Tag: philosophy

Fractured physics and the death of Darwin

I’ve been paying closer attention to the LHC experiment than I normally would because I’m very curious to see how stubbornly scientists will cling to theories should they be proven outmoded by the very experiments designed to support them:

ormer Harvard professor Shahriar Afshar said that failure to find the particle would bring current scientific theory tumbling down like a house of cards with nothing to replace it. The controversial physicist, whose Afshar experiment has already found a loophole in quantum theory, said that unless the scienitific community starts contemplating a “plan B”, failure could lead to “chaos and infighting”.

He said failure will undermine more than a hundred years of scientific theory and undermine some of the mainstays of sceintific thinking, the Standard Model, a general theory of how particles fit together to create matter.

I’ve also found it to be interesting how in physics – real science – there is very little, if any, of the defensive and irrational babbling often heard from true-believing TENS advocates about how a lack of an alternative theory somehow justifies the continued use of a theory already known to be intrinsically flawed. It is usually easier to show that a suggested answer is incorrect than it is to come up with a plausible alternative answer, and it should not be forgotten that through eliminating false pathways, negative results also represent scientific advancement.

As I have consistently suggested, TENS is not only a predictively useless model, but a scientifically flimsy one as well. In fact, it is looking increasingly likely that it will be abandoned by the scientific consensus during our lifetimes. Once I began studying the subject, it was immediately obvious to me that critics had been focusing on the less vulnerable parts of the theory from the start; it is the natural selection element that has even less reliable scientific evidence to support it than speciation or the concept of evolution itself.

Consider the results of some of the first methodical scientific research into the natural selection hypothesis:

The new research, carried out by Mark Pagel and colleagues at the University of Reading, in England, studied 101 groups of plant and animal species and analyzed the lengths of branches in the evolutionary trees of thousands of species within these groups. The lengths of the branches are a measure of the time elapsed between two species branching off.

The researchers then compared four models of speciation to determine which best accounted for the rate of speciation actually found. The Red Queen hypothesis, of species arising as a result of an accumulation of small changes, fitted only eight percent of the evolutionary trees. A model in which species arise from single rare events fitted eighty percent of the trees.

Dr Pagel said that the research shows speciation is the result of rare events in the environment, such as genetic mutations, a shift in climate, or a mountain range rising up. Over the long term new species are formed at a constant rate, rather than the variable rate Pagel’s team expected, but the constant rates are different for different groups of species.

The work suggests that natural selection may not be the cause of speciation, which Pagel said “really goes against the grain” for scientists who have a Darwinian view of evolution. The model that provided the best fit for the data is surprisingly incompatible with the idea that speciation is a result of many small small events,

Now, this research deals with the matter of natural selection’s time scale rather than its existence, but nevertheless underlines my point that the natural selection hypothesis has always been logic, not science. The fact that it is difficult and dangerous to paint grizzly bears pink in order to see if they breed less successfully doesn’t change the fact that no one has ever tested the widespread assumption of why polar bears are white. And while the jury is still out on both matters, the exposed cracks in the major theories naturally leads to a philosophical question: since the foundations of both modern physics and modern Darwinism appear to be wobbling, what is the basis for considering materialism to be rational given such demonstrably flawed understandings of what the material happens to be?

An atheist on indoctrination

I don’t know if the ostrich-like indoctrination approach that John Loftus describes is normal for most Bible colleges and seminaries or not, but it certainly applies to almost every university in the world with regards to economics:

When I went to Bible College I was not educated. I was indoctrinated. While other believers will protest that their Christian college was different, I wonder if that’s true. In order to test this let me explain my experience, compare it with what a good education is, and see what you think. Okay?

Yesterday I had lunch with my friend Dr. Dan Lambert of the Evangelical school John Brown University. He is using my book, WIBA, in several different teaching venues, including college/master’s level classes, and even at an adult study group for a church. I had written about this before. He’s not the only one. My friend Dr. Richard Knopp is using my book in his college/master’s level apologetics classes. I had written about this before too.

There are others, so I’m told. I would like to applaud them all for doing their very best to educate rather than indoctrinate their students. Some skeptics may claim they’re indoctrinating their students anyway, but this is the best we can expect of them. I don’t think the word “indoctrinate” can apply to doing what they’re doing, even if they are arguing against me in their classes.

