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.

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.

From the Vault: Harry Potter and the Attack of the Critics

I am still asked what I think of the Harry Potter books, and, in fact, was just asked about this again recently. This is my article from the Spring, 2008 Classical Teacher magazine addressing this question:

It was Christmas time at number four Privet Drive, and Harry Potter found himself alone in his room, wondering whether anything could be worse than another yuletide spent in the home of the Dursleys. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, whose idea of a yuletide celebration never seemed to include actually giving Harry anything, had already informed him in the harshest tones that the gift he had asked for, the thing he wanted the most, was absolutely unacceptable. These kinds of judgments usually applied only to him, and not to their son Dudley, who almost always got what he wanted.

In fact, Dudley had asked for the same thing this Christmas as Harry: a copy of the newest in a series of books by a British author about a boy whose parents have been killed and is living with his unsympathetic aunt and uncle, and who, it turns out, has magical powers which he is not supposed to use outside school--a boy, in fact, just like him.

But even Dudley would not be getting his wish this Christmas, since the Dursleys were like many other parents on their block: conflicted about whether such books--books about young boys who use witchcraft, but who nevertheless engage in seemingly noble acts, should be so terribly popular--and read by their children.

...Well, you see where all this is going, don’t you?

That the greatest publishing event in history should turn out to have been a children’s book about an English orphan boy in training to be wizard has, depending on who you are, been a cause for celebration--or a matter of concern. For the parents whose children wait for months for the next in the series--and who are likely to disappear for a day or two in their rooms after they arrive, it is fact that either delights or horrifies you.

The Harry Potter books are indeed terribly popular, and many parents wonder what they should think of them. Generally speaking, there are two basic questions abour the Harry Potter books: First, are they bad? Second, if they’re not bad, are they good?

By “bad”, of course, could mean a number of things. Some people think the books are positively dangerous, since they use positive images of witchcraft to tell their story, and there is a concern that this could have a detrimental influence on children. Others think they are simply not good literature.

Let’s first address the first question: are the Harry Potter books dangerous? And the answer, of course, is “yes.” But there is a another, related question that naturally follows this one: Does that mean that the books should not be read? After all, it would seem to naturally follow that, if a book is dangerous it should not be read. All books that are dangerous should not be read; the Harry Potter books are dangerous; therefore they should not be read. Quod est demonstrandum ("It has been demonstrated).

But is it that simple?

When I am asked by a parent whether the Harry Potter books are dangerous, my answer is, “Absolutely.” “In fact,” I point out, “all literature is dangerous.”

Many parents of my generation will remember the fellow students they ran into in college 1970’s and 80’s who were hijacked by the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. These were people who left home and came to college, where they encountered Rand’s novels the Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, and were overcome and captured by Rand’s egoistic ideology. Why were they so swept away? For one reason: they hadn’t read anything else. By and large, these were people who were not well-read in the first place. They were ignorant of the great books, and so, in encountering Rand, they mistakenly concluded that they had come face to face with great thinking. They were not used to ideas, and so, to use G. K. Chesterton’s words, the one idea went to their heads like “one glass of wine to a starving man.”

“Literature,” says Chesterton, “classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone ... You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas.”

To a child who is not well-read, Harry Potter is dangerous--and so is any other book he or she may read.

The best defense against one idea is not fewer ideas, but more of them, and the best defense against one book is a whole host of them. Being widely read, in other words, is the best innoculation against the dangers of literature. Being familiar with a lot of ideas is the best way to protect yourself against one bad one. Being widely read enables a person to not only see an idea, but, as Chesterton pointed out, to see through it.

Literature is dangerous--except when taken in large doses.

If my theory is right, then the Harry Potter books are only dangerous to children who are not well-read. But what about the witchcraft? It would seem here that the critics have a point. But let us think about this a little further.

I think there are two responses to the concerns over witchcraft in Harry Potter. The first is to ask whether the so-called “witchcraft” in these books of the same kind as that prohibited in the Scriptures (it is usually Christians who have this concern). I have my doubts about whether what is discussed in Scripture--namely necromancy--is really what is going on here, or whether what we have in the Harry Potter books is what I have called “fairy tale magic”. Waving wands and exploding birds just don’t seem to be the same kind of thing as calling up the spirits of the dead for purposes of prophesying, as in the case of the Witch of Endor.

The magic in the Harry Potter books seems mostly to be a sort of natural magic, used to manipulate things to do what we want them to do. If this is the case, then we might well ask how it differs fundamentally from science and technology, which do the same thing with processes that, to most of us (with the exception of a few magicians we call scientists) are just as mysterious as what happens when Harry Potter waves his wand.

The twentieth century science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said that "any technology, when sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic." I think he was right. But if you doubt it, then think about any one of the numerous uses to which you put technology every day and explain how they work to manipulate the word around you: the microwave, the garage door opener, your cellphone, or, for that matter, your car. By the same criteria that we would condemn the kind of magic used in Harry Potter, we would also have to condemn the technological devices that we use numerous times every day.

But even if the “magic” in Harry Potter posed a problem, there is something to be said for it being out in the open. In fact, if there are problems with the Harry Potter books, they hit us right in the face: the better we may see and assess them. How much better than a book in which the problems are underneath the surface, and that pass into our mind unnoticed. For this reason I am much more comfortable with my children reading Harry Potter, than, say Lois Lenski’s The Giver, or Katherine Paterson’s, Bridge to Teribithia, whose subtle messages are an undertow that cannot be seen on the surface.

