Tuesday, June 14, 2011
What George Washington would have tweeted on the eve of the Battle of Trenton
Check out Tom Hoopes' Top Ten Great American Tweets. Here are 9. and 10.:
Uncle Tom's Cab ..., er, Interest Group: Who is the NAACP trying to protect?
Well, it appears that the Simon Legrees at the teachers unions are having some trouble keeping 'em down on the liberal plantation. Seems there are many blacks don't understand what's expected of them from places like the United Federation of Teachers--one of the nation's largest teachers unions.
In New York, a battle has broken out between many black parents, who want better schools for the children, and the NAACP, which is supposed to, like, be working for their interests. After the NAACP joined the teachers unions in a lawsuit opposing charter schools, many black parents parents protested. Literally.
In New York, a battle has broken out between many black parents, who want better schools for the children, and the NAACP, which is supposed to, like, be working for their interests. After the NAACP joined the teachers unions in a lawsuit opposing charter schools, many black parents parents protested. Literally.
Read the rest here.But black children have been major constituents of charter schools since their creation two decades ago. So when thousands of charter-school parents, students and advocates staged a rally on May 26 in Harlem, it was not so much to denounce the litigation as it was to criticize the involvement of the N.A.A.C.P.
Since then, a war has broken out within the civil rights community in New York and across the country over the lawsuit against the city and the larger questions of how school choice helps or hurts minority students.
... For the N.A.A.C.P. ... the dispute has turned into a public referendum on its mission. After joining the teachers’ union in the lawsuit, which seeks to keep 20 charter schools from opening or expanding in buildings shared with traditional public schools, the national organization has found itself on the defensive, forced to explain whose rights, exactly, it is trying to protect.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Barefoot and Progressive--but not too Bright
Uh oh. The Tolerance Police over at "Barefoot and Progressive" have spotted our press release pointing out new gay rights language in the Kentucky Department of Education's Model Curriculum Framework. In the fearful sounding post, they accused me of being "terrified of gay people."
Okay. I admit it. They're right. That is why I wrote a press release stating publicly that writing the political agenda of gay rights groups into the state's education policies was a stupid idea, knowing that it would make every member of the Brown Shorts angry at me. Because I'm scared of them. That's why I did it.
I mean, that's what you do when you're scared of people, right? Publicly criticize them to their face?
Just one more piece of keen insight from the folks at Barefoot and Progressive.
Okay. I admit it. They're right. That is why I wrote a press release stating publicly that writing the political agenda of gay rights groups into the state's education policies was a stupid idea, knowing that it would make every member of the Brown Shorts angry at me. Because I'm scared of them. That's why I did it.
I mean, that's what you do when you're scared of people, right? Publicly criticize them to their face?
Just one more piece of keen insight from the folks at Barefoot and Progressive.
Congressman Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Sin and Love Psychology
There are apparently a bunch of people out there who are still under the impression that people can be blamed when they do something wrong.When it was found out that New York Congressman Anthony Weiner had sent sexually explicit text messages to several girls, one of whom whom was only 17 years-old, you would have thought the Moral Majority had been brought back to life or something. For just a moment, it seemed as if we turned into a nation of school marms.
Never has so many people wagged so many fingers in one direction at one time--all because of what one congressman wagged and then broadcast from his cellphone camera.
Did these people not get the memo? We don't need sin anymore. We're not living in the Middle Ages. We don't need some absolute moral code that everyone has to abide by. We've got science. We've got psychology. We have explanations now that render these Bronze Age concepts of right and wrong relics of the past:
“Congressman Weiner departed this morning to seek professional treatment to focus on becoming a better husband and healthier person,” said his spokeswoman, Risa Heller. “In light of that, he will request a short leave of absence from the House of Representatives so that he can get evaluated and map out a course of treatment to make himself well.”There you go. He's sick. You don't hold sick people responsible for their behavior. You let them take leaves of absence so they can go find "professionals," pay them lots of money and then they put labels with scientific sounding acronyms on their actions. And then we let them "map out courses of treatment" for themselves. You've been to the doctor before, you know the routine: you get him to tell you what's wrong with you and then you make the decision on how to cure yourself.
Duh.
“It’s clear he needs professional help and I am glad he is seeking it," said New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. Democratic former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi too concluded that "his behavior required medical intervention," according to the New York Times.
But despite the fact that there has been widespread acceptance that Weiner is a sick man, it didn't stop some of these same people from calling for his resignation. This makes no sense at all. Are you going to be kicked out of Congress for contracting cancer? Are you going to be booted from the Beltway for getting bacterial pneumonia? Are you going to be forced to flee from Washington when they find out you've got fibromyalgia?
Since when did we blame people for having a disease?
Has everyone forgotten Tiger Woods? Yes, he said he was sorry for sleeping with a different girl every night. Yes, he asked for forgiveness for cheating on his wife. But in the end, he acknowledged that he wasn't really to blame for what he did. He announced he was going into "rehab." Like Wiener, he too had somehow contracted "Sex Addiction."
The cynics will say that Weiner is only trying to escape responsibility for what he did by feigning a psychological illness. They will say that the Dr. Drews and the Dr. Lauras of the world are quacks, feeding the desire of television viewers and radio listeners for a neat scientific explanation for problems that are not really scientific. These are people who really think that we live in some kind of moral universe with fixed standards of behavior; they really believe in the existence of right and wrong.