I very much agree with Loftus on the difference between education and indoctrination; I am not only a strong advocate of reading the material from opposing points of view, but of learning it and knowing it better than the advocates of that point of view. For example, the average Richard Dawkins fan does not realize that when Dawkins makes the superficially straightforward statement that “evolution is a fact” he is actually committing typical Dawkinsian sleight of hand and only commits himself to having inferred the facthood of evolution. This inference, of course, is not at all the same thing as an actual fact, let alone an “inescapable” one. In like manner, few Marxians understand how thoroughly robotics and the information society have destroyed the entire foundation of not only Marxian economics, but historical materialism, simply because they do not know their Marx well enough.

I have as little patience for Christians who think it is unnecessary to know what non-Christians are saying as I do for atheists who plead that cretinous Courtier’s Reply while simultaneously attempting to criticize religion in general or Christianity in particular. The fact that one might happen to be correct about something should never be confused for the knowledge of why one is correct, the probability that one is correct, or the ability to explain why someone else is incorrect. The best minds constantly embrace challenges to their thinking, they do not run and hide from them. I can only commend the likes of Dr. Lambart who do not shirk from doing what every good teacher should do and expose their students to the arguments and ideologies they will be expected to face in the future.

Since the question will undoubtedly arise, I should point out that I haven’t read Loftus’s books, and I have no idea if his critiques of Christianity are any more serious or intellectually legitimate than those presented by the Circle Jerk of the Militant Godless.

Letter to Common Sense Atheism VI

Dear Luke,

I am sorry it took me so long to respond to your previous letter. As you know, I recently published a book and have been more than a little occupied with the various interviews that were requested as a result. And, to be honest, the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 hasn’t exactly helped my daily productivity although I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve mastered both the UMP-45 and the SCAR-H. However, I also found myself at a bit of a loss regarding the best way to respond to your most recent letter, because I was not entirely sure which aspects of your previous letters remain operable and which have been negated by the “reboot”. But, I will attempt to make some reasonable assumptions and I have no doubt you will be willing to correct me if I prove to be mistaken.

Now, you noted yourself the inherent contradiction between your original willingness to postulate that the theistic case is true and your subsequent return to a defense of metaphysical naturalism in order to assert that the theistic case is false. This is not any sort of problem in itself, since we both understood that you were merely postulating the truth of the theistic case for the sake of argument. Well and good. But, if you are “ill-prepared to defend the explanatory virtues of supernatural worldviews” you do not actually defend, as you stated in your most recent letter, this raises the question of whether you are capable of ascertaining which of the competing theistic explanations of (S) “Humans often take pleasure in the involuntary and undeserved suffering of others” is the one best supported by the observable evidence. Are you conceding the other theistic explanations now in a willingness to stand or fall on the relative merits of the case for metaphysical naturalism vis-a-vis Christianity? That is, after all, what you appear to be implying here.

One of the problems that has appeared during your continuing pursuit of clarification is that in this process, you appear to have inadvertently conceded the legitimacy of the basis for my personal belief in the truth of Christianity despite your rejection of the concept of objective evil upon which it is founded. I realize that was far from your intent, of course, and your post facto rejection of the theistic case negates it, but let me point out what has developed in order to prevent it from happening again as we consider whether Christianity, metaphysical naturalism, or some other religion best explains the existence of (S), which for me is simply one of many of the various forms of observable, objective evil.

1.You postulated that the theistic arguments succeed and the atheistic arguments fail.

2.I explained that my belief in Christianity is based primarily on observing objective evil that I find to be best predicted and explained by the Christian worldview as expressed in the Bible and mainstream Christian theology.

3.You pointed out that there are a wide variety of competing theistic explanations for evil.

4.I agreed and noted that due to my academic background in history and East Asian Studies, I have even studied a few of those competing religions. In fact, familiarity with those religions was one of the things that led me to believe the Christian explanation for the observable existence of evil was the correct one.

5.You asserted that you are not prepared to defend the explanatory virtues of the various supernatural worldviews, implying that you are not sufficiently prepared to adjudicate between them either.