Another charge thrown against the Harry Potter books is that they are not great literature. Harold Bloom, one of the great literary critics of our time, leveled this charge against the books in an article in the New York Times. After it ran, the editors called and told Bloom that they had never seen anything like it: they had received 400 negative response letters and only one positive one, and the latter they said they suspected he had written himself!

But those who think that the Harry Potter books are dangerous should be less concerned, not more, by the thought that they are not great literature. Why? Because not only is literature dangerous, but the better a piece of literature, the more dangerous it is. This may seem like a paradox, but it is really just common sense. Anything that captures your heart (and the better a piece of literature is, the more it will do this), can propel you in the right direction--or the wrong one.

There is a famous Latin phrase: Corruptio optimi pessima (“The corruption of the best is the worst”) In his “Screwtape Letters,” C. S. Lewis applies this principle by pointing out that the great saints and the great sinners are made of the same stuff.

Valdemort is very, very bad--but only because he could have been very, very good if he had not gone wrong.

In the case of Harry Potter, the books cannot be that bad because they are not that great. There is a difference between great literature and good literature, and they both have their place. When it comes to fiction, a great book is not only a book that you read again and again, or that speaks some great truth: it is a book that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a book in which there is something behind what you initially see--a book in which there is more than meets the eye.

There have been many criticisms of the Harry Potter books, but for my money the most insightful remark anyone has made about them was that made by Medelaine L’Engle, the author of A Wrinkle in Time and several other classic stories. In a May, 2008 interview in Newsweek magazine, L’Engle made an interesting observation: “It’s a nice story,” she said of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, “but there’s nothing underneath it.”

There’s nothing underneath it. That is the difference between a great book and a merely good one. Great books have something underneath them.

There are many things to commend the Potter books as reading material. I happen to think that her characters are well-drawn and compelling. In fact, they remind me very much of some of Dicken’s characters: they have the same vividness, they have the same reality and fundamentally comic nature--even the bad ones. She even gives them names that express something about their character: Bathsheba Babbling, Bathilda Bagshot, and Severus Snape are not that far from Josiah Bounderby, Mr. Bumble, or Ebeneezer Scrooge in descriptiveness and propriety.

And yet there is something different. Dickens’s characters often tell us something fundamental about human nature itself. His stories do this too. There is something “underneath” Dickens’ stories in a way that there is not in the Harry Potter books. While Rowling’s stories are about what they are about, Dickens’ stories are about more than what they are about. Chesterton once said that the aim of good prose words is to mean what they say, while the aim of good poetic words is to mean what they do not say. There is a poetry about great books that is missing from merely good ones.

In his book The Death of Christian Culture, John Senior makes a distinction between what he calls the 100 great books and 1,000 good books. He makes the distinction not to dismiss the good books, but only to put them in their proper place. In fact, he says, it is important to be familiar with the 1,000 good books before even attempting the 100 great books.

To say that the Harry Potter books are not great literature is not an argument against reading them; it is only an argument against the misconception that they are great. Because a book is only good and not great is not a reason for not reading it: it is only a reason for not misunderstanding its place.

In some sense, there is no arguing with success. There is something to be said for the argument that J. K. Rowling’s creation must have something to it for it to have been so successful. In fact, she spins an exciting yarn. As good books go, it is a pretty good good book. But second things, said C. S. Lewis, suffer when put first. He didn’t say what their fate was when put last. But neither mistake does the books--or ourselves--any favors.

More New Atheist Follies: P. Z. Myers tries to take on C. S. Lewis and the result is not pretty

Once again, the New Atheists have approached the black monolith of a philosophical argument, scratched their heads in mystification, and started jumping around in irritation. But unlike the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, they have come away from the experience completely unenlightened, the only benefit being that they got a little exercise.

This happens repeatedly: Some atheist scientist who's been fussing around with his Bunsen burner and test tube walks out of the laboratory and tries his hand at philosophy, thinking that the skills he acquired taking his biology degree somehow transfer over into the kind of conceptual analysis required in philosophy. Lawrence Krauss and Jerry Coyne are constantly embarrassing themselves by doing this.

This time it is P. Z. Myers, trying to make sense of C. S. Lewis' "Argument from Self-Destruction" (as it is termed by the Encylopedia of Philosophy). The argument is designed to show that the materialist position is self-defeating: If materialism is held to be true metaphysically, then it is false in reality.

Here is Lewis' statement, taken out of the context, of course, of the chapter in his book Miracles in which it appears, nevertheless sufficient:

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

Myers' response? "Then how could he write down such illogical inanity as this?" So we expect to hear some logically coherent response to it from the cocky Myers. Addressing the first three sentences, he says:

See, there’s his problem. Brains didn’t just happen. They aren’t merely some peculiar arrangement of atoms. They have a long contingent history in which they were shaped by selection to have particular properties that allowed bearers of slightly more functional nervous systems to outlive, outbreed bearers of cruder brains. An absence of a designer does not imply that the only other alternative is random chaos.

Myers apparently considers this a cogent response. Now first of all, how does it refute what Lewis says―that the brain is a mere arrangement of atoms―to say that the arrangement of atoms has a history? Of course arrangements of atoms have a history. Lewis doesn't deny it, in fact his whole point in this section of his book is that the materialist position is that any brain state is simply the effect of prior physical causes. Exactly why Myers thinks this is somehow in conflict with what Lewis is saying is a mystery. And why does he think the statement that brains are merely peculiar arrangements of atoms is inconsistent with those atoms having a history?

This is typical of New Atheist arguments: They just repeat some Just So story about how something came about and think that constitutes an explanation. In this case, it wouldn't matter if it did: It still doesn't address Lewis' point.

