The Truth about Knowing

I have spent quite a lot of time, likely an inordinate amount of time, thinking about knowledge and skepticism, and, at the end of the day, knowledge always wins in my mind. As it does in the minds of most other sane human beings, even philosopher-human-beings. But what is interesting to me is that the spoils of this victory aren't actually reaped because of some imperforate argument from reason against skepticism. More on that in a moment.

A common skeptical argument aims to show that since I can't know that some strange hypothesis (e.g. that I am dreaming right now or that I am a bodiless brain in a vat being stimulated by diabolical super scientists to believe that I have a body and live in Southern California or...) is false, I don't really know anything at all. René Descartes is of course the most notorious presenter of this argument (and also perhaps the one most duly noted for his failure to answer it). The trouble with this kind of argument is that it very easily induces a kind of intellectual trance. It invites the unsuspecting undergraduate into its cozy little Tumnusian den, and, after what seem like a few brief moments, she awakens to find herself locked in a world of confusion and doubt with seemingly no way to get back home before the queen of that twisted world comes and claims her mind forever.

But, thanks be to God, ninety minutes pass, and she is back in her world (which may not be real but is at least familiar) of text messages and status updates. The spell is broken. But how was it broken? David Hume would say that "custom (or habit)", nature herself, has asserted itself and forced the formerly bamboozled youth to ignore the flawless demonstration of her ignorance and to go on living the life of a presumptuous commoner. But I say Hume is wrong about that. Not because I think that I can prove I am not dreaming or that I am not a brain in a vat or [name your favorite skeptical hypothesis], but because I believe that there are more ways to know than only by reason. In fact, we only know things by reason in a roundabout way, through inferential processes which are ultimately based on knowledge that is known by heart. Everyone, even the skeptic, assumes an entire battery of basic principles in forming their arguments for this or that conclusion - truths of logic, mathematics, the external world, other minds, the past, ethics.

Skeptical arguments will never be answered by rigorous argument because the skeptics are right! Reason, as they understand it at least, is unable to account for our knowledge that we are not massively deceived. Since reason is thus impotent, they conclude we do not know anything, but they are wrong about that! "We know," as Michael Polanyi says, "more than we can tell" (The Tacit Dimension [1967], 4). Or Pascal:

We know the truth, not only through reason, but also through the heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to challenge them. The skeptics, who have only this for their object, labor uselessly. We know we are not dreaming, however powerless we are to prove it by reason. This inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, and not, as they claim, the uncertainty of all our knowledge.

For knowledge of first principles, such as space, time, motion, number, is as firm as any we derive from reasoning. Reason must use this knowledge from the heart and instinct, and base all its arguments on it...Principles are felt, propositions are proved; all with certainty, though in different ways. And it is as useless and absurd for reason to demand from the heart proofs of its first principles before accepting them, as it would be for the heart to demand from reason an intuition of all demonstrated propositions before receiving them.

This inability must serve, then, only to humble reason, which would want to be judge of everything, but not to attack our certainty. As if reason alone were capable of teaching us! Would to God, on the contrary, that we never had need of it, and that we knew everything by instinct and intuition. But nature has refused us this good. (Pensées, S142/L110, Roger Ariew translation, Hackett, [2005], 31)

My Brain Made Me See It

Did you know that things happen in a person’s brain while he is having a religious (or mystical) experience? Did you know that many smart people think that, since things happen in a person’s brain while he is having a religious experience, his experience is nothing more than a brain phenomenon with no external source or cause or referent?

Did you know that things happen in a person’s brain while he is having a sense experience? Did you know that the same smart people who think that religious experience is nothing more than a brain phenomenon because things happen in a person’s brain while he is having one don’t think anything analogous about sense experience?

It seems that to be consistent with their proposed reason to reject out of hand any and all religious experiences, these people should reject out of hand any and all sense experiences. But obviously that’s to court radical skepticism, and nobody (except maybe a few contrarians who are forced to live either as practical hypocrites or as madmen) wants to do that. So, to be charitable to these apparently inconsistent religious skeptics, let’s try to find the real reason they believe religious experiences to be “all in the head.”

The real reason, I suspect, is probably better thought of as an assumption. The assumption is that the only possible way for human beings to experience external reality is through the senses. I say it is an assumption because it is typically taken for granted, not argued for. But how might the religious skeptic defend this assumption?