6. Ergo, there is no competition for the foundation of my belief in the truth of Christianity.

This doesn’t prove that my beliefs are correct, of course, merely that you had no rational basis for questioning the legitimacy of my belief in the truth of Christianity without reopening the matter of metaphysical naturalism. Which you have now done. So, unless you would like to reopen the matter of competing theistic explanations, I shall focus on addressing only the competing explanations of Christianity and metaphysical naturalism.

The metaphysical naturalism perspective dictates that Man is merely an animal, possessed of almost exactly the same substance as any other highly evolved mammal, constituted of DNA that is more similar to the great apes than the apes are to the monkeys, let alone dogs or cats. Since we are so little different from other mammals, we cannot possess any attributes that are materially and substantively different from those possessed by them, we can only possess quantitative differences. A man may pilot a fighter jet over enemy territory while a chimpanzee only hits a rival with a stick, but both mammals are doing essentially the same thing in using a tool for the purposes of harming another. A woman may become the president of a world-reknowned university while a female gorilla may only become the dominant female in its troop, but again, both mammals are doing essentially the same thing in jockeying for primate primacy. And what blogger can be unaware of the human proclivity for flinging metaphorical feces in the electronic form of ritual primate combat?

However, I think there is a definite substantive and non-quantitative distinction between the human and the animal when it comes to (S). While the animal is capable of distinguishing between pleasure and pain, is able to experience pleasure, inflict pain, and can perceive the existence of pain in others, in my experience, I have never seen an animal derive direct personal pleasure solely from the pain of another animal. Any pain that is involved in the interaction, whether it is a dog asserting its alpha status in the local neighborhood or a cat tormenting a mouse, appears to be nothing more than a consequence of the animal’s primary purpose rather than the purpose itself. Unfortunately, humans, all too often inflict pain primarily for the sake of the pleasure it brings them. This can be observed at a very early age; young children learn the pleasure of cruelty long before they are capable of understanding how to use the infliction of emotional and physical pain as a means of protecting and enhancing their social status. This is the first hurdle that metaphysical naturalism must surmount.

The second hurdle that the naturalistic perspective must address is the divided nature of the human mind. Leaving the larger question of the nature of human consciousness aside for the mystery it remains for priests and scientists alike, it is an observable and experiential fact as well as longstanding theory that the human mind does not function in the same unified way in which we understand animal minds to operate, driven solely by instinct, experience, and desire. I am no great fan of Sigmund Freud’s or what I believe to be the profoundly unscientific pseudoscience of psychology that he created, but even I am willing to recognize that his development of the tripartite concept of the id, the ego, and the superego was driven by observational exigencies; it was his attempt to articulate and explain what he was observing in his patients.

Why do we wish to do what we are absolutely determined not to do? Why do we refuse to do what we are absolutely convinced that we must do? From where do these competing desires stem? The Christian explanation is an elegant one; even those who do not believe in it will readily admit that the explanation of the continuous competition of a man’s unregenerate fallen nature and his redeemable spiritual nature provides a rational and reasonable explanation for the rival forces that exist within a single human mind.

This leads to the third hurdle that metaphysical naturalism must eventually address, which is why (S) should be viewed any differently from any other sort of pleasure. The Disturbed song Divide asks the question in a characteristically confrontational manner:

I am a little more provocative than you might be,
It’s your shock and then your horror on which I feed
So can you tell me what exactly does freedom mean,
If I’m not free to be as twisted as I wanna be?

This is not an argument from consequence here, merely an observation that (S) is almost uninformly considered to be undesirable even by those who happen to be inclined towards it from time to time, so the strength and ubiquity of what must be logically be considered a nonsensical view from a naturalistic perspective requires explaining. Obviously the Christian worldview has little problem in explaining its declaration of (S) being unequivocally evil; contra the fevered visions of the Christian God as a deity with a torture fetish that one occasionally encounters among atheists and Christians alike, there is no evidence that God takes any particular pleasure in the destruction of the wicked except in that the necessary justice is done. Actually, the various parables of the wheat and the chaff and the sheep and the goats tend to indicate that God has no more sadistic interest in the Hellbound soul than the average human does in the trash he is taking out to await the weekly garbage pickup.

As for the latter part of your letter, I have no objection to your suggestions regarding “explanation”, “hypothesis” and “theory”, I will await your response to these three (S)-related hurdles with interest.