But these people are clearly delusional and in need of psychological treatment.
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
Family group questions “sexual orientation” in state’s new Model Curriculum Framework
LEXINGTON, KY—A family advocacy group today criticized the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) for including gay rights language in a new document designed to guide local school curricula. "The last thing we need in our schools is a shift in focus away from academics toward special interest politics," said Martin Cothran, senior policy analyst for The Family Foundation, who criticized the language which was included in an April 11 draft of the state's new Model Curriculum Framework. "We need less politics in schools and more academics," Cothran said.
This is the first time "sexual orientation" language has been included in a state document governing elementary and secondary education according to Cothran. "What we don't need in order to academically improve our schools is a larger dose of political correctness."
Cothran made the statement as part of a larger critique of the document, which he described as "vague, devoid of practical helps for educators, and riddled with the kind of amateur pop psychology popular in college education departments."
"The document betrays a serious misunderstanding of what is needed to improve education in this state," he said. "The authors repeat the mantra of '21st century learning' as if it will automatically drive away the problems schools have been suffering since the middle of the 20th century; it misdiagnoses instructional problems as the prevalence, rather than the lack of traditional teaching methodologies; and it seems to see technology as some kind of panacea for our education ills."
He also criticized the Model Curriculum for being heavy on "feel-good rhetoric" and light on actual substance. Cothran pointed in particular to repeated use of the term "critical thinking skills." "Our educational policy makers in this state seem to think that if you merely repeat the term 'critical thinking skills' often enough you can actually bring it about. They offer no definition of the term, much less any practical help on how to inculcate it in students."
The Family Foundation was a leading voice in the mid-1990s debate over education reform in Kentucky.
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Monday, June 06, 2011
The Reductionism Bias: Is the tendency to say that everything we think is hardwired by evolution hardwired by evolution?
A growing body of journalistic evidence points to the conclusion that the tendency to reduce all human thoughts and feelings to material or chemical states may be hardwired by evolution into the human brain. The most recent example is Time Magazine's new cover story, "The Optimism Bias":
But that fact doesn't seem to have slowed her brain processes down any in leaping from her premises about the physical conditions that happen to accompany conscious states to conclusions about the meaning or implications of these states.
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, in his critique of B. F. Skinner's Behaviorism, once unflatteringly described this procedure as the "zoological" or "rattomorphic" fallacy: "the expressed or implicit contention that there is no essential difference between rat and man." It is a process by which, as Hans Jonas puts it:
As Chesterton's pointed out in Orthodoxy, the whole idea that you can turn the gaze of a scientific instrument back on the viewer is one which undermines the entire operation itself. It is the "thought that stops thought." I once heard of a doctor who, marooned on a desert island, removed his own appendix. But it would have been an entirely different kind of thing to have done brain surgery on himself. He would, of course, need his brain to perform the surgery, but the procedure itself would prevent him from using it.
Only the Grey Sisters of ancient myth could take the eye out of its very socket and gaze upon themselves. But when we mortals attempt it, it leads only to delusion.
The humorist Peter Benchley once famously described his experience in a college science class where he spent the whole term drawing an image of his own eyelash as he viewed it in a microscope, all the while thinking it was the object in the slide. Putting the brain under the microscope has the inherent disadvantage of objectifying the very thing that is doing the objectifying, calling the whole process into question.
This is, of course, one of the main points of Sam Harris' book The Moral Landscape, which we reviewed here.
But in addition to being impossible, what people like Sharot and Harris think they can do--understand conscious states by ferreting out the material conditions accompanying them--is based on a faulty premise. All such discussions are premised on the Identity Theory of Mind, which holds that "states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain." It has the disadvantage of having been pretty soundly refuted. You can say of a brain, for example, how much it weighs, but you cannot say that of a mind. Just because one state is simultaneous with another, does not mean the two states are the same. Having a heart is always accompanied by having a kidney. But having a heart and having a kidney are not the same thing.
I propose that those who examine their heads in this way should have their heads examined--by someone other than themselves. People who believe these claims should have their own brains examined to see if their beliefs about the chemical and evolutionary origin of beliefs has a chemical and evolutionary origin. And if they do, then we need to consider what the scientific and philosophical implications of this are.
If a belief--such as the one that holds that beliefs are the result of a purely causal physical process--is the result of a purely causal physical process, can it at the same time be considered the result of a rational process, the only process according to which such beliefs can be considered true?
The Sharot piece includes a detailed diagram of a brain, with pointers to the areas of the brain associated with optimistic thoughts. What we need is a diagram of Sharot's brain that tells us where she gets the idea that conscious states such as optimism can be explained by pointing to the areas of the brain associated with these conscious states.
What would happen if, instead of optimism, Sharot had trained her reductionist science on the tools by which she conducts her analysis in the first place? What happens when the scientist tries to reduce rationality itself to chemical or material processes? Does anything remain? If that is all her theory is--some chance concatenation of chemical events, then would there be any reason to believe them to be true?