Well, she might say that sense experience is the only way that anybody has ever really experienced external reality, and, so, it is safe to assume that it is the only possible way to experience external reality. But that would be to beg the question in a rather obvious way: she is assuming that no one has ever really experienced reality in a non-sensory way. The mystic would beg to differ!

A better argument would be like the one offered by Michael Martin in his book Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (1990), which goes like this: one way to distinguish genuine perceptions from illusory ones is to check them against each other for consistency. While reports of sense experience inevitably vary from person to person, there is almost always agreement among them at a deeper, more fundamental level. One would expect that if people are experiencing the same reality, they would report similar things about it. And, when it comes to reports about sense experience, people do report similar things. But not so with religious experience, asserts Martin. He says that, whereas reports about sense experiences include superficial dissimilarities but fundamental similarities, the exact opposite is true about religious experience. Some people report experiencing the divine as wholly other, others as identical with everything. Some people report experiencing the divine as benevolent, others as full of wrath. And so on. (Actually not “and so on.” In fact, the examples given here are mine; he doesn’t give any concrete examples of dissimilarities, rather just a few vague references to contrary religious truth claims.) So, according to Martin, since reports concerning the divine differ so radically, they are best explained as purely neuropsychological phenomena, not as experiences of divine reality.

Yet, Martin’s argument suffers from major defects. For one, he is far too quick to conclude that seemingly dissimilar religious experiences are actually fundamentally different. Mystics through the ages have been emphatic about their inability to convey the true nature of their experiences in words, and, as is to be expected when one is attempting to communicate the essentially ineffable, one is liable to fall back on basic background assumptions about the nature of ultimate reality in attempt to translate one’s experience into comprehensible language.

A fortiori, recent work by neuroscientists Eugene G. D’Aquili and Andrew B. Newberg [1] reveals that there is a common core to mystical experience.

The essential point in understanding the phenomenology of subjective religious experience involves a sense of unity of reality at least somewhat greater than the baseline perception of unity in day-to-day life (253)

Moreover, D’Aquili and Newberg highlight what they take to be “the most important mystical state, Absolute Unitary Being, or AUB.”

AUB is a state described in the mystical literature of all the world’s great religions. When people are in that state they lose all sense of discrete being, and even the difference between self and other is obliterated. There is no sense of the passing of time, and all that remains is a perfect timeless undifferentiated consciousness. When such a state is suffused with positive affect, there is a tendency to describe the experience, after the fact, as personal. Hence, such experiences often are described as a perfect union with God (the unio mystica of the Christian tradition), or else the perfect manifestation of God in the Hindu tradition. When such experiences are accompanied by neutral affect, they tend to be described, after the fact, as impersonal. This likely results in generating concepts such as the abyss of Jacob Boeme, the Void, or Nirvana, of Buddhism, or the Absolute of a number of philosophical traditions. There is no question that whether the experience is interpreted personally as God or impersonally as the Absolute, it possesses a quality of transcendent wholeness without any temporal or spatial division whatsoever (253).

It seems overwhelmingly likely, therefore, that while devotees of various religious and philosophical doctrines might describe their mystical experiences in diverse ways, their experiences are (at least very often) quite similar.

On a related note, Martin is clearly not interested in considering the notion that there might be a lot more to reality than what is sensuously detectable. How can he be so sure that people don't report experiencing different things because they are experiencing different things? Maybe some experience God whilst others experience angels or demons or some other finite but insensible things. I don’t raise this in order to suggest that this actually happens, but it does seem that Martin would do well at least to consider it. Indeed, though I might be slipping into uncharity at this point, I venture to suggest that Martin’s arguments are simply halfhearted attempts to prop up his basic assumption that non-sensory perception is impossible.

The facts, as I see them, are these: (i) any argument raised against the possibility of veridical mystical experience can be raised with equal force against the possibility of veridical sense experience, and (ii) Martin-style attempts to fault mystical experiences for being hopelessly inconsistent with each other are undermined by the empirical findings of D’Aquili and Newberg concerning the common phenomenological core of mystical experiences across cultures and metaphysical traditions.

