The Five Central Books

There are five books that everyone who wants to become classically educated should aspire to read and understand. I have called them the "central" books because they seem to stand, historically, at the literary center of the learning of educated people in the English world. Here they are:

Homer: by which we mean the Iliad and Odyssey, the book (they originally formed a diptych) that told the story of Achilles (in the Iliad) and Odysseus (in the Odyssey), and in doing so, articulated the ideals and values of the Greeks, whose culture stands at the headwaters of our own. Homer's stories served as the national myth of the Greeks, the narrative through which they saw themselves as the masters of strength and intelligence.

The Aeneid, by Virgil. This is the story of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who flees the burning city of Troy and founds Rome on the banks of the Tiber River. It articulated the ideals and values of the Romans, who saw themselves as masters of the world. It is the national myth of Rome and articulated the twin virtues of order and piety.

The Divine Comedy, by Dante. Dante's story of his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and finally Heaven is the story of every man's spiritual journey in life. It articulates the values of Christian civilization, the baptized cultural offspring of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem.

The King James Bible. There are other versions, of course, but this is the original and greatest of all the Bible translations, and the translation whose phrasings have permeated English literature and thought for centuries. Long passages from it were memorized by generations of English and American people. Whatever the various views on which Biblical translation is the most accurate (the only really accurate version is in Hebrew and Greek), many consider the King James Bible as the greatest work in English.

The Plays of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plays are second in literary influence only to the Bible itself. It's variety of distinct characters and their insights into human character and society have dominated the thought of generations of English and Americans. It has also influenced European cultures in a way that no non-English modern work has influenced the English.

Three Classical Terms

My article in the most recent issue of the Classical Teacher magazine:

I have given many speeches and written many articles on the subject of what classical education is. One of the things I have realized in doing so is that, among the many impediments to understanding what classical education is, there is the simple problem of the lack of clarity in the words we use to talk about it. There are three terms that those of us involved in classical education like to throw around, terms we sometimes use interchangeably and simultaneously or in some other way that obscures their meanings. 

We are in no danger of being arrested by the language police over this, but our approach to classical education and our execution of it depend on our understanding of what these terms mean and how they are distinct. 

The three terms are: “classical,” “liberal arts,” and “humanities.”

Read the rest here.

I will be speaking at the CiRCE Institute's liberal arts conference in Louisville May 18-19

I will be speaking at the CiRCE Institute's regional conference in Louisville on the liberal arts on May 18-19, along with Chris Perrin, Professor Carol and Hank Reynolds, Adam Andrews, Brian Philips and Matt Bianco. It's at the historic Seelbach Hotel. Check it out.

Classical Education is More than a Method: The Secondary Place of Dorothy Sayer's Trivium

My article in the newest Classical Teacher is now up at the Memoria Press website: "Classical Education is More than a Method: The Secondary Place of Dorothy Sayer's Trivium."

If you were to ask most classical educators what classical education is, you would find them hard-pressed to give a short, coherent answer. That is the way with a lot of movements: It’s easy to get swept up in the enthusiasm, but when asked to formulate what it is that excites you, it’s hard to articulate.

But when you can get an answer to the question, “What is classical education?,” it is almost always in terms of Dorothy Sayers’ trivium, her three “states of development”—the grammar stage, the dialectic stage, and the rhetoric stage. These together, we are told, are what constitute a classical education.

The origin of this conception of classical education can be found in a speech Sayers gave to students at Oxford University during a vacation term in 1947, titled “The Lost Tools of Learning.” Despite the lack of attention paid to it at the time or in the succeeding decades, its republication in Douglas Wilson’s 1991 book, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, made it a rallying cry for thousands of classical home and private schools across the country.

Read the rest here.

The Villa of the Papyri

The following is my Letter from the Editor in the spring, 2018 issue of The Classical Teacher:

In 79 A.D., the catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in eastern Italy covered nearby towns in ash and completely buried many of them. Accounts of the ancient eruption paint a horrific scene: Volcanic pumice rained from the skies and waves of searing hot gas and debris swept over the nearby landscape. Thousands died where they stood, and others fell while in flight.

One of the towns that was buried in the eruption was Herculaneum, which at the time was a popular vacation spot for wealthy Romans. According to some historical accounts, Julius Caesar‘s father-in-law, Calpurnius Piso, owned an elaborate seaside villa in the town. He is reputed to have had one of the great libraries of ancient times.

For almost seventeen centuries the ancient town lay in darkness underground. Excavations of Herculaneum were conducted in the mid-eighteenth century, and Calpurnius Piso’s villa was located. But nearby landowners put a stop to the excavation, and the location was forgotten.

Then in the 1980s excavations were begun again, and special attention was given to Calpurnius’ villa. When excavators began their work they discovered numerous statues and other works of art, many of them in pristine condition.

Then they began to discover something else—scrolls, some of them in the boxes in which they had been placed for transportation during the panic, others littered on the floor. The scrolls were carbonized by the intense heat of the gas from the volcano and solidified into stone. They began to call Calpurnius’ Villa the Villa of the Papyri.