[A] growing body of scientific evidence points to the conclusion that optimism may be hardwired by evolution into the human brain."The science of optimism, once scorned as an intellectually suspect province of pep rallies and smiley faces, is opening a new window on the workings of human consciousness," says Tali Sharot, in a the peppy, smiley-sounding article. "Is the human tendency for optimism a consequence of the architecture of our brains?" she asks. It is an interesting question, one which we would need to somehow get outside of the architecture of our brains to answer objectively, an achievement, unfortunately, which Sharot does not seem to have accomplished.
But that fact doesn't seem to have slowed her brain processes down any in leaping from her premises about the physical conditions that happen to accompany conscious states to conclusions about the meaning or implications of these states.
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, in his critique of B. F. Skinner's Behaviorism, once unflatteringly described this procedure as the "zoological" or "rattomorphic" fallacy: "the expressed or implicit contention that there is no essential difference between rat and man." It is a process by which, as Hans Jonas puts it:
man-the-knower apprehends man-qua-lower-than-himself and in doing so achieves knowledge of man-qua-lower-than-man, since all scientific theory is of things lower than man-the-knower. It is on that condition that they can be subject to theory, hence to control, hence to use.There is a whole literature on the issue of the cultural danger of the kinds of assumptions like those employed by Sharot in the Time article, and one of its best known commentators is Wendell Berry:
A little harder to compass is the danger that we can give up on life also by presuming to "understand" it—that is by reducing it to the terms of our understanding and by treating it as predictable or mechanical. The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines—that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation. Our language, wherever it is used, is now almost invariably conditioned by the assumption that fleshly bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine, industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology.Michael Aeschliman too, in his book, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism, points out the cultural implications of this kind of scientific reductionism:
This may have begun as a metaphor, but in the language as it is used (and as it affects industrial practice) it has evolved from metaphor through equation to identification. And this usage institutionalizes the human wish, or the sin of wishing, that life might be, or might be made to be, predictable.
The distinction between means and ends, between things and objects on the one hand and persons and essences on the other is at the root of moral culture and civilization; it is a distinction that the characteristic procedures and terms of the natural sciences can neither discern nor make without violence, contradiction, and confusion, and for which they must depend upon philosophy and religion.In other words, it is not just the cultural consequences of the view that we can simply reduce uniquely human characteristics to material mechanisms that is problematic. It is not just a threat to the culture, but a threat to reason itself. "It is not only an inhumane procedure," says Aeschliman, "it is simply false according to ordinary standards of human reason."
As Chesterton's pointed out in Orthodoxy, the whole idea that you can turn the gaze of a scientific instrument back on the viewer is one which undermines the entire operation itself. It is the "thought that stops thought." I once heard of a doctor who, marooned on a desert island, removed his own appendix. But it would have been an entirely different kind of thing to have done brain surgery on himself. He would, of course, need his brain to perform the surgery, but the procedure itself would prevent him from using it.
Only the Grey Sisters of ancient myth could take the eye out of its very socket and gaze upon themselves. But when we mortals attempt it, it leads only to delusion.
The humorist Peter Benchley once famously described his experience in a college science class where he spent the whole term drawing an image of his own eyelash as he viewed it in a microscope, all the while thinking it was the object in the slide. Putting the brain under the microscope has the inherent disadvantage of objectifying the very thing that is doing the objectifying, calling the whole process into question.
This is, of course, one of the main points of Sam Harris' book The Moral Landscape, which we reviewed here.
But in addition to being impossible, what people like Sharot and Harris think they can do--understand conscious states by ferreting out the material conditions accompanying them--is based on a faulty premise. All such discussions are premised on the Identity Theory of Mind, which holds that "states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain." It has the disadvantage of having been pretty soundly refuted. You can say of a brain, for example, how much it weighs, but you cannot say that of a mind. Just because one state is simultaneous with another, does not mean the two states are the same. Having a heart is always accompanied by having a kidney. But having a heart and having a kidney are not the same thing.
I propose that those who examine their heads in this way should have their heads examined--by someone other than themselves. People who believe these claims should have their own brains examined to see if their beliefs about the chemical and evolutionary origin of beliefs has a chemical and evolutionary origin. And if they do, then we need to consider what the scientific and philosophical implications of this are.
If a belief--such as the one that holds that beliefs are the result of a purely causal physical process--is the result of a purely causal physical process, can it at the same time be considered the result of a rational process, the only process according to which such beliefs can be considered true?
The Sharot piece includes a detailed diagram of a brain, with pointers to the areas of the brain associated with optimistic thoughts. What we need is a diagram of Sharot's brain that tells us where she gets the idea that conscious states such as optimism can be explained by pointing to the areas of the brain associated with these conscious states.
What would happen if, instead of optimism, Sharot had trained her reductionist science on the tools by which she conducts her analysis in the first place? What happens when the scientist tries to reduce rationality itself to chemical or material processes? Does anything remain? If that is all her theory is--some chance concatenation of chemical events, then would there be any reason to believe them to be true?
We're on Real Life Radio today. Tune in.
I will be on the Mike Allen Show on 1380 AM, Real Life Radio in Lexington, Kentucky, this afternoon from 5:15-6:00 to discuss my conversion to Catholicism.
Thursday, June 02, 2011
Lactose Intolerance: Big Brother is watching ... your milk
The Louisville Food Police, tipped off that unauthorized milk-drinking was going on, tried to break up an illicit milk operation, only to be foiled at the last minute by, well, the law.