A final point of D’Aquili and Newberg is that those who have experienced AUB – among them sophisticated, formerly materialist, scientists – are virtually certain that their AUB experiences reflect ultimate reality more faithfully or fully than their ordinary sense experience does. Granted those are just their subjective reports and perhaps we should take them with a grain of salt, but these folks do have the advantage of having experienced both AUB and “baseline reality” (that is, the world as experienced through the senses) and without hesitation insist that AUB is fundamental. “This being the case,” they continue,

it is a foolish reductionism indeed that states that, because hyperlucid unitary consciousness can be understood in terms of neuropsychological processes, it is therefore derivative from baseline reality. Indeed the reverse argument could just as well be made. Neuropsychology can give no answer to the question of which state is more real, baseline reality or hyperlucid unitary consciousness often experienced as God (256).

My conclusion, therefore, is simply that there aren’t any good reasons to rule out the notion that people actually can and do experience God - or, at least, that the common reasons that I consider above fail the task. The question of whether or not there are any good reasons to think that anybody actually has experienced God I leave for another time or, perhaps, for another person.

1. See “The Neuropsychological Basis of Religions, or Why God Won’t Go Away,” Zygon 33 (1998): 187-201. Reprinted in Louis Pojman and Michael Rea, Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology (6th Edition). Boston: Wadsworth, 2012: 247-257. Page numbers refer to the Pojman and Rea volume.

Boethius on Man's Faulty Pursuit of Happiness

"Alas, how blind are men who stumble
along the wrong path!
They hope to find gold and jewels
hanging in trees.
They cast their nets wide and fish
on the mountaintops,
or they try to hunt for wild goats
out on the sea
Oh, they know where to dive for pearls
and where the murex dwells
the source of our precious purple dye.
They can find shellfish
but they cannot begin to locate the good
that looms high up
over the earth on which they tread
They are hopeless fools
in endless pursuit of money and fame.
When they have reached
their worthless goals they will come to know
how far they went wrong."

-Lady Philosophy in Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy

Aristotle's Ethics

Meditate on these if you please:

"Men's conception of the good or of happiness may be read in the lives they lead" (Nicomachean Ethics, I.3).

REACTION: this is philosophy undetached from lived life and, perhaps, an improvement on the method of Socrates who went around asking (and annoying) people what they thought the good (or the pious or virtue or justice or...) was. You act in accordance with your deepest beliefs. So, you want to know what you really believe, look to your actions. Scary.

"As one swallow or one day does not make a spring, so one day or a short time does not make a man blessed or happy" (NE, II.2).

REACTION: in a culture of quick fixes and instant gratification, this truth is especially tough. You mean I have to commit myself to being good long-term? Just like any other art (painting, writing, music making, surfing), deliberate practice is necessary for substantial improvement.

"Moral virtue is concerned with pleasures and pains. It is pleasure which makes us do what is base, and it is pain which makes us abstain from doing what is noble. Hence, the importance of having a certain training from very early days, as Plato says, so that we may feel pleasure and pain at the right objects" (NE, II.2).

REACTION: I once heard a philosopher (David Horner, I think it was) say something like this: you're gonna do what you wanna do unless you've got a good reason not to. In other words, we naturally act in accordance with our desires, and it takes a really solid reason to convince us to abstain from things we believe will give us pleasure. The only reason I can think of that is strong enough for such work is a conception of the good that excludes the action in question and is deeply entrenched in one's belief structure.

"Most people, instead of acting, take refuge in theorizing; they imagine that they are philosophers and that philosophy will make them virtuous; in fact, they behave like people who listen attentively to their doctors but never do anything that their doctors tell them. But a healthy state of the soul will no more be produced by this kind of philosophizing than a healthy state of the body by this kind of medical treatment" (NE, II.3).

REACTION: theory is probably not good in itself. I'm not a pragmatist, but what good is theory...or, better, what good is a theorist if he doesn't act in accord with his theory?

"There are many different ways of going wrong; for evil is in its nature infinite,...but good is finite and there is only one possible way of going right. So the former is easy and the latter difficult; it is easy to miss the mark but difficult to hit it" (NE, II.5).

REACTION: genius and a common insight to many moral geniuses - Jesus and G.K. Chesterton come to mind. Variety does not equal virtue. Chesterton: “There are many, many angles at which one can fall but only one angle at which one can stand straight.” Maybe this is part of the explanation of why it is so easy for us evil folks to be creative in dreaming up evil scenarios. To be sure, evil is commonly louder and more provocative than the good, but it is also available in more varieties...all the varieties just happen to suck.