With the development of modern multi-spectral imaging, the burnt scrolls are just beginning to be deciphered. Some scholars are holding their breath over the works of philosophy and literature that might come to light, many of them unknown or lost. We only possess a small fraction of the works of ancient times. St. Augustine cites Cicero‘s Hortensiusas a formative book in his thinking, but all we know of it is what he and a few others quoted in their works. The vast majority of the works of the Greek tragic poets—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—were lost long ago.

Could these works lie hidden in ash in the library of Calpurnius Piso? It is exciting to think that they might.

But while we yearn for the discovery of heretofore lost works, what are we doing to learn the ones that have been preserved, and which we have yet to read? Are they not as much lost to us as the works in the Villa of the Papyri? Shouldn’t we wonder as much at the works we have but do not know as at the prospect of the discovery of others?

The treasury of our culture may be missing important things, but it is rich nevertheless. And in many ways, too, this treasury has been covered up by time and neglect. It has been buried in disinterest and distraction and hidden by layer upon layer of modern educational fads and gimmicks.

The work of classical education is to excavate the deep and rich tradition of wisdom and virtue that lies at our very feet, and to decipher the scrolls we have had all along.

We don’t need a spade or multi-spectral imaging. We don’t even need to go to Italy. The works are here at our fingertips. All we need to do is take the trouble to read them.

I will be speaking at the University of Dallas this Saturday, Oct. 7

I will be joining Professor Carol Reynolds and several others at the University of Dallas this Saturday, Oct. 7 to talk about arts education. If you are in the Dallas area, come on down!

For more information on “An Exploration of Beauty,” sponsored by The University of Dallas and Professor Carol and to register for the conference, just go to Professor Carol’s website: ProfessorCarol.com.

Don't believe the line that studying the humanities is a job killer

My newest post at Intellectual Takeout:

Zachary First, Managing Director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, opines at PayScale.com on just how misguided is the question: “Can we, in economic terms, justify investing in a degree in the humanities?”

Read the rest here.

Scientific American takes some STEM advocates to task for hating on the Humanities

My most recent post at Intellectual Takeout:

There’s been a lot of rhetoric in recent years from conservative leaders about the importance of giving students a STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). 

That our students should have a better education in math and science is not controversial. What is controversial is when a math and science emphasis is pitted against the liberal arts and humanities.

Read the rest here.

What are schools for? Good citizenship, job training, or academics?

Read my article on the new Phi Beta Kappa poll on the following question"

“What do you think should be the main goal of a public school education: to prepare students academically, to prepare them for work, or to prepare them to be good citizens?”

The results are quite interesting. The plurality believes schools are for teaching academics and the majority of parents of school children think the same thing. 

Read it here.

C. S. Lewis' List of Great Books

The blog A Pilgrim in Narnia has published a list of the books C. S. Lewis refers to in his book, Experiment in Criticism, a book about how to read books. The list tracks pretty well the books that a person concerned with preserving our culture ought to read (or aspire to read):

See the list here.

What the Humanities Can Tell Us about T. Rex that Science Can't

Wisdom and Happiness: What Classical Education Can Do for Your Soul

My most recent article on Memoria Press' blog:

One of the measures of how hard it is to articulate the case for the value of a classical education is that you have to use the assumptions of those who don’t value it in order to persuade them that it has value.

That’s a mouthful, I know. But what I mean to say is that whenever you are asked to give a reason why your student needs a liberal arts and humanities education, you are expected to give a thoroughly utilitarian explanation, an explanation that someone with a classical education would immediately see was not only beside the point, but a little subversive of the very goals of this kind of learning ...

Continue reading this article here.

Why Johnny Can't Add

From my article in the Summer edition of the Classical Teacher magazine, "Why Johnny Can't Add":

This is one of the most controversial aspects of modern math pedagogy: the complicated way in which it proposes to teach simple arithmetic. This is not an accident and is, in fact, very intentional. The idea behind this “multiple strategies” approach is to intentionally complicate the process of learning arithmetic in order to force the student to think about the procedures he is learning. The more strategies employed to teach a child to solve simple arithmetic problems, goes the reasoning, the better off he will be. 

This is exactly the opposite approach to that taken by traditional educators. If we were to haul the teacher in my father’s one-room schoolhouse into a modern math classroom, her first impression would be that the education world had been turned upside down. She would wonder why we had completely over-complicated a simple procedure. And if we were to tell her that the reason we were doing it was to get children to understand arithmetic better, she would get out the dunce cap and put us on a stool in the corner.

Read the entire article here.

The Classical Reason for Calculus

From my post today at Exordium, the blog of the Classical Latin School Association:

 In a recent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Tianhui Michael Li and Allison Bishop question the utility of teaching calculus in high school. The reason? There are other fields of mathematics better suited for preparing a student for the job market.

... The irony is that classical education, whose purpose, along with passing on a common culture, is to train the mind, is the only philosophy of education that can provide a justification for calculus. Why study it? Because it will help a student to think better.

Read the rest here.

The first shot in the war to defend French literature from the new breed of anti-humanities conservatives

My son Tim testified in the Senate Education Meeting yesterday in favor of Senate Bill 75 alongside bill sponsor Sen. Dan Seum (R-Louisville). The bill would impose a moratorium on state university tuition increases for four years. 