So, after jumping around in irritation at the first part and beating his hands on the ground, he tries to take on the second part:

First, you can’t trust your thinking to be true. You have to test and verify all the time. You can believe in thought without believing in gods: we all build empirical models of how the world works and test them constantly. From an early age, we noticed that when we dropped things they fell to the ground; when we learned to walk we stumbled and learned that we can fall to the ground, and it hurts; we learned that when we fell off the table it hurt a lot more than when we fell while standing on the ground. And now, when I look out my second floor window, I know jumping out of it would probably do me significant damage, despite never having actually tried it. 

Most of what we believe isn’t derived from the pure and perfect reasoning power of our flawless brains—it’s learned by trial and error by brains that are often afflicted with stubbornly bad ideas.

I'm sorry, but this response is so utterly bone-headed it's hard not to just dismiss it and go on the next bone-headed New Atheist pronouncement and the next one, ad infinitum. He literally doesn't understand what Lewis is saying.

Myers apparently thinks Lewis is trying to prove the existence of God with this argument, which, of course, he clearly is not. He's trying to show that the whole concept of truth―whether it's the truth of the position that God exists or the truth of the position that "you can't trust your thinking to be true"―is impossible on the materialist account of reality.

If your brain is merely an arrangement of atoms, then what can "truth" possibly mean? On what basis do we call one arrangement of atoms "true" and another "false"? The only basis on which we could privilege one over the other is if there is something above and beyond arrangements of atoms. But materialists don't believe in anything beyond arrangements of atoms―at least not if they're consistent materialists (there is another question).

The only atheists consistent on this point are the Platonist ones, like Bertrand Russell, who basically have to posit metaphysical entities. If there is such a thing as "truth," then it is metaphysical. But materialism denies the metaphysical. Therefore nothing, not even materialism can be "true."

That's why it's been called the "Argument from Self-Destruction": It's a description of how materialism defeats itself. It has nothing to do with proving God. You have to actually understand what somebody is saying in order to even argue against them. And Myer's doesn't even get that far.

I suggest he stick with arguing against thinkers more on his philosophical level, like Ken Ham. With Lewis, he's completely out of his water.

Is human nature an endangered species?

There are certain things that we all used to take for granted. There were no debates about them because almost no one disagreed about them.

Up until about 15 years ago, no one would have thought that marriage was anything but a relationship between a man and a woman—not even gays. This was a time when the biological sex you were born into the world with was actually considered an indication of your gender.

And you wouldn't have to go back even that far to find yourself in a time when everyone expected that boys would use the boy's bathroom and girls the girl's bathroom.

But today, on issue after issue, the traditional view of human sexuality is being challenged. No longer are we allowed to believe what everyone in every culture in every era of human history has believed until just a few years ago.

The new view of human sexuality now being imposed on us declares that men and woman are interchangeable: that there is no meaningful difference between the two. The distinction between males and females, we are told, is arbitrary and socially constructed, and to believe anything else is discriminatory.

The reigning philosophy behind this new view of gender is called "constructivism." Constructivism is the view that the things which we have always assumed are basic to our nature—such as gender—are the result not of anything intrinsic to us, but purely the result of the environment we grow up in.

Boys are boys because, when they were growing up, they were taught to play with trucks and girls are girls because they were taught to play with dolls: Had we switched the trucks and the dolls, boys would be girls and girls would be boys.

If you think this sounds preposterous, just go down to your local university sociology department. There are people who actually believe this. In fact, it is the reigning academic paradigm in the social sciences today: There is no such thing as "human nature." Who and what we are—including (perhaps especially) our gender—is purely a product of our culture. Had our culture been different, we would have been different.

And though this sounds preposterous to those of us who believe in a God-given and perennial human nature—or plain biology for that matter, it is the view that lies behind the same-sex marriage movement, the transgender rights movement, and numerous other and more exotic beliefs championed by the "LGBT" movement.

You can now "self-identify" as any gender you like. And the thing about it is that you are no longer limited to just two genders. Facebook, for example, now offers 52 different gender categories for its users.

Indeed the number of gender categories seems to be limited only by the inventiveness of the human imagination.

No word yet from Facebook or anyone else whether we can arbitrarily choose a "racial identity" and decide which one we want to "self-identify" as. Just imagine what would happen if a White person decided to "self-identify" as an African-American.

"But wait," you say. "I thought gay rights groups thought that sexual orientation was inborn?" And that's true. Except on Tuesdays. Tuesday is the day that it becomes politically inconvenient to be a constructivist. It is the day when the political benefits of saying that gender is inborn exceed the benefits of saying exactly the opposite—like in court cases where saying that people are born gay helps you qualify for designation as a "suspect class" in anti-discrimination laws.

No one ever said consistency was a strong suit of the Cultural Revolutionaries.

Of course if you question any of this, you will be called a bigot. If you point out the inconsistencies you called hateful. And if you point out there is no good science to support it, you will have your sanity questioned. Under these circumstances, who is there brave enough to point out that the emperor has no clothes?

But this is the way ideology works; it is how cultural radicalism manifests itself. But this too shall pass away.

The gender ideology that currently dominates government, academia, and the media is having its day, but, like all such fads it will eventually be eclipsed by something else, hopefully better. That is the way of the world.

History has a way of correcting for nonsense, and human nature can't be wished away and will eventually reassert itself. In the meantime, we just have to keep articulating the simple and obvious truths about human beings. There will come a time when when they will be recognized as simple and obvious once again.

Music for Cultural Zombies: A meditation on the new U2 album

The following article has been released and is available free of charge from Vital Remnants

I was the guy at my high school who knew all the hot bands--and the ones who would be hot even though nobody knew it yet.

