review, David Albert, a theoretical physicist and philosophy professor at Columbia, dismissed A Universe from Nothing as a fraud and excoriated Krauss for failing to deliver the goods advertised in its title: “Vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields!” [...]
Notice how “nothing” can function for the atheist as “God” does for the theist. Are the two only using different linguistic tokens in parallel efforts to express the same ineffable thought? Their fear and trembling at the prospect of the “eternal nada,” Jones and Evans explain, moves them to cultivate their appreciation for the physical world (Christians call it “Creation”) that tickles our sense organs in the here and now: “Transcendence can be found in a breath of wind on your face or in a mouthful of custard tart,” they write. They pronounce nature “awesome,” a word whose recently acquired colloquial sense still shades into its older, literal sense. Open the door to just that much transcendence, however, and all of it comes rushing in, like a strong wind. Atheists instinctively try to resist it, while those of us who have been blown away by it recommend the experience.
“Wonder more,” the Sunday Assembly urges, and adherents of monotheistic religions echo the advice back to them. No, following wonder to its logical conclusion does not by itself make an atheist suddenly Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. It only means he’s not an atheist. Someone should tell him.
---
[...] The Sunday Assembly, a “godless congregation” founded in East London last January by standup comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, now boasts affiliates in Brighton, Bristol, Oxford, Canberra, Melbourne, New York, and Portland, Ore. On September 21, it announced a “global missionary tour”: This past fall, interested individuals in 22 cities across the Anglosphere held Sunday Assembly meet-ups. [...]
Half ironically, the founders allow that the Assembly is a church, dedicated to benevolent acts and the search for transcendence. Though they draw the line at “religion,” insisting that it and atheism are mutually exclusive, the openness with which they borrow ecclesial atmospherics and nomenclature suggests that they see their atheist outfit as not entirely secular either. You might call it a third way, an alternative to religion and secularity both, much as the Church of England was historically a “via media” between Catholicism and Protestantism.
Speaking the language of the many who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” the Assembly draws on an increasingly widespread understanding of religion as something like what “the letter” of the law was for Saint Paul — “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). If “religion” remains the inevitable word for a certain moral and philosophical seriousness, however, atheism is, or should be, counted as religious after all. [...]
And so the Sunday Assembly, its rejection of the label “religion” notwithstanding, joins a distinguished parade of institutions demonstrating that religious practice persists as an anthropological fact even where belief in God is muted or absent.
We live in a post-secular age, having run up against the limitations of procedural liberalism, which, while regulating the market on which God and the Devil compete for souls, remains scrupulously disinterested in the outcome. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, an atheist, created a stir twelve years ago when he began to argue that the secular state has an interest in the distinctive contributions that Judaism and Christianity make to the political order. The Italian philosopher Marcello Pera, also an atheist, goes further, proposing a Christian civil religion to replenish the Judeo-Christian matrix from which the West derives the moral values on which liberal democracy depends. [...]
The third part of the Assembly’s motto, “Live better, help often, wonder more,” reflects a value attractive to souls seeking relief from the cool, or chill, as they experience it, of the secular climate in which they live. “Our modern culture is restless at the barriers of the human sphere,” Charles Taylor writes in A Secular Age. “The sense that there is something more presses in.”
Wonder more: No one disputes that atheism is compatible with wonder at the physical universe and how it works. Wonder at how it came to be just so, however, soon leads to wonder at how it came to be at all, a question that atheists typically sidestep. [...]
[T]he atheist seeking to communicate an accurate answer to the question “Why is there not nothing?” will find himself borrowing theologically inflected terminology. Inescapably, he affirms the most fundamental of theological precepts. He agrees with it implicitly. He asserts that he doesn’t. His disagreement is first of all with himself.
A dramatic declaration of atheism is usually an assertion of disbelief in a god no one else believes in either. Judging the shadowy masculine presence at the center of the Hebrew Bible to be a tyrannical father figure and a lie — Richard Dawkins calls him “the most unpleasant character in all fiction” — atheists who cross over into militant antitheism make quite the show of manfully defying the Lord’s authority to command them. They plant their flag in the ground. There they stand, they can do no other.