Turns out members of a food cooperative, the Whole Life Buying Club, were drinking raw milk. That's right. Milk straight from the cow, a practice equivalent to eating eggs straight from chickens, and vegetables freshly picked from garden plants (grown in dirt).
Don't these people realize that there is no need to risk your health eating natural foods any more? Do they not know that there are plenty of processed foods out there with enough preservatives in them to eliminate the need for embalming when you die?
The Club has apparently been growing the cows on a farm outside of Louisville, having them milked, and then transporting the illicit product back to their own homes. In their own cars. Driven by themselves. Outside the supervision of government bureaucrats.
When the crack Milk Team 6 of the Department of Health and Wellness stormed the group's compound, they acted quickly to quarantine the dangerous substance. The operation was almost foiled when one of the three helicopters used in the raid crashed inside the grounds, tipping off the farmers. But the fast thinking members of the unit completed the rest of the operation without a hitch and in addition gained a treasure trove of intelligence on the group's activities when it confiscated stacks of back issues of Acres, U.S.A., Small Farmers Journal, and Mother Earth News.
"It was the lactic equivalent of a crack house," said an unidentified source within the Department. "It was a lac house."
Now hang on a second ... Um, there's a chance we could be mixing this story up with another one. I'll check on it. But in any case, the Department had to back off because, as it turned out, the members of the milk ring actually owned the cows that were producing the milk they were drinking, creating a constitutional question concerning the right of government bureaucrats to take away the milk someone got from his own cow.
But don't count out the Food Police yet. These are serious, dedicated people who are concerned about the milk you drink. It is not clear how they feel about your cookies.
Turns out members of a food cooperative, the Whole Life Buying Club, were drinking raw milk. That's right. Milk straight from the cow, a practice equivalent to eating eggs straight from chickens, and vegetables freshly picked from garden plants (grown in dirt).
Don't these people realize that there is no need to risk your health eating natural foods any more? Do they not know that there are plenty of processed foods out there with enough preservatives in them to eliminate the need for embalming when you die?
The Club has apparently been growing the cows on a farm outside of Louisville, having them milked, and then transporting the illicit product back to their own homes. In their own cars. Driven by themselves. Outside the supervision of government bureaucrats.
When the crack Milk Team 6 of the Department of Health and Wellness stormed the group's compound, they acted quickly to quarantine the dangerous substance. The operation was almost foiled when one of the three helicopters used in the raid crashed inside the grounds, tipping off the farmers. But the fast thinking members of the unit completed the rest of the operation without a hitch and in addition gained a treasure trove of intelligence on the group's activities when it confiscated stacks of back issues of Acres, U.S.A., Small Farmers Journal, and Mother Earth News.
"It was the lactic equivalent of a crack house," said an unidentified source within the Department. "It was a lac house."
Now hang on a second ... Um, there's a chance we could be mixing this story up with another one. I'll check on it. But in any case, the Department had to back off because, as it turned out, the members of the milk ring actually owned the cows that were producing the milk they were drinking, creating a constitutional question concerning the right of government bureaucrats to take away the milk someone got from his own cow.
But don't count out the Food Police yet. These are serious, dedicated people who are concerned about the milk you drink. It is not clear how they feel about your cookies.
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Arguing in the Void: What's wrong with Coyne and Carroll's arguments against the immortality of the soul
... Meanwhile biologist Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution is True has been voicing his Amens and Halleluiahs over Sean Carroll's scientistic attempt to dissect the issue of the immortality of the soul:
But, as I pointed out in my post on Carroll's original article, the major problem is simply that the scientific materialists who leave their discipline and start prognosticating on philosophical and theological topics are simply unfamiliar with the history of the discussions on the subjects on which they are opining. This causes them not only to make a hash of the whole thing, but to think that the questions they are asking have never been adequately answers.
In the present case, the discussion goes back to the pre-Socratic philosophers, through Plato and Aristotle, continuing on to St. Thomas Aquinas and into modern times--a fact about which Carroll and Coyne seem completely unaware. It's as if a philosopher had attempted to speak on the issue, say, of DNA, but had never heard of Watson and Crick.
In fact, we can go back almost 700 years and find St. Thomas Aquinas dealing with essentially the same issues, which he attributes to philosophers living over a thousand years before his own time:
In fact, the questions Coyne asks were answered by Aquinas and others. But he acts as if he knows nothing about them. Has he gone back and read Question 75 of the Summa Theologica? Has he bothered to consult Book II of the Summa Contra Gentiles? Maybe he wouldn't agree with Aquinas. Maybe he would think the arguments invalid. Maybe he would even think Aquinas' entire way of addressing the questions is outdated. But the problem is Coyne and Carroll are clearly not even aware of them.
They also seem unaware of the discussions in Plato's Phaedo, in Moses Mendelssohn's Phädon, in Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Pascal--or in Hegel and Spinoza. At least the philosophers who dissented from the view that the soul is immortal (and immaterial), like Lucretius, Hobbes, and Hume, knew what they were criticizing.
But what does Coyne do instead of actually looking to see how Christian thinkers and other philosophers have answered these questions? He makes things up:
This is a consistent problem with the New Atheists: they just simply ignore the best arguments against their positions and instead either cherry pick the worst arguments or simply make stuff up.