What I liked was the incidental remark in his testimony about the fact that, as a philosophy student at the University of Kentucky, he reads French literature, a reference to Gov. Matt Bevin's recent statement that "All the people in the world that [sic] want to study French literature can do so, they are just not going to be subsidized by the taxpayer."

The Governor's unfortunate remark is just one example of the new breed of conservatives who like to hate on the humanities and who don't see the importance of passing on Western civilization.

We'll be taking up arms here at Vital Remants in defense of French literature in the coming weeks. My son's remark could be the shot heard round the state.

 

Vive la littérature Française!

What is classical Christian education?

I work with a number of classical schools, one of which is Holy Trinity in Beaufort, South Carolina. They have produced an excellent promotional video on classical Christian education:

Autocracy and Anarchy: The necessity of education in a constitutional democracy

In his article in last weekend's Wall Street Journal, Robert Kaplan writes about the disintegration of Europe and what has brought it about. Part of the reason for Europe's post World War II stability was the existence of oppressive regimes in the Middle East:

The decades in which it was able to develop its high ideals of universal human rights, including the right of the distressed to seek havens in Europe, was made possible, it is now clear, by the oppressive regimes that once held sway on its periphery. The Arab world was slammed shut for decades by prison states whose dictator wardens kept their people in order. Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Assad family in Syria, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya—they allowed to Europe to have its idealistic cake and eat it too.

We know now what happens in the absence of these regimes. With the strongmen who headed them gone (only Assad remains), chaos ensues. Europe is now dealing with the consequences of policies that ousted these leaders, and it is not at all clear that people in the Middle East themselves are better off for it.

But foreign policy aside, it is interesting to note the dilemma such states as those in the Middle East find themselves in: Either submit to the autocratic rule of a dictator or face anarchy. Why do these countries find themselves with only these two alternatives when countries in the West have always had other options, sometimes benevolent monarchies and, today, constitutional democracies?

Is there something the West has that the Middle East does not that gives its nations the ability to self-govern without facing either tyranny or anarchy?

I submit that the West is able to do this largely because its citizenry is educated in a way that the citizenry in Middle Eastern countries is not. And furthermore, the kind of education that gives Western nations stability is an education of a particular kind which consists of a consistent kind of acculturation.

In short, Western countries have traditionally imparted, not only certain basic learning skills (how to read, write, and figure), but also a body of cultural background knowledge and a set of moral values.

The most essential aspect of these last two latter kinds of literacy—the cultural, and moral—is their shared nature. The background cultural knowledge and the set of values were held in common. In fact, it is only by virtue of this shared body of knowledge and ideals that we could say that we had a culture at all. A culture is nothing if it is not this shared body of ideals and values.

Furthermore, this shared body of ideals and values was based on a shared religion. As T. S. Eliot pointed out, religion and culture are just two sides of the same coin. Cultures can also cohere on the basis of common racial characteristics, but only because racial identity usually involves a shared religion. Even those of the same race can be subject to societal deterioration if there are divergent religions within the racial group.

The good news is that this connection—the close relation between culture and religion—can produce a stable society. The bad news is that it falls apart without it.

One of the main problems in the Middle East is that fact that, although their cultures are undergirded largely by Islam, the different forms of Islam bring about cultural divisiveness. The cultural divide in Iraq is primarily along the fault line between Shia and Sunni Muslims. And although the Syrian conflict is complex and the loyalties complicated by larger regional politics, the divisions are still largely based on religious loyalties, complicated by the fact that one of these factions, the Alawite minority, has traditionally ruled the rest.

The religion that undergirded the culture of the West was Christianity. But now rival world views have arisen, primarily that of secularism, the technocratic religion of materialism. The Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft has pointed out that every religion has three aspects to it: a creed, a code, and a cult: a set of beliefs, a methodology, and something which it hopes for or aspires to.

For Christianity, these characteristics are expressed (roughly) in the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer. Secularism's creed, on the other hand, is materialism, its code or methodology is that of scientific method, and its aspiration is for a technocratic utopia, a world in which science has solved every material riddle.

The first problem is that the political, economic, and moral order of Western society is based on this older, Christian model—a model the Church formed on the basis of the cultures of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem that preceded it, and which it transformed in accordance with its to own unique theological beliefs, becoming the basis for the societies and governments of Europe and America. And without the support of the ideas that formed them, these beliefs and institutions must change—or die.

The second problem is that the ideology that is replacing the older Christian order cannot inform and uphold the culture in way that an authentic religion can. A belief system like secular liberalism, which is purely instrumental and materialistic, is inherently incapable of providing the kind of visceral motivation that must inform the higher aspirations of a society—aspirations that are necessary to provide social cohesion. No one wants to go die in a ditch in some foreign country for a higher national GDP. No one wants to risk his life for greater employment opportunities or lower prices. People will fight and die for a way of life, but materialist technocracy has cut itself off from half of what people really value in life. A ruling philosophy that is concerned only with the how can never provide the why required to give a civilization some life force.