They lose their footing when they recoil as they do, reflexively, from classical theism as well. They don’t trust it. If it’s related to Him, they’re not interested; they won’t be seduced. They plug their ears to keep from hearing too distinctly the siren song of sweet reason, which they dodge, rather than confront. Either they see plainly or they intuit that God in his aspect as God of the philosophers is ground on which reason offers no apparent means of escape or resistance. We might as well try to refute the multiplication tables. They are what they are.
“I Am That I Am” is the conventional translation of the enigmatic Hebrew expression by which God in the burning bush identifies himself to Moses (Exodus 3:14). In the Greek of the Septuagint, “I am” is egō eimi. Jesus scandalizes his critics when, shifting to the present tense in a context in which you would expect the past tense, he answers them, “Before Abraham ever was, I am” — egō eimi (John 8:58). In first-century Jerusalem, that statement is either blasphemous or a theophany. [...]
The discernment of God as what Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century would term “ipsum esse subsistens” — the “Ground of Being,” in the parlance of Christian mysticism and theology — developed organically over the course of more than a millennium, with no clear moment of birth, although it was mature certainly by the High Middle Ages. Where the approach to God had been anthropological, it was now also philosophical — ontological, to be more precise. [...]
Many people who would never think to participate in the rancor of public antitheism are nonetheless susceptible to the zeitgeist in which atheism flourishes. It’s what they know. Doesn’t it speak well enough for them too? They start from the proposition that God is a person and rule it out as implausible. The argument that God can only be personal because he can’t be less than we are may be cogent in itself, but it needs a lot of unpacking. It has as its premise the God of the philosophers. To begin to make theism intelligible to a modern atheist, you have to bracket the God of the patriarchs and start from the premise.
Atheism is religion for people in a hurry. They’re quick to assume they understand someone who, engrossed in the question of why there isn’t nothing, says a few words to indicate what he sees the question pointing to. They mistake his verbal gesture for an answer that’s intended to close the question or do it justice. To see what he’s trying to get at, they would have to enter into the wonder that the question elicits in him and dwell there for a moment. The closest thing the question has to an answer is the wonder itself. [...]
For their rejection of all “gods” in the familiar sense of the term, Christians in ancient Rome were sometimes accused of being atheists. Now the misunderstanding is turned on its head: Atheists hold the Christian, and indeed any modern theist, to be most glaringly wrong in his understanding that God is a person, like a god of pagan antiquity. Training their sights on the notion of an anthropomorphic god, they excite and distract themselves. God as Being itself barely registers with them. [...]
To ask what [the atheist] means by “nothing” will provoke some eyeball-rolling at first, but the longer you think about it, the more you realize just how stubbornly inscrutable a concept “nothing” is, like “time,” which gave Saint Augustine so much trouble: “I know what time is until you ask me for a definition of it.” [...]
By “nothing,” it turns out, Krauss [an atheist physicist who sought to disprove the ontological argument in his book A Universe from Nothing] meant only the vacuum state, which in quantum theory is a field characterized by the occurrence of fleeting electromagnetic waves. In a withering review, David Albert, a theoretical physicist and philosophy professor at Columbia, dismissed A Universe from Nothing as a fraud and excoriated Krauss for failing to deliver the goods advertised in its title: “Vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields!” [...]
Notice how “nothing” can function for the atheist as “God” does for the theist. Are the two only using different linguistic tokens in parallel efforts to express the same ineffable thought? Their fear and trembling at the prospect of the “eternal nada,” Jones and Evans explain, moves them to cultivate their appreciation for the physical world (Christians call it “Creation”) that tickles our sense organs in the here and now: “Transcendence can be found in a breath of wind on your face or in a mouthful of custard tart,” they write. They pronounce nature “awesome,” a word whose recently acquired colloquial sense still shades into its older, literal sense. Open the door to just that much transcendence, however, and all of it comes rushing in, like a strong wind. Atheists instinctively try to resist it, while those of us who have been blown away by it recommend the experience.
“Wonder more,” the Sunday Assembly urges, and adherents of monotheistic religions echo the advice back to them. No, following wonder to its logical conclusion does not by itself make an atheist suddenly Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. It only means he’s not an atheist. Someone should tell him.