Best regards,
Vox

This was written in response to the 6th Letter to Vox Day

The brilliant sociopathy of Gervais

A very interesting interpretation of The Office as a structural re-envisioning of corporate culture. I have to admit that in my experience, the Gervais Principle, as the author names it, is superficially more convincing than either the Peter or Dilbert Principles.

This is where Gervais has broken new ground, primarily because as an artist, he is interested in the subjective experience of being clueless. For your everyday sociopath, it is sufficient to label someone clueless and work around them. What Gervais managed to create is a very compelling portrait of the clueless, a work of art with real business value.

Here is the ultimate explanation of Michael Scott’s (and David Brent’s) careers: they are put into a position of having to explain their own apparent, unexpected and unexamined success. It is easy to explain failure. Random success is harder. Remember, they are promoted primarily as passive pawns to either allow the sociopaths to escape the risks of their actions, or to make way for the sociopaths to move up faster. They are presented with an interesting bit of cognitive dissonance: being nominally given greater power, but in reality being safely shunted away from the pathways of power. They must choose to either construct false narratives or decline apparent opportunities.

The clueless resolve this dissonance by choosing to believe in the reality of the organization. Not everybody is capable of this level of suspension of disbelief. Both Ricky Gervais (David Brent) and Steve Carrel (Michael Scott) play the brilliantly-drawn characters perfectly. The most visible sign of their capacity for self-delusion is their complete inability to generate an original thought. They quote movie lines, lyrics and perform terrible impersonations (at one point Michael goes, “You talking to me?” a line he attributes, in a masterful display of confusion, to “Al Pacino, Raging Bull“). For much of what he needs to say, he gropes for empty business phrases, deploying them with staggering incompetence. When Michael talks, he is attempting, like a child, to copy the flawless buzzspeak spoken by sociopaths like Jan and David Wallace. He is oblivious to the fact that the sociopaths use buzzspeak as a coded language with which to simultaneously sustain the (necessary) delusions of the clueless and communicate with each other.

Of course, one would be remiss to fail to point out the way in which this postulated analytical brilliance strongly suggests Gervais’s own sociopathy. This may offer partial explanation for his atheistic hostility to religion, (not his disbelief, mind you, just the hostility), whose creators and leaders he would naturally assume to be as sociopathic as he knows himself to be.

It would appear that I may have a sociopathic trait or two myself, as the author brings up one of my favorite tactics, the last sentence aside, in extra credit for his Law Number Five: “Quoting your opponents more accurately than they can quote themselves is one of the most fascinating moves you can employ. The original speaker is put on the defensive, forced to fumble and clarify, and in the process loses control. If you want to experience true schadenfreude listen closely to what your opponents say. Do not admit to enjoying this experience.” Of course, despite the best efforts of many critics over the last eight years, this has seldom worked on me. Since I make habitual use of the tactic myself, I never cease to anticipate it. Also, there are few things more amusing than seeing an arrogant and insufficiently analytical critic snap at the bait you’ve laid before him.

Darwin’s killer disciples

The murderous children of evolution are a real problem, even if the Darwinists don’t like to admit it:

Darwin would no doubt have been horrified by all this, but it’s easy to see why some of his ideas might appeal to the disturbed adolescent mind. One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance. Any psychologically well-adjusted person would regard this as regrettable, if true. But some people get a thrill from peering into the void and acknowledging that life is utterly meaningless.

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved — a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang “Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free” — lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

The truth or untruth of natural selection, or evolution by natural selection, doesn’t depend upon their consequences. But the inability of biologists to recognize the obvious logical implications of the freedom from the limits of traditional morality that they celebrate only serves to demonstrate their complete incompetence as philosophers. If it’s no longer evil to freely fornicate or worship idols, it’s no longer evil to freely rape or murder either. And a description of a theorized process of historical moral development is no rational basis for subsequent cherry-picking between those developments you happen to believe are positive and those you happen to believe are negative.

The OC on time and things

Things

I’m on a road trip this weekend, to Colorado, to finish cleaning out Emily’s apartment and deal with her things. Good gosh, she’s got a lot of things.