"We must also note the weaknesses to which we ourselves are particularly prone, since different natures tend in different ways; and we may ascertain what our tendency is by observing our feelings of pleasure and pain. Then we must drag ourselves away towards the opposite extreme...In all cases we must especially be on our guard against the pleasant, or pleasure, for we are not impartial judges of pleasure" (NE, II.9).

REACTION: good advice. It's easy to avoid doing what would pain us to do anyway; it's also easy to pat ourselves on the back for not doing such undesirable bad things. But attend to the bad things that are pleasurable, and there you shall have your battle.

Thanks Aristotle.

Good and Evil (part 1)

Many of my students seem to think that the existence of goodness is somehow dependent on the existence of evil. They have vague intuitions, that is, that the existence of evil is somehow necessary for the existence of good. Call this the “Metaphysical Necessity View” (MNV). Students often employ this sentiment, or something akin to it, in their attempts to defend God against the charge that the existence of evil (or evil of certain sorts, degrees, or amounts) is logically inconsistent with the existence of God (or at least casts considerable doubt on the idea that God exists). I think these students are wrong: they are wrong both about good and evil and to try to defend the existence of God on such grounds. Another, much more plausible, view lurking in the neighborhood of MNV is what I’ll call the “Epistemic Necessity View” (ENV). This position concerns not the existence of good and evil but knowledge of the existence of good and evil. According to ENV, it is impossible (for humans anyway) to have knowledge of the good without having knowledge of evil too. This position, as I say, strikes me as much more plausible than MNV, though it too seems to me to be mistaken.

The following are some vague thoughts of my own on the matter. My hope is that in the process of writing out these thoughts my (and perhaps even your) understanding of these issues will begin to sharpen.

For this blog, let’s deal with MNV. The advocate of MNV suggests that goodness and evil somehow need each other. Statements like this often contain some offhand remarks about “yin and yang,” though, as of yet, no one has explained to me how that is supposed to help. So, do good and evil need each other? Are they somehow mutually dependent? I don’t know of any good reason to side with mutual dependence folks here. In fact, it seems to me that MNV is among the least plausible theories of good and evil on offer – though perhaps not quite as bad as the “explanation” that good and evil do not exist at all but rather are, say, social constructions or mere subjective feelings about things that have no real connection to the world an sich (“in itself”).

One promising way to criticize MNV is to think about its implications, chief among them that if MNV is true, then it is impossible for there to be a world that is purely good, a world where good exists and evil does not. Is it really impossible for there to be such a world? It doesn’t seem so, at least not to me. Indeed, I have a strong intuition that it is possible for there to be a purely good world. But if there is such a possibility, then MNV is false. It’s an easy argument.

1. If MNV is true, then it is impossible for there to be a purely good world
2. It is possible for there to be a purely good world
3. Hence, MNV is false
   

I see no reason to reject number 2 except that it conflicts with MNV, but to use MNV as a premise in an argument for MNV is clearly question begging, so that won’t do. What other reason might one give for the impossibility of a purely good world? ...I can’t think of any. (Can you? If so, please share!) So I think it’s reasonable to assume that MNV is false.

(Moreover, if one is a theist – especially a Jewish or Christian theist – then one has another powerful reason to reject MNV: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” [Genesis 1:31]. I’d say that pretty much rules out MNV too. Of course, quoting Scripture probably won't satisfy the agnostic inquirer, but it certainly carries a lot of weight with believers. And why prefer the evidential standards of one who admits to not knowing [cf. agnostic] to the standards of one who thinks she does?)

So much then for MNV…See a future post for a discussion of ENV.

Twitter is for Barneys

This post is for anyone who happened to click on the link to my blog from Bobby Earle's blog (which happens to be a blog that people actually read). Leave a comment if you would like my measured and supremely rational assessment of Twitter ;) I'm too busy right now to write for no one but myself.

Terry Eagleton on Richard Dawkins

Another well-written and devastating review of Dawkins' The God Delusion.

Sample nugget:

As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

Universal TV

Why are almost all "educational" TV shows about the universe about ways it can kill us? Why all this emphasis on how it can crush us or incinerate us or vaporize us or freeze us or starve us or...?