But now we are dismantling this cultural system, sometimes actively (as we see through the open hostility toward Western values displayed at many of our colleges and universities), but mostly passively, as we see in our elementary and secondary schools. Here, rather than open hostility toward the ideals of Christian culture, these ideals are treated with implicit indifference, which is just as bad.

We are now two or three generations away from a time when our culture was being passed on in our schools. We can still hear it articulated, if we listen, by our grandparents, to whom it was a living tradition. But our parents are less well-versed in it, and to their children, who were never taught it, it doesn't even amount to a heritage.

Although this abandonment is not necessarily explicit, it was intentional. George Steiner has aptly called it "planned amnesia." The intention too is now passing from cultural memory, since modern educators (not to mention everybody else) do not generally know the history of their own profession. But those familiar with the education battles around the turn of the 20th century can easily see its origins in John Dewey's progressivism and William Heard Kilpatrick's pragmatism, the twin ideologies that displaced the older classical education: progressivist political indoctrination (environmentalism, global warming, race and gender politics) or pragmatist job and life skills (drivers ed, sex education, STEM, and vocationalism in general).

All modern education stems from the implementation of Dewey's progressivism in the 1920s and the Life Adjustment Movement of the 1940s and early 1950s. They are inconsistent, of course (as Dewey, who later repudiated the pragmatism that hijacked his Progressive Education Movement, realized), but they have dominated education philosophy in America in an uneasy alliance ever since.

And so today, lacking the active cultural transmission that was the goal of classical education, there is nothing left by which a coherent culture can be passed on. Education has always been the means by which a culture is transferred from one generation to the next. But when the system of education no longer sees it as its role to perform this task, it is simply not done at all.

And since political indoctrination and job training do not amount to an education as we traditionally understand it, you get an uneducated citizenry, an acultural culture. Instead, we mistake technological sophistication for learning. We produce button-pushers thinking we have done our job when, in fact, all we have produced is technological barbarians.

The glue that holds a society together—shared beliefs and ideals—loses its hold, and you get cultural fragmentation, a fragmentation that, lacking a common culture, can only be brought back together by the charisma of a political strongman. And of course since the order is dependent upon a particularly leader, it is only assured until that particularly leader is gone.

We haven't faced it yet, but if we continue down the road of cultural disintegration, we too will face something like we now see in the Middle East. The founders knew full well the importance of those things that ground cultural cohesion, as their many remarks about the necessity of religion and morality to a free people attest. They knew that the absence of these things led to either autocracy or chaos.

Why Traditional Logic Doesn't Employ Truth Tables

One if the interesting things about this blog is that, while most of what I talk about is politics and culture, the post with the most continuing popularity is an older post I did on the difference between traditional and modern logic. I was going to continue that discussion in later posts but not only got rather busy, but ran into some conceptual problems in the next section of what is basically a pamphlet I wrote a few years ago that I have yet to resolve to my satisfaction.

In the meantime, here is a discussion of the differing views on truth conditionality that address some of the same issues I addressed in the earlier article.

One of the questions I get rather often from students and logic instructors about traditional logic is why it doesn't teach truth tables. Modern logic, the most common kind of logic encountered in high school and college, uses them, so why does traditional logic ignore them?

Many people encounter a smattering of logic in high school math courses, which teach a few of the rudiments of modern logic. Here, more than likely, they will encounter simple truth tables. Truth tables were invented by Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the the 20th century's most influential modern philosopher. He invented them to accompany the calculus into which modern analytic philosophers had transformed logic. They were seen a way to quickly solve for the truth of simple and complex logical propositions in the modern system.

Let's take the statement, "There are seven days in the week and twenty-four hours in a day." In the modern system of logic we would want to immediately reduce this down to its formal elements. Let's say that P = "there are seven days in the week" and that Q = "there are twenty-four hours in a day." If we did this, then we could represent the statement as follows:

P and Q 

How do we find out whether the statement "P and Q" is true? In modern logic, the truth value of this statement is determined by its elements--in this case, the statements signified by "P" and "Q". We know as a matter of simple common sense that the statement "P and Q" is true only when both the statements represented by "P" and "Q" are themselves true--in other words, if it is true to say that there are seven days in the week and if it is true to say that there are twenty-four hours in a day. If either one or both of these statements are false (in other words, if a week is made up of something other than seven days or if a day is made up of something other than 24 hours--or both), then the statement would be false.

Using truth tables, we would set forth all of the truth possibilities of P and Q so we could see clearly when "P and Q" is true and when it is false:

P     Q     P and Q

T     T           T

T     F           F

F     T           F

F     F           F

We don't really need to go to all this trouble to verify that a simple statement like "P and Q" is true. But what if you had a statement like "P and (Q or (If R, then S))"? When statements become this complex, truth tables can be an easier way to calculate their truth value.

So if truth tables make the determination of the truth of statements more easy to calculate, then why doesn't traditional logic teach them?

There are several answers to this question. The first is practical, the second is theoretical.

The Practical Usefulness of Truth Tables is Overstated

The first reason is that, although truth tables have certain technical applications, they are not practically useful in actual argument or discussion, since most statements used in everyday speech and even in academic conversation never get to the level of complexity that would require a truth table to figure them out. They are certainly helpful in certain scientific applications and for computer computer programming (modern logic's most practical application), but outside those fields, they are seldom needed.  