Those who specify the existence of souls and afterlives in this scientific era must do more than issue fuzzy-minded gobbledygook. They must specify more precisely what they’re talking about, and how it’s supposed to work. If we’re supposed to survive after death, what part of us survives, and how? And what is this soul, exactly? We’re no longer in the Middle Ages, so theologians who make empirical claims must be empirically specific.Well, I'm not sure what counts as bona fide "fuzzy-minded gobbledygook," but Coyne's definition apparently does not include treating non-scientific questions as if they were scientific ones.
But, as I pointed out in my post on Carroll's original article, the major problem is simply that the scientific materialists who leave their discipline and start prognosticating on philosophical and theological topics are simply unfamiliar with the history of the discussions on the subjects on which they are opining. This causes them not only to make a hash of the whole thing, but to think that the questions they are asking have never been adequately answers.
In the present case, the discussion goes back to the pre-Socratic philosophers, through Plato and Aristotle, continuing on to St. Thomas Aquinas and into modern times--a fact about which Carroll and Coyne seem completely unaware. It's as if a philosopher had attempted to speak on the issue, say, of DNA, but had never heard of Watson and Crick.
In fact, we can go back almost 700 years and find St. Thomas Aquinas dealing with essentially the same issues, which he attributes to philosophers living over a thousand years before his own time:
The philosophers of old, not being able to rise above their imagination, supposed that the principle of these actions [knowledge and movement] was something corporeal: for they asserted that only bodies were real things; and that what is not corporeal is nothing: hence they maintained that the soul is something corporeal. (Summa Theologica, Question 75, Article I)The materialism of Coyne and Carroll is not, as you can see, a new thing.
In fact, the questions Coyne asks were answered by Aquinas and others. But he acts as if he knows nothing about them. Has he gone back and read Question 75 of the Summa Theologica? Has he bothered to consult Book II of the Summa Contra Gentiles? Maybe he wouldn't agree with Aquinas. Maybe he would think the arguments invalid. Maybe he would even think Aquinas' entire way of addressing the questions is outdated. But the problem is Coyne and Carroll are clearly not even aware of them.
They also seem unaware of the discussions in Plato's Phaedo, in Moses Mendelssohn's Phädon, in Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Pascal--or in Hegel and Spinoza. At least the philosophers who dissented from the view that the soul is immortal (and immaterial), like Lucretius, Hobbes, and Hume, knew what they were criticizing.
But what does Coyne do instead of actually looking to see how Christian thinkers and other philosophers have answered these questions? He makes things up:
Of course theologians will respond to all of the above like this, “We don’t have to tell you what souls are, or in what form you survive after death. We just know it’s true because we just know that there’s a God and that he allows these things.”This is not what Christian thinkers have argued and it is not what philosophers have argued. This is just silliness--coming, ironically, from someone who presumes to lecture other people on intellectual integrity.
This is a consistent problem with the New Atheists: they just simply ignore the best arguments against their positions and instead either cherry pick the worst arguments or simply make stuff up.
Can proof be proved?
Someone recently asked me in the comments section of one of my posts about an article on logic on the Answers in Genesis website on the question of circular reasoning. The article was a response to a question by a reader concerning presuppositional Christian apologetics, which holds that, in contending for the truth of Christianity, one should rationally assume the truth of the Bible rather than argue for it. The folks at Answers in Genesis are clearly advocates of this position. The questioner asked how to respond to someone who accused him of circular reasoning.
Here was the response (in part):
Contrary to what your non-Christian friend said, circular reasoning is surprisingly a valid argument. The conclusion does follow from the premises. Circular reasoning is a logical fallacy only when it is arbitrary, proving nothing beyond what it assumes.Well, no, sorry. It's just circular reasoning. The chief problem is in the last sentence:
However, not all circular reasoning is fallacious. Certain standards must be assumed. Dr. Jason Lisle gave this example of a non-arbitrary use of circular reasoning:
1. Without laws of logic, we could not make an argument.
2. We can make an argument.
3. Therefore, there must be laws of logic.
While this argument is circular, it is a non-fallacious use of circular reasoning. Since we couldn’t prove anything apart from the laws of logic, we must presuppose the laws of logic even to prove they exist. In fact, if someone were trying to disprove that laws of logic exist, he’d have to use the laws of logic in his attempt, thereby refuting himself. Your non-Christian friend must agree there are certain standards that can be proven with circular reasoning."
"Your non-Christian friend must agree there are certain standards that can be proven with circular reasoning."
Every discipline (including science) has metaphysical assumptions that are not inferred from other knowledge within the discipline (and sometimes, as in the present case, even from knowledge outside the discipline). These assumptions are not themselves proven, and the idea that you can prove them is a misunderstanding of the nature of first principles--which are the analog in logic of axioms or postulates in mathematics.
The error made here was refuted about 2400 years ago. It is discussed in Book I, Part 3 of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. He points out that some people make the error of thinking that all knowledge must be demonstrated, but in order to say this they must allow that reasoning can be circular.
Our own doctrine is that not all knowledge is demonstrative: on the contrary, knowledge of the immediate premisses is independent of demonstration. (The necessity of this is obvious; for since we must know the prior premisses from which the demonstration is drawn, and since the regress must end in immediate truths, those truths must be indemonstrable.) Such, then, is our doctrine, and in addition we maintain that besides scientific knowledge there is its originative source which enables us to recognize the definitions.