Some recent autobiography: I watched about an hour's worth of the History Channel's "The Universe" last night, and what I saw was a bunch of university professors talking about how black holes or some other cosmic-something-or-rather could easily destroy life on earth if thus and so astronomical event were to take place in close enough proximity to our planet. Then this morning, out of curiosity, I turned on the History Channel again and discovered "Mega Disasters," a program chiefly concerned with informing viewers that ridiculously violent, volcanic activity - at some time or other, perhaps soon - will snuff out all or most of the human race. "It is not a matter of if but when," says the narrator.

This is a curious emphasis, don't you think? I suppose people have always been interested in death and disaster, but still, how could the producers of a high-budget television program and some of the brightest scientific minds look out on the universe and find most salient its power to destroy us? This strikes me as pathological.

Then again, perhaps it is just a natural consequence of the naturalistic point of view.

How often have you heard statements like this: "From time immemorial, sages, mystics, philosophers, priests et al have speculated about the end of the world, but now - for the first time - we know how the world will end...'not with a bang but a whimper.'" (Or, as an alternative to taking Eliot out of context, maybe this time they tickle our ears with a bastardized Shakespearean quip.) Following this confident assertion, the narrator takes us on an historical tour of the Cosmos, from the Big Bang all the way to the future "heat death" of the universe. This sequence of events is presented as inevitible and bleak. No light. No heat. No life. Nothing but cold, dead matter and empty space.

(Now if that is the truth about the world, then so be it. But has the issue of its truth been settled? Clearly it hasn't. Christians believe that God will make a new heavens and a new Earth, one invulnerable to decay - full of light and life. What in the history of philosphy or science refutes the Christian vision? Nothing that I can see. Yet, it is treated as if it were refuted or at least irrelevant to the realm of facts. But this isn't really the point of this blog; so I'll leave it for another time.)

I wonder (I don't know) whether fixation on the various powers of the universe to kill us is not in large part the result of widespread, naturalistic (atheistic) presumptions about the world and our place in it.

Moral Ignorance

Why not another nugget from Berry? "Moral ignorance," he says, is "self-induced" and comes with the "excuse" of "objectivity."

One of the purposes of objectivity, in practice, is to avoid coming to a moral conclusion. Objectivity, considered a mark of great learning and the highest enlightenment, loves to identify itself by such pronouncements as the following: "You may be right, but on the other hand so may your opponent," or "Everything is relative," or "Whatever is happening is inevitable," or "Let me be the devil's advocate." (The part of devil's advocate is surely one of the most sought after in all the precincts of the modern intellect. Anywhere you go to speak in defense of something worthwhile, you are apt to encounter a smiling savant writhing in the estrus of objectivity: "Let me play the devil's advocate for a moment." As if the devil's point of view will not otherwise be adequately represented.)
--Wendell Berry, "The Way of Ignorance" in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays, p.55

Ironic, isn't it, that those who consider themselves most objective say things like "Everything is relative?"

Berry Nuggets

All of the following is drawn from Wendell Berry's essay "The Joy of Sales Resistance," which serves as the preface to his book Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.

Berry describes the "political package" of Tolerance and Multiculturalism like this:

Quit talking bad about women, homosexuals, and preferred social minorities, and you can say anything you want about people who haven't been to college, manual workers, country people, peasants, religious people, unmodern people, old people, and so on. Tolerant and multicultural persons hyphenate their land of origin and their nationality. I, for example, am a Kentuckian-American.

On "intellectual property," he says,

As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no "intellectual property," and I think that all claimants to such property are thieves.

He also sees one (perhaps the only one) advantage to being a straight and white Protestant American:

I am, I acknowledge, a white Protestant heterosexual man, and can only offer myself as such. I take no particular pride in my membership in this unfashionable group, nor do I consider myself in any way its spokesman. I do, however, ask you to note, dear reader, that this membership confers on me a certain usefulness in that it leaves me with no excuses and nobody to blame for my faults except myself.

Concerning those who oppose him,

On my more charitable days, I am grateful even to my enemies, who have sharpened my mind and who have done me the service of being, as a rule, wronger than I am.

The Kingdom of God

O WORLD invisible, we view thee,

O world intangible, we touch thee,

O world unknowable, we know thee,

Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,

The eagle plunge to find the air—

That we ask of the stars in motion

If they have rumor of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,

And our benumbed conceiving soars!—

The drift of pinions, would we hearken,

Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places;—

Turn but a stone and start a wing!