I have not only taught logic, but engaged in private and public debate for over 25 years. While I have made use of William of Sherwood's traditional mnemonic verse of the 19 valid syllogism forms and the procedure for backing into missing premises repeatedly (both of these are covered in my Traditional Logic, Book II), I have never had to resort to a truth table. 

This is partly the result of the fact that most real life argumentation is conducted in or reducible to categorical reasoning on which you cannot use truth tables anyway. This is because categorical reasoning operates on the basis of the relations between individual terms (which are neither true nor false, since only full statements can be true or false) and truth tables work only with hypothetical reasoning, which operation on the basis of relations between statements. In addition, even though modern logical techniques were developed primarily to deal with complex philosophical and scientific problems in an academic context, the vast majority of the reasoning you encounter even there consists simply in chain arguments (strings of simple arguments strung together) that don't require any advanced calculus to solve.

The Faulty Metaphysics Behind Modern Logic

The second reason for the absence of truth tables from traditional logic has to do with the philosophical differences between the traditional and modern systems of logic. To state it baldly, traditional logic doesn't believe in truth tables.

The reason they are used in one system and not the other has to do with a concept called truth functionality.  What is truth functionality?  “A compound proposition,” said Edward Simmons, “is said to be truth-functional when its truth as a whole depends solely upon the truth values of its component parts.”  In other words, the truth or falsity of its parts will tell us the truth or falsity of the whole.

In the statement above, "P and Q", we can tell its truth from its component parts. "P and Q" is called a "conjunctive proposition"--it conjoins P and Q. Traditional logicians believe that conjunctive statements are the only kind of statements whose truth can be "solved" in a truth table--the only kind of statements, in other words, that are truth functional. No other kinds of logical statements ("P or Q", "If P, then Q", etc.) are truth functional in this way.

The reason traditional logicians deny the truth functionality of hypothetical propositions has to do with the underlying assumptions about language and reality.  To illustrate this, let's take another simple statement, this time a conditional statement (This is where the problem with modern logic's assumptions become very clear):

If it rains, then my dog will get wet

In modern logic, we would "solve" for the truth of this statement using a truth table:

P     Q     If P then Q

T     T           T

T     F           F

F     T           T

F     F           T

This kind of statement is considered true in every possible case except when P is true and Q is false (the second line). Let's say my dog is an outside dog and has no protection from the rain. In that case, when it rained my dog would get wet--both P and Q would be true, and therefore it would be true to say (as on the first line of the truth table) that the entire statement, "if it rains my dog gets wet" is true.

But let's say it was raining, but my dog was in the garage, dry and cozy. In that case, it would be true to say that it was raining, but false to say that if it rains, then my dog gets wet (as indicated on the second line of the truth table). It rains, but my dog does not get wet. The statement would therefore be false.

But what about the other two possibilities, in other words, when it is not raining at all (when P is false and Q is either true or false--the last two lines of the truth table)? Why, as indicated in the truth table, do modern logicians say the statement would be true in those cases? 

As someone who has heard the explanations of why this is the case--as well as having tried to explain it to his own students in class--I can testify to the difficulty in trying to understand this. 

But the fact is that modern logic's treatment of the conditional statement (particularly its treatment of conditional statements in which the antecedent is false) is problematic not because it is complicated; it is problematic because it is problematic.

In the traditional system a conditional statement is considered true only if the fact that your dog gets wet really occurs as a result of the rain—in other words, if the statement asserts what is called a valid sequence.  To put it another way, there must be a real logical relation between the rain and your dog getting wet.  The fact of it raining must, in some way, materially imply that your dog will get wet.

In the modern system, however, there need be no real connection all.  All that is required is that, as a matter of fact, the consequent (my dog will get wet) is not false when the antecedent ( it rains) is true.  Unless this is the case, the statement is considered true.  Therefore, in the modern system, statements such as:

If the moon is made of green cheese, then ducks can swim

are considered true statements, since their antecedents ( in this case, "the moon is made of green cheese") is false at the same time that the consequent ("ducks can swim") is false.  In fact the antecedent is false and the consequent true, therefore (according to the modern logician) it is a true statement.

While modern logic considers this statement true, traditional logic sees it, again, for what it is: nonsense.  The moon being made of green cheese clearly has no relation (logical or otherwise) to the fact that ducks are able to swim.

In the traditional system, conditional statements are considered to assert a necessary connection between their elements (the antecedent and the consequent), while in modern logic the only connection has to do with the happenstance coincidence of the truth or falsity of the elements. There must be either a cause and effect or ground-consequent relation between the antecedent and the consequent. The rain and the dog getting wet are to be seen as having a fundamental metaphysical relation (in this case a cause-effect relation) to one another. The assumption behind modern logic is that such necessary connections either do not exist or that they do not need to be accounted for in our system of logic.

The underlying problem here is that modern logic is concerned with the attempt to quantify reality. It wants to turn logic into a kind of calculus. This was the dream of philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, who hoped that one day man could create what he called a "calculus ratiocinator"--a logic machine for the "solution" of logical problems. In many ways Leibniz was Aristotelian in his thinking (traditional logic is Aristotelian), but he would have had to have had very non-Aristotelian assumptions in order to believe that this was even possible.