The belief that circular reasoning is valid is a foundational belief of presupposition apologetics. Cornelius Van Til makes the claim that "all reasoning is circular." This is important to that position because Van Til wants to be able to engage in circular reasoning by assuming the truth of the Bible. And he thinks that he can avoid the criticism that this belief is circular by arguing that what he is doing is no different from what everyone else does anyway.
But, alas, this is not true. First principles, being the conditions of proof, can't be proved--and don't need to be.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Another physicist performing philosophy without a license: Sean Carroll on life after death
A physicist has trained his scientific instruments on the question of the immortality of the soul and is not getting the right readings and he has therefore concluded that there is no such thing.
Sean Carroll claims that "there is clearly no way for the soul to survive death." Carroll makes this claim in a recent post on his blog Cosmic Variance. There is no reason to believe that Carroll is not a competent scientist, but he has now produced a pretty good reason why we might want to question his competence as a philosopher:
Carroll is partly responding to Adam Frank, who thinks rightly that science can have nothing to say about the question of the immortality of the soul since there since it is not a scientific question, a position Carroll glibly compares to the position that we can't really know whether the moon is made of green cheese:
Once again, we have a scientist performing philosophy without a license, thinking that his scientific qualifications fit him for the task when they don't.
C. S. Lewis once noted that there is very little you could know about what was outside nature by what was inside nature:
Why would we expect that the soul would retain information after we die? Why would anyone belief that it consists of particles? Why would we think there would be physical laws holding it together?
Why would anyone ask questions like this unless they were simply unaware that the question of the immortality of the soul is not a scientific question. I'm sure accountants have a hard time making accounting sense of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I imagine economists have some trouble making economic sense of Beethoven's Symphony Number 3 in E-flat Major. And I've got to believe that the Empire State Building is somewhat impervious to the analysis of a professional psychologist.
But somehow we're supposed to believe that a physicist, by plying his particular craft, can resolve the question of the immortality of the soul. I wonder how Carroll would react if a theologian began analyzing problems in science according the principles of religious dogma.
In fact, we already know the answer to that question. Just go look at Carroll's response to creationism! But don't ask Carroll to observe the same limitations that he asks others to observe.
Carroll sets forth the formula that "tells us how electrons behave" [genuflect here]:
He then states:
If nothing can be accepted as real if it cannot be encompassed in a mathematical equation, and these things cannot be encompassed in mathematical equations, then these things cannot be accepted as real. What is the formula for consciousness? (a subject Carroll mentions later, as if he'll be able to make any more sense of that) What equation explains free will? By what calculus can you prove love?
And what about life itself? Carroll talks on as if science really understood life, but does it? What is the equation for life? What physical thing is absent from a dead body? Can science even create life? If science cannot explain life itself, by what authority does is pretend to speak on the afterlife?
Aristotle, wiser even in physics than his successors, says that the soul is "the form of the body." The form of a thing is not a material aspect of it. In fact, Carroll is just one of the many philosophically ignorant scientists who gets his formal and material causes mixed up. Modern scientists of Carroll's bent accept material causation, but reject formal causation. But instead of going on their merry way and simply interpreting the world without taking formal causation into account, they either try to make material causes do the work of formal causes or they want to keep formal causation and pretend it is material causation--or (more commonly) both.
In demanding that scientific criteria be applied to the question of whether the soul is immortal, Carroll commits the first of these errors. In not applying it to consciousness, free will, and the process of rational justification, he also commits the second. In both cases, he is committing a category error.
The extent of Carroll's confusion is evidenced by the fact that he doesn't even know he is confused.
Sean Carroll claims that "there is clearly no way for the soul to survive death." Carroll makes this claim in a recent post on his blog Cosmic Variance. There is no reason to believe that Carroll is not a competent scientist, but he has now produced a pretty good reason why we might want to question his competence as a philosopher:
Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?These kinds of statements make me wonder what I would say if my plumber told me that the interior decoration scheme in my home was all wrong on the basis of his knowledge of pipes, or if my barber tried to explain how he had detected psychological problems with a previous customer based on what he knew about cutting hair.
Carroll is partly responding to Adam Frank, who thinks rightly that science can have nothing to say about the question of the immortality of the soul since there since it is not a scientific question, a position Carroll glibly compares to the position that we can't really know whether the moon is made of green cheese:
Adam claims that “simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information” regarding life after death. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese ... So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted.There's just one minor difference here: the composition of the moon is an actual scientific question with a definite scientific answer--whether you have to tools to determine it now or not. It is exactly the kind of question science is designed to answer. Whether the soul is immortal is not. That Carroll thinks it is is a measure of his lack of understanding of the issue before him.
Once again, we have a scientist performing philosophy without a license, thinking that his scientific qualifications fit him for the task when they don't.
C. S. Lewis once noted that there is very little you could know about what was outside nature by what was inside nature:
"But science has shown that there's no such thing [something that exists outside nature]."Carroll's argument seems to run something like this:
"Really," said I. "Which of the sciences?"
"Oh, well, that's a matter of detail," said my friend. "I can't give you chapter and verse from memory."
"But don't you see," said I, "that science never could show anything of the sort?"
"Why on earth not?"
"Because science studies Nature. And the question is whether anything besides Nature exists--anything 'outside'. How could you find that out by studying simply Nature?"