'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangèd faces,

That miss the many-splendored thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)

Cry;—and upon thy so sore loss

Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder

Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,

Cry,—clinging to Heaven by the hems;

And lo, Christ walking on the water,

Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

FRANCIS THOMPSON (1859-1907)
"The Kingdom of God"

Wendell Berry on "Commercial Education"

I always tell people: "I hate college." And I really do. I hate it. But I'm a college teacher. So how does that work? Well, I should be clearer: I hate the contemporary academy. I love, however, the classical idea of the university, and I need a job--and I possess the naive hope that, in my own little way, I just might be able to combat the things I hate about the contemporary academy and help foster something good. This is probably a vain hope, especially since I don't really know what exactly it is that I hate about the contemporary academy. Thankfully, Wendell Berry is helping me figure that out. He states,

"Actually, as we know, the new commercial education is fun for everybody. All you have to do in order to have or to provide such an education is to pay your money (in advance) and master a few simple truths:

I. Educated people are more valuable than other people because education is a value-adding industry.

II. Educated people are better than other people because education improves people and makes them good.

III. The purpose of education is to make people able to earn more and more money.

IV. The place where education is to be used is called 'your career.'

V. Anything that cannot be weighed, measured, or counted does not exist.

VI. The so-called humanities probably do not exist. But if they do, they are useless. But whether they exist or not or are useful or not, they can sometimes be made to support a career.

VII. Literacy does not involve knowing the meanings of words, or learning grammar, or reading books.

VIII. The sign of exceptionally smart people is that they speak a language that is intelligible only to other people in their 'field' or only to themselves. This is very impressive and is known as 'professionalism.'

IX. The smartest and most educated people are the scientists, for they have already found solutions to all our problems and will soon find solutions to all the problems resulting from their solutions to all the problems we used to have.

X. The mark of a good teacher is that he or she spends most of his or her time doing research and writes many books and articles.

XI The mark of a good researcher is the same as that of a good teacher.

XII. A great university has many computers, a lot of government and corporation research contracts, a winning team, and more administrators than teachers.

XIII. Computers make people even better and smarter than they were made by previous thingamabobs. Or if some people prove incorrigibly wicked or stupid or both, computers will at least speed them up.

XIV. The main thing is, don't let education get in the way of being nice to children. Children are our Future. Spend plenty of money on them but don't stay home with them and get in their way. Don't give them work to do; they are smart and can think up things to do on their own. Don't teach them any of that awful, stultifying, repressive, old-fashioned morality. Provide plenty of TV, microwave dinners, day care, computers, computer games, cars. For all this, they will love and respect us and be glad to grow up and pay our debts.

XV. A good school is a big school.

XVI. Disarm the children before you let them in.

Of course, education is for the Future, and the Future is one of our better-packaged items and attracts many buyers. (The past, on the other hand, is hard to sell; it is, after all, past.) The Future is where we'll all be fulfilled, happy, healthy, and perhaps will live and consume forever. It may have some bad things in it, like storms or floods or earthquakes or plagues or volcanic eruptions or stray meteors, but soon we will learn to predict and prevent such things before they happen. In the Future, many scientists will be employed in figuring out how to prevent the unpredictable consequences of the remaining unpreventable bad things. There will always be work for scientists."

("The Joy of Sales Resistance," Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community, xii-xiv)

Incredulity about Moral Realism

The famous professor Allan Bloom says in his most famous passage,

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. (The Closing of the American Mind, p. 25)

This semester (as an undergrad philosophy instructor) I have been privileged to put Mr. Bloom’s belief to the test. I am sad to report that, at least with regard to moral truth, it is absolutely true.

What's more, it is clear that most of these students have never been challenged in their relativism; nor have they even questioned it themselves. Hence the general bafflement at my apparent "absolutism." For example, upon gently pushing the class to consider the notion that at least some moral propositions (i.e. Torturing babies for fun is morally wrong) are objectively true, I was met with incredulous stares, followed by the exasperated objection: "But then there would be absolutes!" "Well, yes, I guess you could put it that way, though I prefer to use the word 'objective' as opposed to 'absolute'." More incredulous stares.

Almost equally as shocking was their uniform and quite obviously fallacious argument for relativism:

People in different cultures have totally different morals than we do. They think their morals are right, and we think ours our right [although apparently we don't]. So morality is relative.