Had. Sorry, I’m still thinking of her in the present tense. I’m at the point now where it seems as if—oh, that she’s just on a somewhat longer than usual vacation, and any minute now she’ll walk through that door, or call my cellphone. And then I remember: no, she won’t.

Read it. And then spend some time with someone who will value it.

Letter to Common Sense Atheism V

Dear Luke,

I fear you have misunderstood the pleasure I take in demonstrating the waywardness of paths that do not lead to the truth for my purpose in seeking the correct one. A path believed to be correct is either so or it is not so. Observing the falsity of your claims to superlative theological knowledge was more than a work of my peculiar art, it was necessary for us to even begin getting at the truth of the matter because what we do not know usually impairs our ability to reason less than our belief in the truth of that which is false. Given that you are contemplating the pursuit of a philosophy PhD, I can safely assume you have read Plato’s Apology. If you have, then you will surely recall the way in which Socrates paraphrased the Oracle’s reference to him. “He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.” I see no need to dispute your claim to have spent hundreds of hours reading the Bible and various theological texts, because it is irrelevant.

Apes do read theology, Luke, they just don’t understand it. Christianity no more concerns a Panglossian world actively managed by a magical omnibenevolent puppet-master where all things work out for the good of everyone than Aristotle was Belgian or the central message of Buddhism is every man for himself.

Before I get to the substance of this discussion, I find myself interested in learning how your belief in desirism is off-topic, given that: a) you up brought the subject and went into a fair amount of detail in describing it, b) this discussion does not only concern my beliefs, but yours as well, and, c) desirism is directly relevant to your definition of evil. You must know that the references to your FAQ don’t even begin to answer the very serious philosophical and material problems with desirism that were articulated in my last letter. In addition to the fact that you “answered” by referring to two points that remain unwritten, it is not accurate to say that the references to the answers to {3.20}, {3.21}, {3.22} addressed the problems raised, much less successfully addressed them. Lest I find myself charged with more obscurantism or hand-waving, I will now explain why those three answers are insufficient. I trust the nonexistence of answers {3.23} and {5.31} will serve to demonstrate the inadequacy of your present response to my points about the totalitarian aspects of desirism as well as the way in which desirism resembles a collectivist variant of Maoist ethics.

In {3.20} you answer the desirist calculation problem by asserting that “we can estimate” desires, that “neuroscience will eventually tell us” what desires look like and how to measure them, and that “we may be able to understand” the relationship between desires. This is not an answer, this is just hope and hand-waving. {3.21} is nothing more than another failure to apply the correct definition of the word “objective” to desirism in order to claim that an intrinsically subjective concept is actually objective. This is not only absurd, but it has absolutely nothing to do with my criticism of desirism. Furthermore, I explained the specious nature of this definitional dancing in my previous letter: “While it is true that there are many different definitions of objective and subjective, the philosophers’ concept of mind-independence is no more relevant to the subject at hand than the grammatical concept pertaining to the use of a form as the object of a transitive verb.” {3.22} is merely a repetition of the very Knob Metaphor I had shown to be not only flawed, but downright backwards since it led you to an incorrect conclusion. As I wrote, under the desirist moral code, the Nazi extermination program is confirmed to be good and and opposition to it, or even mitigation of it, is a definite evil.

You didn’t even make the slightest attempt to address that massive flaw in your reasoning, either in your FAQ or in your letter. Now, I see no need to continue beating a deceased equine, so if at this point you wish to leave off discussing desirism, that’s certainly fine with me. My recommendation would be that you abandon it altogether as an insignificant and untenable variant of utilitarianism, but that is your concern, not mine. Still, I don’t regret the diversion as I find it fascinating how decent and civilized Western atheists have nevertheless managed to conceive what appears to be a more consequentially disastrous moral ethic than the one that produced the horrors of the Great Leap Forward.