No reality can exist that does not abide by the laws of physicsThat first premise is a doozy. No wonder he never states it outright in his argument. It simply lurks there in the background throughout the whole article unargued for, unanalyzed, and unacknowledged. How exactly does he know this? In fact, isn't this precisely one of the points at issue between scientific materialists like Carroll and religious thinkers?
A supernatural reality could not abide by the laws of physics
Therefore a supernatural reality cannot exist.
Why would we expect that the soul would retain information after we die? Why would anyone belief that it consists of particles? Why would we think there would be physical laws holding it together?
Why would anyone ask questions like this unless they were simply unaware that the question of the immortality of the soul is not a scientific question. I'm sure accountants have a hard time making accounting sense of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I imagine economists have some trouble making economic sense of Beethoven's Symphony Number 3 in E-flat Major. And I've got to believe that the Empire State Building is somewhat impervious to the analysis of a professional psychologist.
Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.Well, the absurdity of the task--and of asking these particular scientific questions about a non-scientific issue--has apparently not been brought home with sufficient force to Carroll to prevent him from engaging in it. Maybe the reason believers in life after death don't ask scientific questions about it know something Carroll apparently doesn't: that it isn't a scientific question.
But somehow we're supposed to believe that a physicist, by plying his particular craft, can resolve the question of the immortality of the soul. I wonder how Carroll would react if a theologian began analyzing problems in science according the principles of religious dogma.
In fact, we already know the answer to that question. Just go look at Carroll's response to creationism! But don't ask Carroll to observe the same limitations that he asks others to observe.
Carroll sets forth the formula that "tells us how electrons behave" [genuflect here]:
He then states:
If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?)Um, well, no you don't. At least no more than you would need such a thing to happen in the process of affirming the above statement. Such an affirmation would involve a free will decision by Carroll in his conscious mind. In fact, this is one of the problems with the philosophical solvent Carroll wants to apply here: it would not only explain the immortality of the soul away, but consciousness, free will, love--and rational validity itself.
If nothing can be accepted as real if it cannot be encompassed in a mathematical equation, and these things cannot be encompassed in mathematical equations, then these things cannot be accepted as real. What is the formula for consciousness? (a subject Carroll mentions later, as if he'll be able to make any more sense of that) What equation explains free will? By what calculus can you prove love?
And what about life itself? Carroll talks on as if science really understood life, but does it? What is the equation for life? What physical thing is absent from a dead body? Can science even create life? If science cannot explain life itself, by what authority does is pretend to speak on the afterlife?
Aristotle, wiser even in physics than his successors, says that the soul is "the form of the body." The form of a thing is not a material aspect of it. In fact, Carroll is just one of the many philosophically ignorant scientists who gets his formal and material causes mixed up. Modern scientists of Carroll's bent accept material causation, but reject formal causation. But instead of going on their merry way and simply interpreting the world without taking formal causation into account, they either try to make material causes do the work of formal causes or they want to keep formal causation and pretend it is material causation--or (more commonly) both.
In demanding that scientific criteria be applied to the question of whether the soul is immortal, Carroll commits the first of these errors. In not applying it to consciousness, free will, and the process of rational justification, he also commits the second. In both cases, he is committing a category error.
The extent of Carroll's confusion is evidenced by the fact that he doesn't even know he is confused.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
What is Poetry? Answers on the Apocalypse
My post on the failed predictions of the End of the World (and, no, I'm not talking about the Warmers) has garnered some interesting comments, and, as I anticipated, some misunderstandings. What I said was several things (and I am adding a few things here that were not explicitly in the original post for purposes of clarification):
1. That the Book of Revelation was, like all works in the apocalyptic genre, primarily a poetic work rather than a prose work and that that matters when it comes to how you interpret it;
2. That a poetic work cannot be quantified in the way a prose work can and that therefore any attempt to interpret it as if it were prose is doomed from the beginning; and
3. That dispensationalists (like Harold Camping), because of their modernistic tendency to quantify the unquantifiable by treating poetic works as if they are prose, are particularly prone to this, as evidenced by the failed May 21 prediction.
Now I anticipated some misunderstandings of my statements here in part because most of us now are literary eunuchs, having been poetically castrated by a public education establishment that is not only incapable of simply teaching children to read and write, but which has given up on passing on Western culture, a significant aspect of which is its poetry.
We are the first generation that does not read poetry. All ages prior to our own read and understood poetry and were therefore familiar with poetic idiom. And since we don't read it, we don't understand it. In fact, I have argued elsewhere that poetic understanding is essential to a Christian worldview, since large swaths of Scriptural Revelation employ it and if we do not understand how it works, then we cannot understand large swaths of the Revelation.
I have only begun to realize the tragedy of this over the last 10 or 15 years as I have gone back and gotten the education I never got by reading Dante and Milton, and Eliot, as well as Yeats and Berry, and Wilbur.
So, in other words, I am not at all shocked that my comments here are misunderstood.
But let me address one of the comments here. One of my interlocutors, Lee, said the following:
Second, poetic expression does not limit the message of the author. To say that "poetic content is all there is" is to betray the belief that poetry is somehow more limited in its ability to communicate a thought than prose. As Chesterton has put it, "The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say." Well, what does that mean? For one thing, it means that poetic expression can communicate a lot more than prose because there are many more things a word does not mean than things that it does mean.