---
Source: Nicholas Frankovich, "Do Atheists Exist?," National Review Online, December 28, 2013, accessed December 29, 2013, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367136/do-atheists-exist-nicholas-frankovich/.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Robert Twigger on How Anyone Can Become a Polymath
I travelled with Bedouin in the Western Desert of Egypt. When we got a puncture, they used tape and an old inner tube to suck air from three tyres to inflate a fourth. It was the cook who suggested the idea; maybe he was used to making food designed for a few go further. Far from expressing shame at having no pump, they told me that carrying too many tools is the sign of a weak man; it makes him lazy. The real master has no tools at all, only a limitless capacity to improvise with what is to hand. The more fields of knowledge you cover, the greater your resources for improvisation.
We hear the descriptive words psychopath and sociopath all the time, but here’s a new one: monopath. It means a person with a narrow mind, a one-track brain, a bore, a super-specialist, an expert with no other interests — in other words, the role-model of choice in the Western world. You think I jest? In June, I was invited on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 to say a few words on the river Nile, because I had a new book about it. The producer called me ‘Dr Twigger’ several times. I was flattered, but I also felt a sense of panic. I have never sought or held a PhD. After the third ‘Dr’, I gently put the producer right. And of course, it was fine — he didn’t especially want me to be a doctor. The culture did. My Nile book was necessarily the work of a generalist. But the radio needs credible guests. It needs an expert — otherwise why would anyone listen?
The monopathic model derives some of its credibility from its success in business. [...]
Classically, a polymath was someone who ‘had learnt much’, conquering many different subject areas. As the 15th-century polymath Leon Battista Alberti — an architect, painter, horseman, archer and inventor — wrote: ‘a man can do all things if he will’. During the Renaissance, polymathy became part of the idea of the ‘perfected man’, the manifold master of intellectual, artistic and physical pursuits. [...]
Science, for example, likes to project itself as clean, logical, rational and unemotional. In fact, it’s pretty haphazard, driven by funding and ego, reliant on inspired intuition by its top-flight practitioners. Above all it is polymathic. New ideas frequently come from the cross-fertilisation of two separate fields. [...]
Invention fights specialisation at every turn. Human nature and human progress are polymathic at root. And life itself is various — you need many skills to be able to live it. In traditional cultures, everyone can do a little of everything. Though one man might be the best hunter or archer or trapper, he doesn’t do only that. [...]
However, the pessimistic assumption that learning somehow ‘stops’ when you leave school or university or hit thirty is at odds with the evidence. It appears that a great deal depends on the nucleus basalis, located in the basal forebrain. Among other things, this bit of the brain produces significant amounts of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that regulates the rate at which new connections are made between brain cells. This in turn dictates how readily we form memories of various kinds, and how strongly we retain them. When the nucleus basalisis ‘switched on’, acetylcholine flows and new connections occur. When it is switched off, we make far fewer new connections.
Between birth and the age of ten or eleven, the nucleus basalisis is permanently ‘switched on’. It contains an abundance of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and this means new connections are being made all the time. Typically this means that a child will be learning almost all the time — if they see or hear something once they remember it. But as we progress towards the later teenage years the brain becomes more selective. From research into the way stroke victims recover lost skills it has been observed that the nucleus basalis only switches on when one of three conditions occur: a novel situation, a shock, or intense focus, maintained through repetition or continuous application. [...]
‘Use it or lose it’ is the watchword of brain plasticity. [...]
An intriguing study funded by the Dana foundation and summarised by Dr Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, suggests that studying the performing arts — dance, music and acting — actually improves one's ability to learn anything else. Collating several studies, the researchers found that performing arts generated much higher levels of motivation than other subjects. These enhanced levels of motivation made students aware of their own ability to focus and concentrate on improvement. Later, even if they gave up the arts, they could apply their new-found talent for concentration to learning anything new. [...]
There is often something rather obvious about people with narrow interests — they are bores, and bores always lack a sense of humour. They just don’t see that it’s absurd to devote your life to a tiny area of study and have no other outside interests. I suspect that the converse is true: by being more polymathic, you develop a better sense of proportion and balance — which gives you a better sense of humour. And that can’t be a bad thing.