Now Luke, there is a pattern of evasion that is becoming increasingly apparent in your letters, and I fail to see how it is either compatible with your personal search for the truth or can be of any utility to you in this discussion. I am perfectly willing to continue refining our terms in as pedantic a manner as you require until you eventually run out of room to dance around the most relevant dictionary definition and have no choice but to directly confront the matter at hand. I did not declare “that the truth value of a proposition does not depend on the meaning of its terms”, I merely stated that given the context of the question, which your belief in any form of evil. I already knew you didn’t believe in my definition of evil because you made it very clear that you did not in your second letter, so it was simply absurd to assert that you needed to be informed a second time of what I meant by “evil” before you could answer the question of whether you believe in it or not. Of course, I could have avoided this by pinning you down more specifically regarding your belief or unbelief in any form of evil and now that I know you require a greater degree of precision on my part in order to respond in a relevant manner, I will be quite happy to provide it. Meta-ethical philosopher Stephen Finlay’s belief in evil is of zero relevance here, it is only your belief that is relevant to this discussion. Please note your declaration that “the definition of evil that we are using” cannot be contained by “any form of evil” is illogical; surely you did not mean to assert that the set does not contain the subset!

You finally admitted that you believe in a subjective form of evil in your fourth letter, although your constant wrestling with the objective/subjective issue somewhat muddied the admission. This mildly complicates the discussion, but not severely since it does not affect your ability to discern which of the competing objective standards are most in line with your observations of the material world even though you happen to subscribe to none of them. Speaking of definitions, while I agree that pain, anguish and privation of joy can all be reasonably described as suffering and that suffering is a prominent feature of this fallen world, I cannot accept your suggestion of it as a substitute for evil. This is because for the Christian and the non-Christian alike, suffering can be quite reasonably deemed a distinctly positive good. For example, a Christian is told to rejoice when he suffers for the faith, because he will be rewarded in Heaven for his travails and the testimony his suffering provides will cause others to believe in the gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ. While we cannot confirm the former consequence, there can be no doubting the truth of the latter as it is known to have occurred in persecutions of Christians ranging from ancient Rome to modern North Korea.

And suffering can be a positive good for the non-Christian as well. The pagan mother will embrace the pain of childbirth as gladly as the strong Christian embraces martyrdom; no pain can considered evil when it is an inescapable necessity for such a powerfully desired result. Even the language of the weight room testifies to the non-intrinsically evil nature of suffering: “no pain, no gain”. The suffering is voluntarily chosen and becomes the price of the good. While suffering can certainly be the result of evil, I don’t think it can serve as a reasonable substitution for it. We deem it evil for a man to kill 10 people because it amused him, but we do not consider a lethal storm that killed just as many to be evil even if an equivalent amount of suffering is created by the two incidents. Furthermore, suffering lacks the intentional aspect that is usually required to deem an act or an intention evil. So, taking that aspect into account, I suggest that we define ”taking pleasure in the involuntary and unjust suffering of another” to be evil.

I entirely agree with your statement that our arguments will not meet each other if we do not agree upon a definition of evil. This is precisely why I am trying to get you to commit to one. And I also agree that I could quite easily construct a completely circular argument on the basis of my Christian definition of evil; this is precisely why I am trying to get you to commit to an objective and observable one. So, with that in mind, would you be willing to agree to a definition of evil as “”taking pleasure in the involuntary and unjust suffering of another” as a useful metric by which we can compare the competing religious and philosophical accounts of evil? While this is merely one of the broad panoply of theoretical evils from which we could plausibly select, it would at least serve as a reasonable starting point for the proposed comparison of various religious and philosophical accounts of evil.

This was written in response to the 5th Letter to Vox Day

Why Peanuts is the greatest comic of all time

I really liked The Far Side. Bloom County was another favorite along with Calvin and Hobbes. But their merits notwithstanding, I think there is a reason that Peanuts wasn’t merely long-lived, but was superior to even the best comics of subsequent generations.

Lucy.

I always despised Lucy as a child. She was so pointlessly mean, so needlessly cruel. Her selfishness and narcissism were incredible; what other cartoon character would kick her own little brother out of the house when given the opportunity?  She bothered me to the point that I used to refuse to make Lucy cookies at Christmas with our old Peanuts cookie-cutters.  I could not understand what could possibly have possessed the cartoonist to spoil what was otherwise a lightly amusing comic with such an unpleasant character.

Now that I’m older, however, I understand why intellectual sophisticates hailed Charles Schulz as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. Unlike most creative sorts, he fully recognized the fundamental pettiness and cruelty of human nature and explored it to the full, often in the persona of Lucy.  The seeds of his brilliant and unusual perspective are visible in the very first Peanuts strip, published 59 years ago on October 2nd.