I remember when I had Queen's first three albums before anyone had ever heard of them and found out they were coming to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, a mid-size venue for Los Angeles County. I convinced a few of my friends (who I don't think had ever heard of them) to go with me. "Killer Queen" had been a moderate hit the previous year, but that was all anyone other than me know about them. Then, about two weeks before the concert, "Bohemian Rhapsody" hit the airwaves. There we were, the only ones around with tickets.

At a reunion not too long after graduating from college, an old college roommate came up to me and said, "You know, you used to play music from all these bands that no one had ever heard of. And, a few months later, they would be really popular. "So tell me, what's going be popular next?" I don't remember what I said, but I hope it was something like, "Polka. Trust me."

Then there was the friend at my fraternity, who, upon discovering I was a wealth of knowledge of the pop music world, would grill me every time he saw me about some band or another. I was walking through the lobby of the University of California Library one day and he stopped me. "Okay, I think I've got you now." And he proceeded to formulate some question having to do with a band from Canada which was the only band that had gotten so far on the charts in America--or some such thing. "You can't possibly know that!"

I looked at him calmly, and said, "April Wine," as I turned and walked out the automatic doors, leaving him standing there dumbfounded (This is what passed for important knowledge at that time).

I'm trying to figure out how I knew all this, since, at the time, there was no Internet and very little information available on what is now the object of a whole industry. There was Circus magazine, which you could obtain at one of the few record stores around, Melody Maker, a British magazine―if you tolerate all the coverage of British bands that didn't even have American releases. And then, of course, Robert Hilburn's articles in the "Calendar" section of the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles was a great place to live if you liked rock music, since it was always on everyone's tour schedule. I saw a lot of bands live growing up there. Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, Queen, Kiss, Yes, Peter Frampton, Bob Seger, Cheap Trick, Jackson Browne, Al Stewart, The Dictators, Rush, UFO, Talking Heads, the B-52s, the Kinks, Kenny Loggins, Journey, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Gentle Giant, Thin Lizzy, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Sparks, and Be Bop Deluxe. There were others. I saw some of them more than once.

I remember a friend of mine and I going to see Devo at the Whiskey A Go Go before they hit it big in the early 80s with "Whip It." It was also before they began performing as their own opening act at their concerts without anyone knowing about it. Before the show, my friend Wes and I had a couple hours to kill and we were walking down the Sunset Strip, seeing the sights. Wes had a T-shirt with a picture of the Tubes on it. The Tubes were a moderately popular band in the early 80s. As we were talking, a fairly tall guy walked up to Wes and said, "I like your T-shirt." It was Fee Waybill, lead singer of the Tubes. They were playing at a club down the street.

I'm thinking about all this now that I've listened to the new U2 album that is partly famous because iTunes has released it for free.

U2 is one of the few classic rock bands that is still together and writing new music. Like the Heartbreakers, who also have a new release, U2 is one of the many classic rock bands that believed in meta-narratives. They couldn't actually provide any, but they at least believed they existed. Aside from disco and other subgenres in pop music at that time that were about little other than having fun (through various means, including sex and drugs), many of the classic rock bands at least attempted to say something they thought might be significant. Most of the time they ended up trying to say too much, in which case they ended up just being pretentious (I'm thinking of Rush here).

Among the most pretentious musical events ever was, of course, the movie "Tommy," a so-called "rock opera," with music and performances by the Who. Because it was produced by a popular rock band, everyone was expected to suspend critic judgment and talk about how profound it was, a critical assessment commonly voiced by such expressions as "Oh wow" or "That was so radical" (expressions that were considered high praise among us knuckle-headed teenagers of the time).

Of course, there was nothing profound about "Tommy" at all. It wasn't really about anything--or at least anything important. But everyone was expected to think highly of it because it was the Who and the Who were cool.

The only rock act of the time that made any real sense was Alice Cooper, and that was only because his act was a Vaudevillian stage play wherein the character he played was shown going to Hell (where, incidentally, he belonged). All of it, of course, was a tongue-in-cheek. No one took Alice Cooper seriously, especially Alice Cooper: He spent half of his stage act making fun of himself, dispensing with the need for the rest of us to do it. I still consider it a favor.

And there's not much good you can say about Kiss, but at least there was no pretense to their unadulterated hedonism.

When it comes to popular culture you have to be thankful for small things. Bands like Pink Floyd, Yes, and Genesis, although they never pretended to say much that was very compelling (well, maybe Pink Floyd did), their attempt to say something could at least be taken as a bow to the idea that there were things about life worth saying that had some importance in this life and, sometimes, beyond it.

They at least tried to say something big, and if they couldn't find anything particularly big to say, they said it big. In fact, the lack of any substantive message was more than made up for by the size of the show. Pink Floyd's "The Wall" tour, and virtually all the concerts of groups like Yes and Genesis (when they were led by Peter Gabriel), were huge spectacles. They were big, bold, and gaudy.

Nostalgia for metanarratives

I wonder what it says about us now that bands no longer make much of an effort to actually put on a show? Today's rock bands don't even attempt to say anything big. They have small things to say and they expend little effort in saying them.

No one writes a song like John Lennon's "Imagine" anymore, a song which evokes a wholly different world. In one sense that's good, since I can't imagine any world in which I would less like to live. I don't want to live in a world in which there is "nothing to kill or die for," or where there is "above us, only sky."

But what's worse than living in a world in which songwriters write songs about worlds that are not very good worlds is a world in which no one writes songs about other worlds at all.