My response went something like this:

First, I'm not at all confident that beliefs about morality fundamentally differ from culture to culture. But let's just grant that for the sake of argument and look at your reasoning. Your argument seems to pivot on the principle that if people radically disagree about x, then x is neither true nor false but relative to some individual or culture or society or .... But people radically disagree about all sorts of stuff, even scientific stuff. Consider the debate between the Heliocentrists and the Geocentrists. The Helios and the Geos radically disagreed about the nature of the universe. Was there no truth of the matter? Was it true for the Geos that the earth was the center of the universe and true for the Helios that it was not? No! Then why should we think that mere disagreement about moral matters somehow entails relativism?

The few, the timid, the objectivists seemed to have gained courage at this point and began weighing in. I was very thankful for them. But for the most part my counterattack was ignored and met with a repetition of the fallacious argument and supplemented with some stories about how there are cannibalistic tribes in Africa and Alaska. I rephrased my point...to no avail, and round and round we went.

Our Mothering Father & the Problem of Evil

Eleonore Stump's essay "The Mirror of Evil" in God and the Philosophers (ed. Thomas Morris) is centered around the truth contained in Psalm 131: 1-2.

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

Weaning, says Stump, appears a great evil to a child who longs for his mother's milk, but eventually the child becomes "calmed and quieted" of soul in response to the mothering care of the very one who appeared the villain. The answer to the child's suffering, in other words, is in the loving face of his mother.

It is often said that God's answer to Job's sufferings was only a flurry of (justified) questions to remind Job of his own finitude and then silence. But, Stump insists, this is entirely to miss the answer God gives: Himself. "Now I see you," Job says, and he has his answer. Stump:

If you could see the loving face of a truly good God, you would have an answer to the question why God had afflicted you. When you see the deep love in the face of a person you suppose has betrayed you, you know you were wrong. Whatever happened was done out of love for you by a heart that would never betray you and a mind bent on your good. To answer a mistaken charge of betrayal, someone who loves you can explain the misunderstanding or he can show his face.

We, especially we analytic descendants of the Enlightenment, are wont to demand propositional explanations for things not understood. But doesn't it seem a bit ridiculous to presume that whatever propositional explanation could be given for the suffering and evil in the world would be mundane enough for our puny minds to comprehend, let alone to appropriate in a meaningful way? And, after all, Stump continues, "Sometimes showing his face heals the hurt much faster."

To the mind apprised only of the reality of evil, the problem of evil is likely to strike irrefutable. "But start with a view of evil and a deep taste of the goodness of God," says Stump, "and you will know that there must be a morally sufficient reason for God to allow evil--not some legal and ultimately unsatisfying reason, but the sort of reason...in which true goodness is manifest." Of course, we must be careful to maintain that "nothing in this thought makes evil less evil." But "it makes a great difference to suppose that the sufferers of evil, maybe ourselves included, are in the arms of a mothering God...we feel our pains of the moment, but they are encircled by an understanding that brings peace and joy."

From the vantage of the one who has tasted and seen that the Lord is good,

the mirror of evil brings us around to the hobbit's way of seeing things at the end. 'Go,' says Ecclesiastes, 'eat your bread in gladness and drink your wine in joy; for your action was long ago approved by God' (9:7). If God is mothering the earth and if its evils are in His hands, then you may be at peace with yourself and your world. You can be grateful for the good that comes your way without always contrasting it with the ghastliness elsewhere. This road to quiet cheerfulness is the long way to the goal, but perhaps for some people it is also the only way there.

At this point, Stump wisely is careful to hedge against the critic who is ever ready to cry "Escapism!" The one who is consoled and quieted by the goodness of God will naturally wish to ally herself with what is good and to see to it that what is evil is eradicated. God hates evil, and so do those who love Him.

Mr. Russell & (Part of) What it Means to be Modern

What does it mean to be modern? It means, at least partially, to endorse the following from Bertrand Russell. In fact, I think that the degree to which one agrees with this passage is roughly the degree to which one is a modern.