My favorite bits usually concerned Snoopy’s fantasy life.  The vulture, the dinosaur, the Sopwith Camel, and, of course, the literary career.  But what ultimately distinguished Peanuts from the rest was Schulz’s fearless recognition of Man’s fallen nature.  Lucy is not driven by biological or economic imperatives, she simply is.  And we all know a Lucy, we all have aspects of Lucy in us to a larger or hopefully smaller degree.  Charlie Brown’s persistence in the face of his own haplessness is obviously a major aspect of the comic, but even Charlie Brown is most notable for the foil of human decency he provides to Lucy’s all-too-human petty evil.

I do not believe that Eco was entirely correct when he wrote: “”These children affect us because in a certain sense they are monsters; they are the monstrous infantile reductions of all the neuroses of a modern citizen of the industrial civilization.”  For all his brilliance, Eco is an Italian urbanite, and does not understand American suburbia or the complete irrelevance of European modernity and urban civilization to it.  Charlie Brown’s neuroses are amusing, to be surebut they are far less significant than the interplay between him and the quotidian cruelty of the other children, the innate and trivial cruelty that one can easily observe in the interactions of children and adults today.

Perhaps the most poignant in the series of strips is the baseball game when Charlie Brown’s team finally has the opportunity to win a game.  All he has to do is let the team’s best batter do the work, run home from third, and tie the game.  It is the obvious thing to do.  It is the smart thing to do, and even the girls who seldom pay any attention to the game while they are playing in the outfield know it.   Surely, they say to each other, surely he could not be so stupid as to try to steal a base.  But Charlie Brown suddenly finds himself seduced by his desire to be the hero… and as a result finds himself lying on the field, staring into the night sky, crying “why? over and over again.

And who among us has not found himself in a similar position?  There is little overt religion in Peanuts, the classic Christmas special notwithstanding, but as Tolkein once said of The Lord of the Rings, “it is  of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”  Peanuts is catholic rather than Catholic, but whether you grasp the religious aspects of it or not is totally irrelevant; it is worth reading and re-reading because it is the greatest philosophical work produced in the 20th century.  It is our Iliad and Schulz was our Homer.  And if his poetry was less than lyric, well, that was fitting too.

Mailvox: the materialist’s observations

JS is musing on some observations:

I wanted to ask you about William Lane Craig. Having seen or listened to many of his debates and arguments, I have to say that the guy is pretty impressive. During his debate with Bart Ehrman though, Ehrman brought up an interesting point. Craig had pulled out some probability equations to display that the resurrection of Christ was more likely than other explanations (followers stealing the body, Jesus’ evil twin), particularly the explanations put forth in Ehrman’s book. Ehrman then responded by saying “I can’t believe we are arguing about the probability of the resurrection, we would be laughed off the stage if we were in front of a crowd of real academics.” He then went on to downplay WLC appeals to authority by stating Craig taught and lived in a bubble where all the academics he interacted with were believers and that he had little idea of the beliefs of academics outside the academia of faith.

In addition to ridiculing Craig’s authority appeals, what Ehrman was getting at was that the idea of a supernatural resurrection is so ridiculous, probability formulation doesn’t even come into play because it is absurd on the face of it. Isn’t this where believers’ argument get hung up, even arguments as compelling as Craig’s? Given what we know about the physical world, a mythical resurrection just isn’t possible. Keep in mind that I’m not necessarily making a statement of opposition here, just stating an “observable truth”. This brings forward another question, which is why we don’t see evidence of the supernatural/mystical/divine, etc. today? My thought is that if this material existed, we would have found some definitive evidence for it by now. But what little evidence there is for ghost or whatever else, is readily dismissed. Do you Vox, have any examples of the supernatural that would be at all convincing to the open mind?

Finally, while my materialism may be strong, I have noticed a sad trend with my fellow materialists, which is a vainglorious attitude and sort of misplaced condescension. When I read Sam Harris’ article against Francis Collins, I must admit that I was ashamed to be part of this worldview, yet the shouts of “here, here” on the message boards in the secular blogosphere were largely in agreement. If Collins had been Jewish or Islamic, I’m pretty sure the NYT would not have run that article.