We don't live in a world in which songwriters can't write such songs; we live in a world in which they won't. It's not that they can't say anything big because they don't know how; rather, it is because they don't believe there is anything big to say.

Many of the rock bands of the 70s and 80s were pretentious because what had to say was less important than they seem to think it was. Now it is considered pretentious to say anything important in the first place.

In Jean Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, he defines postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives." Our culture now doesn't believe there is any one narrative in which we can all participate, but only smaller, subnarratives under which we gather only briefly and for some small comfort, before having to disperse back to our atomistic individuality. "The narrative function," says Lyotard, "is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, is great goal."

We got the world John Lennon hoped for. Unfortunately it is a world in which a song expressing hope for such a world could not be written.

What we are left with in a world without metanarratives is a world in which there is nostalgia about a world with metanarratives. Has anyone noticed the recent blizzard of shows about "the 60s"? Why are we engaged in this frenzy of nostalgia for the 60s?

I'll tell you why.

We look back longingly on the 60s because it was when John F. Kennedy announced his vision for putting a man on the Moon. It was when Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Civil Rights Crusade and the March on Washington, D.C. It was when Lyndon Johnson launched the Great Society programs. there were grand causes and

What do we do now? The big, bold imaginative quest, like the Apollo program of the 60s and 70s, is too expensive, or too troublesome, or simply not realistic. It doesn't address any of our current priorities, the chief of which is what benefits me personally. The safe, comfortable little individualistic world in which we live militates against it. We got what we wanted: a bottomless pit of information and goods from anywhere on earth. We've got air conditioning microwave ovens, and wide screen TV.

Was there something else we needed? Comfort kills culture.

Our contracted imaginations are simply incapable of even formulating any kind of grand vision. And we try to find causes big enough for crusades, but they're getting harder and harder to find. All the cultural walls have been scaled. All the barriers have been broken. All the cultural landmarks have been removed.

And besides, isn't The Walking Dead coming on in a few minutes?

The best we can do is something like gay rights. But that's a poor excuse for a crusade. Despite the comparisons with Blacks, gays were never enslaved, they never had to live in separate neighborhoods or go to inferior schools or had to drink at separate drinking fountains.

Never happened.

Discrimination against gays is largely a myth. In fact, they're wealthier than everybody else on average and have political clout way out of proportion to their numbers and are celebrated at every cultural juncture by the media and entertainment industry. The only danger they are in is suffocation due to over-adulation.

The gay rights movement is nothing more than the muscle twitch of a tired, dying culture.

And then, of course, there is Woodstock. How many television specials have we had now celebrating what was, essentially, a big, over-haired, drug-induced orgy? The attempts to exalt an event in which a whole bunch of spoiled, overgrown adolescents show up and behave, well, like spoiled, overgrown adolescents are nothing short of comic. But at least if you take away the pretense of "freedom," you can see what kind of society modern liberals really want.

And if you want to see something other than old reruns of it, just go to a college coed dorm hall.

But what about space, the final frontier? It's too expensive to explore, and besides we need the money to prop up Medicare.

We can't do culture big anymore. All we can do is admire the past era in which we could. Which brings me back to the new U2 album.

What is U2's "Songs of Innocence" about? It's about nostalgia for meta-narratives. U2 is a classic rock band that has lived past its era, "chasing down the dream before it disappears," as Bono sings on the first track. To speak to the current culture it can no longer evoke the great; it must instead evoke the era in which the great could be evoked. "The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)" is not about greatness, it is about the memory of thinking things could be great.

Of course, I remember the first Ramones album. I had it before anyone else. One listen to "Blitzkrieg Bop" on the radio and I was on my way to the record store. But I grew out of it: I not only grew out of liking it, I grew out of the idea that it was worth liking.

But we live in a culture that refuses to grow up.

"The Miracle (of Joey Ramone) is Bono's nostalgic reminiscence of hearing the punk band the Ramones for the first time. It begins with an anthemic chant, much like the Ramones' cartoonish "Hey, ho, let's go" from "Blitzkrieg Bop." Then the crunching electric guitar chords, and then the oversimplistic drum beat―Ramonish fixtures all.

The Ramones were the quintessential nihilist band. They may have invented torn jeans and T-shirts of the kind that you can now buy in high-end stores for some ridiculous price, I'm not sure. From the way they visually presented themselves to how they played their instruments bespoke the philosophy of nothingness. Joey Ramone sang in a mock monotone, Dee Dee Ramone played an intentionally unremarkable bass, Tommy Ramone played pretty much the same no-frills drum beat in every song. Then there was Johnny Ramone, the guitarist of the band who bragged that his guitar playing style (such as it was) was entirely without blues influence, which was just another way of saying it was devoid of human subtlety. It was a styleless style.

And by the way, the blues thanks Johnny for disassociating himself from it.

Everything about the band evoked a senseless and sterile world in which human feeling had no context and human aspiration no place. A broken relationship was reduced to "I don't want to walk around with you," anger to "Beat on the brat (with a baseball bat)," and all the while they just wanted to be sedated. I don't want to attribute too much intelligence to the band, but knew exactly what they were doing.

And boy did it play. In modern culture the demand for nihilism is bottomless.

Rolling Stone Magazine famously designated the Ramones one of "The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time." Yes. You heard that correctly. Then again, that probably says as much about Rolling Stone as about the Ramones.

So why would Bono so admire Joey Ramone? At first you're tempted to think that the high tone of a song about something as mundane as the lead singer for a punk band is slightly comic, but when Bono sings that he "woke up at the moment when the miracle occurred/To a song that made some sense out of the world," you begin to realize that there comes a point in the lives of many people in my generation when you either grow out of the attraction for the shallow appeal of the music you listened to when you were young, or you have to take it seriously and come to terms with what much of it really is.