The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge--knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain. Hence also the free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense-organs distort as much as they reveal.
-from "The Value of Philosophy" in The Problems of Philosophy (1969)

As for me, something about Russell's view strikes me stifling and cold. I am a firm believer in the objectivity of truth and the reality of knowledge, but in my view the emotions (passions, affections) have a pivotal role to play in the pursuit of knowledge and the expansion of the mind. The goal should not be to snuff out the emotions but to stimulate and refine appropriate emotions. Moreover, as persons, there is no chance of extricating the "personal" from knowing; why then ought we to pursue "impersonal" knowledge, "as purely contemplative?" Perhaps if we accept and celebrate that we are unavoidably personal knowers, we might find the world all the more opened up to us.

I, therefore, prefer the philosophical vision of Michael Polanyi to that of his contemporary. As he puts it, notably in personal terms,

"I declare myself committed to the belief in an external reality gradually accessible to knowing, and I regard all true understanding as an intimation of such a reality which, being real, may yet reveal itself to our deepened understanding in an indefinite range of unexpected manifestations. I accept the obligation to search for the truth through my own intimations of reality, knowing that there is, and can be, no strict rule by which my conclusions can be justified."
-from "Knowing and Being" (1961)

David Bentley Hart on Creation

I just received in the mail David Bentley Hart's intimidating tome, The Beauty of the Infinite: the Aesthetics of Christian Truth. I was flipping through the book with excitement (because I'm a nerd) and foreboding (because I'm lazy and the book is massive) when I ran across this little nugget in the extensive table of contents.

II. Creation

1. God's gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure, and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity, as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love; and thus creation must be received before all else as gift and as beauty.

Well stated, wouldn't you agree? Creation as, first of all, "gift" and "beauty" as opposed to say creation as, first of all, "product" or "mechanism" or "artifact."

There is a general suspicion of beauty among modern people. Even despite myself, I find it difficult to think of beauty as a (or the) primary aspect of the world, but I think Hart is right to assert that Creation should be understood by Christians as an unnecessary and beautiful gift of the God to be received by his creatures.

Moreover, I can't help but speculate that this view of creation is the best antidote to gnosticism. The notion that the physical world is something to be loathed and, if possible, escaped is shown to be preposterous if the Creation is, first and foremost, a gift of a perfectly loving God.

You Can't Think of Anything Better? Really?

A high school teacher was interview directly following the Obama Inauguration today. (Yes, 'tis true, the Promised One has taken up his rightful place as ruler over the less blessed.) I don't want to comment on the Coronation...ahem! I mean Inauguration. Rather, I want just to focus on this woman-in-the-crowd's comment concerning children and politics. She said:

I can't think of anything better than for kids to become politically active.

Really? Isn't it more important for kids to know the difference between right and wrong or to cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues essential to legitimate political activity or to have fun or to learn how to be a good friend or ....

Actually, I'm not sure it is, on the whole, good or important at all that kids be politically active. And, really, what is it for a kid to be "politically active?" What it was for me was supporting whomever my parents were supporting.

I don't mean to attack this woman particularly, but it seems to me that her view is shared by many these days. And I think that's dumb.

On the Practicing of Old Liturgies

This blog is about practice, not theology. (However, as I read Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World, I am becoming convinced that the two are ultimately inseparable.) My inspiration for this post is the following:

A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it … Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books … Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction … [I]f any man is tempted to think – as one might be tempted who read only contemporaries – that ‘Christianity’ is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so.*

This incisive comment by C.S. Lewis on the value of reading outside one’s own historical moment got me thinking about liturgy. Lewis points out that the blind spots which endanger every age are usually (perhaps unavoidably) present in the books of that age. I want to extend that idea into the realm of church practice.

Evangelical liturgies have, almost as a rule, been developed – sometimes very thoughtfully, sometimes very hodgepodgely – during and for this age. These liturgies (it feels a bit strange to call them that) might contain various holdovers from past decades but not many. And even when they do reflect antiquity, they do so vaguely, more in shadow than in substance. Now, this would be fine if our time was one of perfect insight, but it is not. So, I say, just as it is helpful to read what they read of old, why not do what they did of old? (There are myriad other, and better, reasons to embrace ancient liturgy, but I am here just concerned with one.)

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* C.S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books” (1944), reprinted in (ed.) Walter Hooper, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), pgs. 201-3.

Jesus vs. PETA

"Of how much more value is a man than a sheep!" (Matt. 12:12)

Plantinga's EAAN Goes Pop

For all those who should be interested--everybody, that is--Alvin Plantinga has whittled down his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) and published it as "Evolution vs. Naturalism" in Books & Culture. Click and read.