Traditional logic does not attempt to reduce logic to a quantitative calculus, largely because it views logic as a linguistic and metaphysical art, not a technical mathematical calculus. Traditional logicians recognize a distinction between what is called extension and comprehension--on other words, that any comprehensive view of human reasoning would have to recognize both the quantitative aspects of human language, but also the qualitative. It rejects modern logics reduction of all human reasoning to extensionality.

Traditional logicians reject the idea that language can be quantified in the way that modern philosophers believe it can. Logic, according to the traditionalists, is inherently qualitative and logocentric (centered on the Word), and attempts to quantify logical language can only serve to distort the process of reasoning.

Behind the idea of such a calculus is a view of the world fundamentally at odds with traditional metaphysical beliefs. Ultimately, the only way logic can be made into a calculus is by denying the essential metaphysical nature of the world that logical language attempts to portray.

This, of course, is not a problem for the logical positivists who developed modern logic because they did not believe in traditional metaphysics, although, of the three people who wrote the book that put modern logic on the academic map (Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Wittgenstein, the latter of whom greatly influenced, but did not actually author the book) both Whitehead and Wittgenstein later repudiated it--for different reasons. 

Their progenitor is David Hume, the 18th century British empiricist philosopher who went so far as to question the rationality of the belief in cause and effect. What modern logic has done is to create a system of logic that honors Hume's positivism by ignoring metaphysical reality: You can "solve" an "If P then Q" statement by ignoring the metaphysical implication in it and taking account solely of the "truth value" of its elements. 

In the modern view, in other words, "If, ... then" statements do not posit either a cause/effect or ground/consequent relation. They operate basically like conjunctive statements, ignoring the very relation that those who use them actually mean to assert (cause/effect or ground/consequent).

It is logic for Humeans.

In other words, the question over truth conditionality--in addition to anything else that might be wrong with it--is the logical consequence of a faulty view of metaphysics.

Does science explain anything?

What we now call 'science' was once called 'natural philosophy.' But although in one sense these two terms mean the same thing, there is a sense in which they are still very different. Modern science came out of natural philosophy, but has changed into something else.

In the old natural philosophy, the purpose of inquiry into nature was to better know what creation is. It taught nomenclature (the names of things), taxonomy (how the thing fits in with other things), morphology (how things are internally structured), and scientific method (how to investigate natural things). It was focused on the wonder and mystery of creation itself. It was focused on apprehending the natures of natural things and thereby appreciating them. It was a philosophy of wonder.

Much of modern science, however, has a different agenda. Francis Bacon (and, in a different way, René Descartes) began to change the very purpose of investigation into nature. For the first time, the belief arose that nature was not there primarily to be known, but to be used or controlled. Bacon said he wanted to put nature on the rack to give up its secrets—not primarily so that we could understand or behold it, but so that we could use it for our own betterment or advantage.

"Knowledge," Bacon said, "is power."

Bacon and Descartes seem to have meant well: They wanted to use science to improve the human condition. But once science came to be seen as an instrument to control nature for an extrinsic purpose—which it has done rather convincingly—the other purposes, such as that of understanding and wonder, tend to get shunted to the side.

Its success in accomplishing its new purpose has also caused science to develop a rather big head. Many modern scientists have become so enamored of the power of science that they now think that scientific inquiry can answer all of our questions. This belief—that science is the chief or even the only way to determine truth—is called "scientism": the religion of science.

Whereas in the old natural science there was no competition between belief in God and the study of nature, the scientism that began to gather strength in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries eventually resulted in the view that science and theology were competing modes of belief and that as science gained explanatory power, it would eventually push out religion.

It is said that Pierre-Simon Laplace, the famous French scientist, once gained an interview with Napoleon in order to present him with a copy of one of his books. "They tell me," said the Emperor, "that you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator."

"Sire," Laplace famously responded, "I have no need of that hypothesis."

The "God of the gaps"
In fact, one of the arguments offered by non-believing scientists against religious belief is called the "God of the gaps" argument. If you look at the history of science, they say, what you see is that, at first, there were many questions which science could not answer. These questions were simply dismissed as unanswerable and attributed to God.

In other words, if there was some question science couldn't answer, we would simply say, "God did it," and that was considered the final word.

But, say these scientists, as science has grown in power and subtlety, there are fewer and fewer questions science is unable to answer. There are fewer and fewer mysteries about which we have to resort to the "God did it" solution. Furthermore, if we follow this trajectory into the future, we can see that, as science continues to grow in its explanatory effectiveness, it will one day be able to answer all the questions about nature that we have formerly had to invoke God in order to explain.
In short, soon science will have explained everything and God will be made irrelevant.

We will have "no need for that hypothesis."

But is this true? Are these scientists right to say that the fund of unanswered questions about nature is being slowly diminished by science, and that it will one day have answered all of these questions?

The answer is "No."

Why the "God of the gaps" argument does not work
There is an assumption underlying the "God of the gaps" argument that is ridiculous on the face of it. In fact, it is a great example of the static analysis fallacy—the fallacy of assuming that what you are examining is somehow fixed and not in the process of changing.