If the song you liked asked you to Rock and Roll All Night and Party Every Day, it's a little easier to shrug it off. You realize it is just silly and debased and you try not to think too much about it so you don't end up unconsciously whistling it all day.

But in what way did the Ramones "make sense out of the world"? You could only say that if you just accepted their nihilism outright, something Bono seems explicitly to professes when he says, "I was young, not dumb/Just wishing to be blinded/By you..."

Make no mistake, Bono knows how to fashion a lyric:

We use language so we can communicate
Religion so I can love and hate
Music so I can exaggerate my fame
And give it a name

But the irony is that the worldview championed by the likes of the Ramones is the very thing that has ended up making groups like U2 obsolete and irrelevant. U2's concerts were never quite the big productions of many other classic rock bands, but they at least wanted to be about something. They and musicians like them are less and less able to communicate to a culture that rejects the grand narratives they were once able to voice. But, hand it to them, they're smart enough to know what they are still capable of doing, which is to reminisce about the time when this could still be done.

What the 20th century's most influential philosopher thought about scientism

Ludwig Wittgenstein

There have been a number of recent skirmishes on the issue of scientism in the last couple of years. In most of these altercations, critics of scientism offer a clear and meaningful definition of the term and then apply to people who practice it, who, in their turn, either question the term 'scientism' altogether, ignoring the clear definitions and claim that it doesn't mean anything, or who deny that their positions fit the meaning despite the fact that they do.

And then there are a few, like the philosophically-challenged Jerry Coyne, who alternatively deny they are practitioners of scientism and engage in it depending on the issue and the day of the week.

Raymond Monk authored one of if not the best biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher whom Monk, among others, considers the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. I think by "greatest," Monk means "most influential," but I may be wrong about that. In any case, I'm closing in on the end of the book and it is truly fantastic.

Monk weighs in on the scientism issue by pointing out Wittgenstein's view of it, which could be summarized as "dim." Wittgenstein helped to spawn, unintentionally and ironically, logical positivism, a scientist school of philosophy that proposed the verification principle of truth. Wittgenstein influenced the Vienna Circle, the group of intellectuals who birthed it, but was never a part of it, and never really endorsed the program, although there are parts of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that the reader can be excused for interpreting as scientistic.

But Wittgenstein was never really a positivist. Partly this is because he was a mystic as well as a philosopher. he believed you couldn't say anything meaningful about God or the transcendental, but he never made the leap to the belief that, because of this, they don't therefore exist.

There are a number of interesting points in Monk's article in the recent issue of Prospect Magazine, but the most basic is just the description of what scientism and why it is fundamentally flawed:

Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept.

There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music-all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better. 

Read the rest here.

Are humans really different than animals?

In the light of new research into human intelligence, some animals have concluded that there simply is no profound difference between animals and humans. According to several recent books by prominent animals, no significant difference can be found in animal research (that is, we assume, research conducted by animals) that would justify the commonly-held believe that humans are somehow different.

“There is nothing special about being human," says Henry Gee (of a species unspecified) in The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution, "any more than there is anything special about being a guinea pig or a geranium ... humans are just one twig in the thicket, and they could easily have never sprouted at all."

The insensitive remarks about guinea pigs and geraniums is in part due no doubt to the fact that none of the books were written by guinea pigs or geraniums, which is understandable: Geraniums have been having a hard winter and the guinea pig community has never been very sympathetic toward scientific research (for obvious reasons).

According to Mark Bekoff, author of Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed: The Fascinating Science of Animal Intelligence, Emotions, Friendship and Conservation, humans are different from animals only to the extent that we are "the only animals who cook food, and no other species is as destructive of its own and other species."

Whatever species of animal Bekoff may happen to be, he clearly seems to have a chip on his shoulder (possibly some past run-ins with humans that went wrong), as does Gee. In fact, humans don't seem to fare too well at all in these books.

"Like Gee," says reviewer Stephen Cave, "Bekoff supports his case with examples of altruistic rats, toolmaking crows and evidence of the emotional lives of bees. Towards the end, there is even an account of what appears to be animal spirituality: one group of chimpanzees have been recorded participating in a “waterfall dance”, during which they would stand upright at the water’s edge, swaying rhythmically from foot to foot and stamping for up to 15 minutes.

According to recent research ... Uh, hang on a second.

Let me check these books again. Hmmm. Well, shoot. Actually the books are written by human, not animal scientists. In fact, there are no animal scientists. As it turns out animals don't conduct research or do science or even write books. They don't read them either. In fact, they are not even capable of asking the question of whether they are different from humans.

Only humans do these things, a fact so obvious that even a geranium could have figured it out.

If I couldn't do all these things, I too would be swaying rhythmically and stamping my feet in sheer frustration.

You'd have to be as dumb as a rock to think that humans really are no different from animals. Come to think of it, since we're no less the products of nature than rocks, why should we be any different from them either?

How Literature Solves the Problem of Evil

My new article on literature and the problem of evil is in the new CiRCE Magazine here. Here is an excerpt:

When people look for a solution to the problem of evil in its rational or logical form, they are looking for a resolution to a technical problem. But this question—the rational question of evil—is not the real problem of evil. At least it is not the question with which people who experience suffering actually struggle. In fact, the vast majority of those who actually struggle with evil couldn’t even tell you what the logical question was. And even if they were aware of the problem—and even if they knew the answer to it—they would not be satisfied.