But let me see if I can articulate what poetic expression consists of to make my point clearer.
What I think Chesterton is saying is that poetic expression is analogical in nature, not univocal. That just means that the words it uses invoke a resemblance which many times cannot be completely captured by rational prose words. Poetic expression also has a different purpose: it is meant to appeal to the imagination and not the intellect. If I say
The "Love is a rose" example is a fairly direct kind of poetic expression. It is almost telling us what it is doing. "Love is a rose" is just one step away from saying "Love is like a rose," which would turn it from poetry to prose--and which would break the enchantment, because it would no longer be seen in soft light of imagination, but under the rude glare of the intellect.
Most poetry is not that obvious. It doesn't bother to telegraph what it is doing. It just leaps directly into the metaphorical:
This doesn't imply that the passage doesn't mean anything or that it means less than it otherwise would or that it doesn't communicate a truth. It most definitely means something--something more and maybe something less that what a poetically challenged person might want to attribute to it. But the main point is that its meaning will be most fully understood by taking it for what it is: an appeal to the imagination, and its meaning is just as likely to be misunderstood by treating it as an appeal to the intellect.
1. That the Book of Revelation was, like all works in the apocalyptic genre, primarily a poetic work rather than a prose work and that that matters when it comes to how you interpret it;
2. That a poetic work cannot be quantified in the way a prose work can and that therefore any attempt to interpret it as if it were prose is doomed from the beginning; and
3. That dispensationalists (like Harold Camping), because of their modernistic tendency to quantify the unquantifiable by treating poetic works as if they are prose, are particularly prone to this, as evidenced by the failed May 21 prediction.
Now I anticipated some misunderstandings of my statements here in part because most of us now are literary eunuchs, having been poetically castrated by a public education establishment that is not only incapable of simply teaching children to read and write, but which has given up on passing on Western culture, a significant aspect of which is its poetry.
We are the first generation that does not read poetry. All ages prior to our own read and understood poetry and were therefore familiar with poetic idiom. And since we don't read it, we don't understand it. In fact, I have argued elsewhere that poetic understanding is essential to a Christian worldview, since large swaths of Scriptural Revelation employ it and if we do not understand how it works, then we cannot understand large swaths of the Revelation.
I have only begun to realize the tragedy of this over the last 10 or 15 years as I have gone back and gotten the education I never got by reading Dante and Milton, and Eliot, as well as Yeats and Berry, and Wilbur.
So, in other words, I am not at all shocked that my comments here are misunderstood.
But let me address one of the comments here. One of my interlocutors, Lee, said the following:
One could read your post, Martin, and come away thinking that you believe poetic content is all that there is in Revelation. But I don't think John was so much a poet as he was the last of the great, fulminating Old Testament prophets. Much of the imagery he employs is in the style of earlier prophets predicting the end of great cities such as Babylon and Ninevah.First of all, this statement assumes that the Old Testament prophets were not themselves using poetic expression. They clearly were. Ezekiel is probably the most obvious example of this.
Second, poetic expression does not limit the message of the author. To say that "poetic content is all there is" is to betray the belief that poetry is somehow more limited in its ability to communicate a thought than prose. As Chesterton has put it, "The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say." Well, what does that mean? For one thing, it means that poetic expression can communicate a lot more than prose because there are many more things a word does not mean than things that it does mean.
But let me see if I can articulate what poetic expression consists of to make my point clearer.
What I think Chesterton is saying is that poetic expression is analogical in nature, not univocal. That just means that the words it uses invoke a resemblance which many times cannot be completely captured by rational prose words. Poetic expression also has a different purpose: it is meant to appeal to the imagination and not the intellect. If I say
Love is a rose, but you better not pick itThis is not saying that love actually is a physical flower. It is saying that there is a relationship between the flower and the picking of it in the physical world that is similar to the relationship between the beloved and the act of trying to possess her. That "You'll lose your love when you say the word 'mine'." I have compared love to a flower, which, like love, often seems to wilt when we try to possess it. But saying it in this latter way is somehow insufficient. It does not encompass the full import or effect of the poetic expression because some truths are better apprehended by seeing them through the imagination than by understanding them through the intellect.
It only grows when it's on the vine
The "Love is a rose" example is a fairly direct kind of poetic expression. It is almost telling us what it is doing. "Love is a rose" is just one step away from saying "Love is like a rose," which would turn it from poetry to prose--and which would break the enchantment, because it would no longer be seen in soft light of imagination, but under the rude glare of the intellect.
Most poetry is not that obvious. It doesn't bother to telegraph what it is doing. It just leaps directly into the metaphorical:
And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.This is about the purest form of poetry you can find. If you try to perform your intellectual surgery on it, you will kill it. It is meant for your imagination and the tool of the imagination is analogy, not analysis. To try to turn it into something univocal is like trying to grasp a bubble: it will disappear the moment you touch it.
This doesn't imply that the passage doesn't mean anything or that it means less than it otherwise would or that it doesn't communicate a truth. It most definitely means something--something more and maybe something less that what a poetically challenged person might want to attribute to it. But the main point is that its meaning will be most fully understood by taking it for what it is: an appeal to the imagination, and its meaning is just as likely to be misunderstood by treating it as an appeal to the intellect.
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