The assumption of the "God of the gaps" argument against religious belief is that there is a fixed number of questions about the natural world, some of which have been answered and some of which have not, so that every question that is answered reduces the number of unanswered questions by one.
Now this is obviously absurd, since science does not operate in a world in which there is a fixed and unchangeable number of questions. In fact, as science proceeds in its path of discovery, it not only discovers answers to unanswered questions, it discovers new questions which it never would have thought to ask. New discoveries not only answer old questions, they produce new questions.

This problem becomes even more pronounced after a scientific paradigm shift. When Einstein's theory of relativity displaced Newtonian mechanics, it offered an improved system of explanation. But it also redefined mass, energy, time, and space, creating a whole new set of problems needing a solution. Quantum mechanics too introduced a whole new set of questions which no one would ever have thought to ask until Neils Bohr, Wolfgang Pauley, and Werner Heisenberg thought to ask them.
Some would argue that the number of unanswered scientific questions is not diminishing at all—that, in fact, because of the rate of the appearance of new questions compared to the number of questions having already obtained answers, the number of unanswered questions is actually increasing all the time. Natural mysteries for which science has no answer, far from being eliminated, are actually multiplying.

Think of it this way: If you take a flashlight and point it straight down, close to the ground, you will see a small circle of light. And if you raise the flashlight higher from the ground you will see a much larger circle of light. Our scientific flashlight today illuminates much more than the small circle of knowledge we had in the past. But notice this: The small circle of light borders only a small portion of darkness, but the larger circle of light reveals a much larger circumference of darkness. So, too, does the circumference of our ignorance increase as the area of our scientific knowledge becomes greater.

The more we know, the more we realize how much we do not know. Science is a light in the darkness of physical reality, but as its light increases, so does its estimate of the amount of darkness that is in need of light.

Many scientists postulate that they are in the process of closing in on some ultimate terminus in which our understanding of nature—and our ability to control it—are perfect: a sort of scientific utopia. But the idea of arriving at some position of full knowledge of nature becomes increasingly implausible as we see such a terminus move further away from us the closer we think we're getting.

This problem—of never being able to make headway toward a comprehensive explanation of nature—has been underscored by the investigations of quantum physics. According to many of its chief architects and many of its most devoted adherents, quantum mechanics has not only failed to make the nature of reality clearer, but has fundamentally undermined confidence in science as a mode of explanation at all.

Can science explain anything?
One of the themes of modern science has been that a knowledge of the parts of things reveals more clearly the nature of the things themselves. This is why much of modern scientific investigation involves analyzing the most elemental parts of something. This is just what quantum mechanics has done. The problem is that when they finally found the tools to investigate the behavior of the subatomic world, scientists did not find what they thought they would find. What they found, far from making nature more understandable, has made it even more paradoxical.

Light, which logically cannot be both a wave and a particle, is both (a photon). Certain particles disappear and then reappear somewhere else instantaneously (a quantum leap). Subatomic particles do not exist anywhere until we observe them (said Neils Bohr). Measurement defines what is being measured (said Heisenburg). "The more successes the quantum theory enjoys," said Einstein, "the more stupid it looks." But even Einstein could not stop it. Though he rejected it until the day he died, he could not refute it.

As with relativity, quantum physics redefined basic scientific concepts—'particle,' 'wave,' 'position,' 'momentum,' 'trajectory'—all had to be given new meanings. As it turned out, many of the old questions that had been "answered" were not the right questions to ask in the first place.
Not only did quantum physics show that many of the assumptions of classical Newtonian physics were incomplete (and in some cases simply wrong), but it brought the whole purpose of science as an explanatory construct into question. Events at the quantum level, it found, are governed by the rules of probability. At the level of the smallest and most elemental things—where we finally get to the bottom of things—it turns out that nature does not follow the scientific script.

So confounding have been the findings of quantum physics that its original and chief exponent, Niels Bohr, finally gave up on science as an explanatory discipline altogether. He talked of a new "epistemological situation" brought about by particle physics in which we can no longer apply the concepts of causality at all. And with causality goes logic itself. "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory," said Bohr, "has not understood it."

Traditional Christian theism does not believe in a "God of the gaps" whose relevance can be eliminated by the progress of science. God is not there to answer our "how" questions in the first place. Many of these can be explained by studying the world He created, complete with the inherent mechanisms implanted in it that make it go. God is there to answer our "why" questions—the questions science can't even begin to answer.

Science, in Bohr's view, is no longer in the explanation business. "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out [what] nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." All it can do is describe and predict. It can only say "how," it can never say "why."

Modern science began with mysteries it could not explain; it has brought itself full circle. When science launched off on its own and shed the label 'natural philosophy,' it set off on a journey to explain everything. But here we are at the beginning of the twenty-first century and we are still being told by Bohr's scientific descendants that not only can science not explain the why of everything, it can't explain anything, a position that radically undermines the rationalistic pretensions of many modern scientists.