How would the answer to a logical question assuage their grief? Their grief is not a logical problem. The logical dilemma of evil would not be satisfying to anyone but a logician—and it would only satisfy him as a logician; it would not satisfy him as a human being. 

The purely abstract philosophical problem of evil is an impersonal question. It is always someone else’s problem. But the real problem of evil and suffering—the existential problem—is necessarily a personal question. It is a problem for me. 

The philosophical question of evil is not the question parents and friends of those killed in Newtown or Japan or the twin towers asked themselves. It is certainly not the question addressed by God speaking from Job’s whirlwind. 

There is, in fact, not just one problem of evil: There are two. The first is the logical question, “How can there be evil and suffering in a world created by a good and all powerful God?” But the second question, which can often sound the same, is actually much different. The second question is “Why is evil happening to me?” This second question is not a logical question, but an existential question--or perhaps we might better say that it is a phenomenological question.
It is not a question about something that happens in the abstract, it is something that happens to us. 

In Job’s story, the characters do not make this distinction, but I think the author does. Certainly God does, as we see by the end of the story. Job is dealing (whether he knows it or not) with the second question—why is evil happening to me?—while his Comforters are dealing with the first question—“How can there be evil and suffering in a world created by a good and all powerful God?” Job’s question is concrete and existential, not abstract and philosophical. But his friends are all philosophers. Job himself seems unaware of this distinction—or maybe, to borrow a phrase from Chesterton, it was in his soul but not in his mind. In any case, this was part of his struggle, and this is the primary reason why the advice of his friends is not a help to him: He thinks they are addressing his question, when, in fact, they are not. 

While his Comforters bring him reasons, God brings the news of the poetic order of the world. God’s words mean more to Job than those of his comforters because the world is more like a poem than a syllogism.

Is there such a thing as natural selection?

Panda's Thumb put up a blog post with an interesting title a couple of weeks ago: "Natural selection reduced diversity on human Y chromosomes." Now I'm sure this is a very interesting article for other reasons, but I'm interested in the title of the article, which talks about "natural selection" "reducing" something in something else.

Natural selection, which is, apparently, some actual thing, is acting on some other thing. This brings up several questions having to do with ontological status of natural selection. What exactly is it? Is it some ghostly force? Is it a mechanism? How can it act on something else? In what way is it a subject that acts on other objects?

And this article title is hardly unique. Many scientists talk this way--in a way that reifies the abstractions they have themselves fashioned.

Now there seem to be two possible views here: First, there is the prescriptive view: that natural selection is a thing--it has some ontological status in the world and that it acts upon other things in the world. Second, and alternatively, there is the descriptive view: natural selection is not a thing in and of itself, but is rather a description of the way the world, in fact, behaves. Another way of putting it is that, under the prescriptive view, natural selection is something in the world, whereas under the descriptive view it is something in the mind of the scientist.

To talk about it in the way this article title does--and in the way many scientists do on many other occasions--assumes the first view. Do these people really believe that natural selection is a thing? Or is this just their careless way of speaking?

I imagine if you corner your scientific friend who speaks in this way, he will finally have to say that it is just a manner of speaking, in which case you can't really say that natural selection does anything.

Maybe, in regard to natural selection, it is just a way of speaking. But there is the same issue in regard to natural laws. Are they real in and of themselves? Do they have some prescriptive force on the things they are said to govern? Or are they simply descriptions constructed to fit a set of facts and events in the world?

I don't think it is too much to say that the general public thinks of things like natural selection and the law of, say, gravity, as things having prescriptive force. And it's partly due to the way scientists are always talking. I suspect that in this case there are more scientists who would take the prescriptive view. And this is certainly the way the layman thinks about scientific laws: that they govern things in the world, making them do this and that and prohibiting them from doing that and the other thing.

That is, after all, what laws in the real sense of laws--the things our legislatures pass--do: they govern things. They order this thing to happen and this other thing not to happen. The whole reason for calling regularities in nature laws is to produce this impression that there is something out there that makes things in nature act a particular way.

The prescriptive view of natural law is wholly unscientific. And by that I mean not that it violates any scientific principle (that would be positing a prescriptive law governing prescriptive laws), but that such a view lies outside the very purview of science. If scientists want to claim to be empirical, then they can't possibly believe in the prescriptive view because the prescriptive view is metaphysical. It is what the philosopher David Hume said about causation in general: it can never be arrived at by any empirical method: Nobody has ever seen a natural law. It is a metaphysical postulate that explains the way things happen. But it is wholly non-empirical.

This, in fact, is the whole objection to miracles: that they are claims that there are events that violate natural laws. The objection to miracles assumes the prescriptive view. And yet, I suspect that a number of the atheists out there who are always championing the integrity of science, and who would admit that, from an empirical standpoint, natural laws are merely descriptive, will turn right around and argue against the miraculous on the grounds that miracles violate prescriptive laws.

As Chesterton pointed out in his "Ethics of Elfland," the only way to view the world prescriptively is to view it as the result of prescriptive will. In fact will is the only thing that can really be prescriptive: It is the necessary condition for prescriptiveness. To use the term "law" in the context of science and then to deny that you are using it prescriptively is try to have your scientistic cake and eat it too. It's either careless or dishonest--or, perhaps more likely, thoughtless.

The way atheistic scientists talk is many times at odds with their stated positions. They say on the one hand that they are not engaging in metaphysics, but as soon as they say that, they render much of what they say unintelligible. Their very denials make gibberish of the truths they affirm.

It's one of the great ironies of the whole language of science and natural law (or for that matter natural selection) that it only makes sense from a position of theism.