We hear the descriptive words psychopath and sociopath all the time, but here’s a new one: monopath. It means a person with a narrow mind, a one-track brain, a bore, a super-specialist, an expert with no other interests — in other words, the role-model of choice in the Western world. You think I jest? In June, I was invited on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 to say a few words on the river Nile, because I had a new book about it. The producer called me ‘Dr Twigger’ several times. I was flattered, but I also felt a sense of panic. I have never sought or held a PhD. After the third ‘Dr’, I gently put the producer right. And of course, it was fine — he didn’t especially want me to be a doctor. The culture did. My Nile book was necessarily the work of a generalist. But the radio needs credible guests. It needs an expert — otherwise why would anyone listen?
The monopathic model derives some of its credibility from its success in business. [...]
Classically, a polymath was someone who ‘had learnt much’, conquering many different subject areas. As the 15th-century polymath Leon Battista Alberti — an architect, painter, horseman, archer and inventor — wrote: ‘a man can do all things if he will’. During the Renaissance, polymathy became part of the idea of the ‘perfected man’, the manifold master of intellectual, artistic and physical pursuits. [...]
Science, for example, likes to project itself as clean, logical, rational and unemotional. In fact, it’s pretty haphazard, driven by funding and ego, reliant on inspired intuition by its top-flight practitioners. Above all it is polymathic. New ideas frequently come from the cross-fertilisation of two separate fields. [...]
Invention fights specialisation at every turn. Human nature and human progress are polymathic at root. And life itself is various — you need many skills to be able to live it. In traditional cultures, everyone can do a little of everything. Though one man might be the best hunter or archer or trapper, he doesn’t do only that. [...]
However, the pessimistic assumption that learning somehow ‘stops’ when you leave school or university or hit thirty is at odds with the evidence. It appears that a great deal depends on the nucleus basalis, located in the basal forebrain. Among other things, this bit of the brain produces significant amounts of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that regulates the rate at which new connections are made between brain cells. This in turn dictates how readily we form memories of various kinds, and how strongly we retain them. When the nucleus basalisis ‘switched on’, acetylcholine flows and new connections occur. When it is switched off, we make far fewer new connections.
Between birth and the age of ten or eleven, the nucleus basalisis is permanently ‘switched on’. It contains an abundance of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and this means new connections are being made all the time. Typically this means that a child will be learning almost all the time — if they see or hear something once they remember it. But as we progress towards the later teenage years the brain becomes more selective. From research into the way stroke victims recover lost skills it has been observed that the nucleus basalis only switches on when one of three conditions occur: a novel situation, a shock, or intense focus, maintained through repetition or continuous application. [...]
‘Use it or lose it’ is the watchword of brain plasticity. [...]
An intriguing study funded by the Dana foundation and summarised by Dr Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, suggests that studying the performing arts — dance, music and acting — actually improves one's ability to learn anything else. Collating several studies, the researchers found that performing arts generated much higher levels of motivation than other subjects. These enhanced levels of motivation made students aware of their own ability to focus and concentrate on improvement. Later, even if they gave up the arts, they could apply their new-found talent for concentration to learning anything new. [...]
There is often something rather obvious about people with narrow interests — they are bores, and bores always lack a sense of humour. They just don’t see that it’s absurd to devote your life to a tiny area of study and have no other outside interests. I suspect that the converse is true: by being more polymathic, you develop a better sense of proportion and balance — which gives you a better sense of humour. And that can’t be a bad thing.
---
Source: Robert Twigger, "Master of Many Trades," Aeon Magazine Website, November 4, 2013, accessed December 3, 2013, http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/anyone-can-learn-to-be-a-polymath/.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
"The Scientific Worldview of the Bible"
Great, short article: http://stacytrasancos.com/the-scientific-worldview-of-the-bible/
I'm putting it here so that I don't forget about it. I'd like to get back to it in the future but can't right now.
I'm putting it here so that I don't forget about it. I'd like to get back to it in the future but can't right now.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Human Rights Campaign, the Discourse of Equality, and the Joker
Although I don't pay much attention to the same-sex marriage movement as well as its related equal rights movement for the LGBT community, it's almost impossible to avoid these things in our society. There are two facets of the complementary movements that I've noticed that I would like to comment on: 1) its discourse that capitalizes on the ambiguity of key words; and 2) its values that supervene upon this ambiguity.