Maybe the goal of science should not be to resolve mysteries. The classical view of nature—as something to wonder at instead of to take apart—has virtues that we would do well to remember.
Under the classical view, the role of science is not to solve every question presented by nature, but rather to bring us face to face with things themselves—things which are essentially mysterious. Science tells us how the mystery operates; philosophy, why it is here at all; and theology, Who it is Who is behind it all.

Was the Protestant Reformation Opposed to Graeco-Roman Thought? A Second Response to David Quine, Part II: Philipp Melanchthon

Philipp Melanchthon

This is the second in a continuing series of posts on whether classical education is somehow opposed to the Christian worldview. This is a claim made by David Quine, a Christian curriculum developer who has made this charge in several speeches and in comments on this blog.

Quine not only claims that the study of the classics is inconsistent with Christianity in general, but more specifically with the thinking of the Protestant Reformation. Says Quine:

It is exactly this amalgamation of Greco-Roman thought to true Christianity which [Francis] Schaeffer described in his writings as a departure from true Christianity and which the Reformation Church leaders considered contrary to orthodox teaching of the Church ( that is, heresy) and many of whom were willing to give up their earthly lives for this issue. 

There are a number of problems with this statement, the chief of which is that it is clearly not true. In actuality, the Protestant reformers, to a man, were not only the beneficiaries of a classical education, but proponents of it. They not only knew the great authors of Latin and Greece, but esteemed many of them highly. They not only learned from them, but taught them. They not only taught them, but openly advocated that others teach them.

Let's talk first about Philipp Melanchthon. Melanchthon was the first systematic theologian of the Reformation and was, in some respects, its intellectual leader.

When Melanchthon was ten years old, he learned to read the Greek and Latin poets, then the histories and dramas. "This habit," he said, "gradually led me to the ancient classics. From them I acquired a vocabulary and style."

He studied the structure of the orations of Cicero (the Roman orator) and Demosthenes (the Greek). At the University of Tubingen, he then took up Virgil, Galen, and others. When he was seventeen years old, he began to teach there, with classes on the Romans Vergil, Terence, Livy, and Cicero. He even conducted translations of Terence, portions of the Roman biographer Plutarch, and the Greek philosopher Aristotle's Posterior Analytics.

When he became the Professor of Greek at the University of Wittenburg (the academic home at the time of Martin Luther), he gave lectures on the Epistle of Titus, wrote two treatises on Plutarch, the Greek philosopher Athenagoras, Greek philosopher Plato's Symposium, wrote a Greek dictionary, a Greek hymn, and three books on rhetoric—classical subjects all. He published a handbook on dialectics, edited the Greek playwright Aristophanes' Clouds, and wrote a Greek grammar.

He encouraged his pupils to translate works by the Roman philosopher Seneca, and the Roman playwrights Plautus  and Terence, a practice of which, said classicist Theodore Arthur Buenger, "Luther approved."

Here is Dr. Buenger's account of Melanchthon's educational programme:

In 1528 appeared the Saxon Visitation Articles ... which give an outline of the school system as Melanchthon wished it to be. In the first place, teachers should be careful to teach only Latin, not German, Greek, or Hebrew. The primary School was to consist of three classes, which, however, were not to he absolved in one year. In the first the pupil was to study the alphabet, the Lord's prayer, the Creed, Donatus, and Cato's Disticha; in the second class, he was to be occupied with Aesop (in Latin), extracts from the writings of the contemporaneous authors Mosellanus and Erasmus, and with Terence and Plautus. Besides, there was to be drill in grammar. The third division was to take up Vergil, Ovid, and the Letters or the De Officiis of Cicero, and to continue the study of grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric. In all classes the boys were obliged to talk Latin with the teacher and with one another. This elementary school was followed by the Gymnasium, in which the study of Latin was continued, Greek and Hebrew were begun, and Greek was continued through Isocrates, Xenophon, Plutarch, Hesiod, Theognis, etc. ... "We still have the correspondence between him [Melanchthon] and fifty-six cities asking counsel and assistance in founding and conducting Latin schools and gymnasia" [said James W. Richard] ... Nearly all the Latin schools of the sixteenth century in Germany were founded according to Melanchthon's directions. His textbooks were used in all of them. 

According to Richard, this curriculum was instituted at the University of Marburg, then at Jena, then at Tubingen, Leipzig, Heidelburger, Frankfurt, Rostock, and Greisfswald. Said Buenger, "The outcome was a union of classical antiquity and of all the sciences and philosophy with religious knowledge."

If Quine is concerned with "synchretism" (the mixing of Graeco-Roman thought and Christianity) in Dante, this should really concern him.

In fact, the idea that the Protestant Reformation was somehow opposed to classical education--the study of Latin, the liberal arts, and the study of the Greek and Roman classics—is not only untrue, but precisely the opposite of the truth. Here is Buenger on the actual historical situation:

We may thus say that the leaders of Protestantism were all of them well trained in the Classics, that they had in fact a knowledge of the ancient literatures which is rare nowadays even among professional classicists. They appreciated the classical authors and made them a part of their lives. That this heritage of antiquity might not be lost to their descendants they incorporated them in their Schools. Protestantism adopted humanism as its educational standard.  

You would have to falsify the historical record in order to maintain the position that there is some kind of opposition between the Reformation and classical education.