Words that Should Be Banned: "Impactful"

I'm starting a new and occasional series of posts on this blog about words vying for legitimacy which should, on the contrary, be eliminated from the language as soon as possible. The need for this increases the more the cultural barbarians assert their new found influence.

George Orwell once pointed out that it is not only true that the decadence of our civilization has bad effects on language, but that decadent language has bad effects on culture:

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

In other words, saving language helps save civilization. So I have selected a word I heard just today, care of Michelle Obama, although it is hardly limited to the liberal lexicon. In fact, I just heard it the other day from a conservative radio talk show host. The word is ...

"Impactful."

Just typing it makes my cring. Here's the Urban Dictionary's entry on this "word" (which I place in quotation marks to underscore the tentative nature of its status as an actual word):

"Impactful": A non-existent word coined by corporate advertising, marketing and business drones to make their work sound far more useful, exciting and beneficial to humanity than it really is. This term is most frequently used in "team building" seminars and conferences in which said drones discuss the most effective ways to convince consumer zombies to purchase crap they clearly do not need or even want.

"Team building." Ugh. There's another one that needs to go.

When I hear a person use the term "impactful" my first thought is that he has read a few too many bureaucratic memos written by unimaginative people who, instead of reading competent literature, spend their time reading cheesy success books with titles like How to Maximize your Success Through Positive Habits. Or maybe that the person just doesn't read a all.

"Impactful" is a word created by taking a noun ("impact") and adding a suffix ("ful"), making it an adjective. This can work, but more often it does not. If you just don't have an ear for words (and anyone using a word like this is demonstrating that he doesn't), then ask yourself, "Does the expression that results from taking the word back apart and using it as a full expression sound right?" In other words, does it sound right to say, "full of impact"?

How can something be "full of impact"? By its very nature "impact" can only refer to the effect some one thing has on another. One thing "has an impact" on another. But nothing can be "full of impact" and therefore nothing can be "impactful."

Whenever the urge comes upon you to use this fake word, ask yourself whether there is not another word which expresses your thought better. I submit that there is no case in which another word, such as "effective," "meaningful," "constructive," or "significant" would not express the thought better. Oh, and don't replace it with "affecting," which is another word that needs to be banned.

Now that I have had to use this word several times, I feel like taking a shower. So if you'll excuse me...

Still Not Even Wrong: More on atheists conflicted about the falsifiability criterion for science

In a previous post, "Not Even Wrong," I pointed out that the belief that there is life on other planets is, in terms of Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion, no more scientific than belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The Peanut Gallery got all up in arms about it and generally missed the central point of my post.

And then there was P.Z. Myers, who does a great imitation of bull in a china shop, asserting that I am a creationist and that I was somehow defending the falsifiability criterion (which, ironically, I have called into question several times on this blog), talking down Popper's demarcation criterion.

And I now notice Sean Carroll has advocated the abandonment of the falsifiability criterion over at the Edge.

Funny how far down this test to tell the difference between science and non-science has come since the Dover v. Kitzmiller decision, which employed the criterion to determine that Intelligent Design was not science.

Ten dollars says these people still think the reasoning in the Dover decision was legitimate despite the fact that they have now reject the criterion employed in coming to it.

Oh, and don't miss Massimo Pugliucci (an atheist who actually knows what he's talking about on the philosophy of science) responding to Carroll here.

Not Even Wrong: How the belief that there is life on other planets is like believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster

P.Z. Myers has blogged on this post and, as usual, botched the job. My response is here.

There many scientists who believe that there is life elsewhere in the universe, and they seem to think that this belief is a scientific belief. But if you think about the criterion many scientists employ to determine what is and isn't science, you begin to wonder.

We are told by many New Atheist scientists in particular (who like to mark their territory, but, fortunately in a way slightly different than, say, cats) that a belief can only be scientific if it is falsifiable. This is their demarcation criterion of choice and they use it to ruthlessly guard the borders of science. This is one of the reasons, they say, we must reject Intelligent Design. This idea comes generally from Karl Popper, a philosopher, who said that a theory cannot be considered scientific merely because it admits of possible verification, but only if it admits of possible falsification.

It is this general idea that is behind Richard Dawkin's "Flying Spaghetti Monster." The Flying Spaghetti Monster, says Dawkins, exists just outside the range of the most powerful telescopes and the more powerful the telescopes, the further away the monster gets so that we are never able to actually detect him. There is therefore, no way in which belief in him may be disproven.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is Dawkin's send-up of the belief in a theistic God, belief in Whom has the same status as his imaginary monster: there is no evidence that can possibly count against his existence. God can never be disproven.

Okay, now take the belief that life exists somewhere else in the universe. This is a common belief among atheist scientists. In fact, Dawkin's himself conjectured that life on earth may have come from other planets. But how can that belief possibly be falsified?

There is a possibility that, if true, it can be proven true simply by finding it somewhere in our outside our own solar system. But if it is false, how could we ever know that it was false? If it was false and the universe were infinite, as many scientists believe, then would could never know it to be false even theoretically. And if it was false but the universe was finite, there is no practical way we could ever know it to be false even though it is theoretically possible--although there is some question whether it is even theoretically possible for humans to investigate a universe as massive as we know ours to be.

Even in this latter case of a finite universe theism would be less problematic since a theist could simply say "Well, we will find out after we die." And since everyone will certainly die, at least he has that to go on.

So there you have it. Belief in extra-terrestrial life. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Theoretically indistinguishable. And taking this into consideration, how is believing in God any more or less scientific that believing there is life on other planets?

Let's see what the Peanut Gallery has to say about this one.