As with all discourse, there are key words and phrases that set the same-sex equality movement discourse apart from others. One can see these phrases collected or implied on the Human Rights Campaign website, for example, or in their nearly-ubiquitous equal sign logo. This list could go on, but here are some that come off the top of my mind: same, sex, movement, equality (and equal), right(s), human, marriage, love, partners, gays (and variants), choice, freedom, self-determination, tolerance, acceptance, advocate, attraction. These are the positive words, but there are also negative words, such as homophobia, bigot (and variants), fag, queer, unnatural, Bible, intolerant, un-accepting, religion, dogmatic, judgmental, and other vulgar or graphic terms.
Interestingly, when one looks at the broadest of these key terms, the discourse under examination becomes almost indistinguishable from other discourses of a similar kind, such as the pro-choice movement, libertarian thought, modern political liberalism/progressivism, secular advocacy, the advocacy of scientism, etc. These are worldviews similar to what Husserl called the Lebenswelt. They are discourses that collectively organize the perception and appropriation of reality in a way that "makes sense" or that attempts to minimize cognitive dissonance, such as the reality of physical and genetic difference between male and female species, the reality of death, or, above all, the reality of God.
But if these broad key words are shared, then there is a foundational post-Enlightenment political-philosophical discourse that roots those words and makes sense of them; we could call it a "cenoscopic discourse" that gives birth to particular discourses. And these key words are necessarily ambiguous. For example, what is meant by same/equality? The answer is self-evident to a person who unquestioningly subscribes to the discourse. Its answer is as natural as a fish in water, but notice that in order to answer the question, such a subscriber will consult other key words within the same discourse. The web of key words is thus self-reinforced, hearkening back to Descartes' important contribution to the modern mind: self-produced certitude and all the solipsism that follows from that, culminating in Bertrand Russell's own admission of solipsism: "We can witness [only] what goes on in our heads, and [not] anything else at all" (1959: 26). It is literally impossible to think outside the box of a discourse without awareness and external light leading to Lonerganian insight.
The questioning may continue: what does love mean? In what way can one love be "equal" to another? Who/what adjudicates the validity or equality of any love? Why isn't the desire that leads to rape or pedophilia equal to the love that leads to same-sex or heterosexual relationships? Of course, such a question will cause a knee-jerk negative reaction, culminating in accusations of intolerance, judgmentalism, dogmatism, and bigotry. The reason is that even though the question does not declare any explicit judgment, it implies certain judgments that are contrary to the same-sex discourse. These judgments, one could say, are alien, are analogically homophobic to the homo-accepting Lebenswelt, and hence such judgments are seen as a threat. In fact, everyone understands at least implicitly that to frame a question in a certain way requires firstly a certain way of looking at things, because the frame implies the framer and vice versa; this is the possibility for rhetorical and loaded questioning. Discourse is a frame. The question reveals the frame just as the frame of a picture gives finality to the picture itself. A picture without frames, without borders, becomes indistinguishable from the Real.
These questions, however, reveal the ambiguity of the same-sex discourse and its key words. It reveals that such words are not simply used analogically but ambiguously or even worse, equivocally (perhaps because its users are nominalists). And the discourse and all related discourses rely absolutely upon such ambiguity. It is imperative that no one knows what love is, what "nature" is, what it exactly is that one "chooses" or "self-determines" but simply that one has "choice." It is like the anarchic Joker from Nolan's The Dark Knight, who says, "Do I look like a guy with a plan? [...] I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just do things." Oddly enough, the Joker's own discourse falls right into the modern political-philosophical discourse that I've been describing thus far. It is essential to the project (or "plan" or "scheme") that human rights remain floating values that one can pick and choose like apples from a tree, the tree being...what? And who planted it?
If love is an empty placeholder, then why not call it "equal" as well? If sex/gender are indistinguishable, then what is marriage? Yes, the destruction of distinctions leads inevitably to a discourse of "tolerance," which is impossible on its own terms. The discourse of tolerance, as is any discourse by its very terms, is intolerant of other discourses. A discourse, to be distinguishable from other discourses, must be intolerant in its foundation.
Yet again, discourses can be either ideoscopic or cenoscopic, particular or general, but that is another topic.
As with all discourse, there are key words and phrases that set the same-sex equality movement discourse apart from others. One can see these phrases collected or implied on the Human Rights Campaign website, for example, or in their nearly-ubiquitous equal sign logo. This list could go on, but here are some that come off the top of my mind: same, sex, movement, equality (and equal), right(s), human, marriage, love, partners, gays (and variants), choice, freedom, self-determination, tolerance, acceptance, advocate, attraction. These are the positive words, but there are also negative words, such as homophobia, bigot (and variants), fag, queer, unnatural, Bible, intolerant, un-accepting, religion, dogmatic, judgmental, and other vulgar or graphic terms.
Interestingly, when one looks at the broadest of these key terms, the discourse under examination becomes almost indistinguishable from other discourses of a similar kind, such as the pro-choice movement, libertarian thought, modern political liberalism/progressivism, secular advocacy, the advocacy of scientism, etc. These are worldviews similar to what Husserl called the Lebenswelt. They are discourses that collectively organize the perception and appropriation of reality in a way that "makes sense" or that attempts to minimize cognitive dissonance, such as the reality of physical and genetic difference between male and female species, the reality of death, or, above all, the reality of God.
But if these broad key words are shared, then there is a foundational post-Enlightenment political-philosophical discourse that roots those words and makes sense of them; we could call it a "cenoscopic discourse" that gives birth to particular discourses. And these key words are necessarily ambiguous. For example, what is meant by same/equality? The answer is self-evident to a person who unquestioningly subscribes to the discourse. Its answer is as natural as a fish in water, but notice that in order to answer the question, such a subscriber will consult other key words within the same discourse. The web of key words is thus self-reinforced, hearkening back to Descartes' important contribution to the modern mind: self-produced certitude and all the solipsism that follows from that, culminating in Bertrand Russell's own admission of solipsism: "We can witness [only] what goes on in our heads, and [not] anything else at all" (1959: 26). It is literally impossible to think outside the box of a discourse without awareness and external light leading to Lonerganian insight.
The questioning may continue: what does love mean? In what way can one love be "equal" to another? Who/what adjudicates the validity or equality of any love? Why isn't the desire that leads to rape or pedophilia equal to the love that leads to same-sex or heterosexual relationships? Of course, such a question will cause a knee-jerk negative reaction, culminating in accusations of intolerance, judgmentalism, dogmatism, and bigotry. The reason is that even though the question does not declare any explicit judgment, it implies certain judgments that are contrary to the same-sex discourse. These judgments, one could say, are alien, are analogically homophobic to the homo-accepting Lebenswelt, and hence such judgments are seen as a threat. In fact, everyone understands at least implicitly that to frame a question in a certain way requires firstly a certain way of looking at things, because the frame implies the framer and vice versa; this is the possibility for rhetorical and loaded questioning. Discourse is a frame. The question reveals the frame just as the frame of a picture gives finality to the picture itself. A picture without frames, without borders, becomes indistinguishable from the Real.
These questions, however, reveal the ambiguity of the same-sex discourse and its key words. It reveals that such words are not simply used analogically but ambiguously or even worse, equivocally (perhaps because its users are nominalists). And the discourse and all related discourses rely absolutely upon such ambiguity. It is imperative that no one knows what love is, what "nature" is, what it exactly is that one "chooses" or "self-determines" but simply that one has "choice." It is like the anarchic Joker from Nolan's The Dark Knight, who says, "Do I look like a guy with a plan? [...] I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just do things." Oddly enough, the Joker's own discourse falls right into the modern political-philosophical discourse that I've been describing thus far. It is essential to the project (or "plan" or "scheme") that human rights remain floating values that one can pick and choose like apples from a tree, the tree being...what? And who planted it?
If love is an empty placeholder, then why not call it "equal" as well? If sex/gender are indistinguishable, then what is marriage? Yes, the destruction of distinctions leads inevitably to a discourse of "tolerance," which is impossible on its own terms. The discourse of tolerance, as is any discourse by its very terms, is intolerant of other discourses. A discourse, to be distinguishable from other discourses, must be intolerant in its foundation.
Yet again, discourses can be either ideoscopic or cenoscopic, particular or general, but that is another topic.
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