My final question to you is this….what is the source of this narrow-minded attitude of the secular set, be they scientist, philosopher, or layperson? Is it fear? My thought is that if your argument is strong enough, there is no reason to resort to libelous acts and petty insults. I have started to notice this trend among my fellow secularists more and more and admit that it is beginning to try my patience.

First, let me say that I am deeply unimpressed by both Craig’s appeal to mathematical precision and Ehrman’s appeal to academic credentials. Craig’s stunt is no more valid when he pulls it than it was when Dawkins or Luke do the same; “probability calculations” have all too often become a bizarre rhetorical flourish that is no more legitimate today than were similarly innumerate shenanigans when Charles Babbage decried them back in 1830. Any economist can tell you that probability is problematic enough even when you have the relevant numbers, and appealing to it is fraudulent when you don’t – especially when you don’t because you can’t!

Ehrman, however, is demonstrating nothing but a willfully closed mind and a blind faith in materialism. We see observable evidence of what may or may not be the supernatural every day, from the mystery of human consciousness to people being confirmed dead by medical experts and then somehow returning to life. The fact that we possess possible material explanations for these things and that this evidence presently falls short of being definitive does not make it nonexistent. I readily admit that we may one day prove that consciousness is a purely material construct and that every single post-mortem resurrection was merely a mistaken observation on the declaring doctor’s part, but in the meantime, assuming those two things as fact is nothing but an act of pure and stubborn faith that cannot be justified by the material evidence available at the present. This is a good example of how many atheist arguments rely upon appeals to logic even though they are presented under the color of science.

Moreover, this ignores the mass of documentary evidence supporting the existence of the supernatural. While it is often possible to dismiss testimonial evidence with ex post facto diagnoses of “mental illness” and “hallucination”, there are no shortage of incidents that do not lend themselves to such interpretations, such as when individuals speak languages they do not know or possess information that they have no material means of possessing. I have personally witnessed the latter, and while in that particular case I can concoct a very complicated and improbable (in the non-mathematical sense) scenario in order to rationalize it materially, it is not the sort of thing that anyone who is genuinely open-minded would be able to completely dismiss.

As for your observation that your fellow secular materialists have become increasingly vainglorious and narrow-minded, I believe it is because they have been misled into a false sense of security by a combination of Christian intellectual sloth and the increasing compartmentalization of Western society. Intelligent, self-satisfied atheists with post-graduate degrees think those who believe in the supernatural are all poorly educated dimwits out to oppress others for the same reason that wealthy, suburban Christians with beautiful families think those who don’t believe in God are all miserable gay alcoholics out to commit suicide. Their paths very seldom cross, their assumptions are often confirmed by the extreme examples that come to their attention, and on the rare occasion that the intelligent, highly-educated Christian or the happy, well-adjusted atheist finds himself in the territory of “the other”, he’s usually going to be inclined to keep his mouth shut about his beliefs in order to avoid unnecessarily rocking the boat. This dynamic can be seen at work even on this blog, as with a few exceptions, the people known with certainty to be atheists tend to be the less intelligent, socially autistic variety, just as on campus the only identifiable Christians tend to be either the genuine saints or annoying evangelizing whackos.

Nor should the effect of Christian intellectual sloth be discounted. Having long been the dominant belief-system, Christians all too readily drift off into internecine navel-gazing rather than intelligent engagement; even here I occasionally have to prevent people from starting an esoteric theological debate while in the middle of discussing the most basic concepts with non-believers who are unfamiliar with them. I think part of what you are describing is a minor secular version of the same process at work in the university environment. When Sam Harris makes a demonstrably stupid statement about the intrinsic inability of someone given to “magical thinking” to perform science, a statement which can be easily and conclusively proved to be utterly false, he is not questioned by his fellow secularists, let alone derided as he merits. And even in your own case, your language betrays the bias of your assumptions. There is no debate over whether a mythical resurrection is or isn’t possible because the question at hand is whether the impossible resurrection is a myth or not! And remember how often academics have been historically prone to reach consensus on beliefs and ideologies later confirmed to have been completely false – see yesterday’s post on Mises vs Mayers for just one of many possible examples – so I suggest it would not be wise to place too much confidence in the present academic consensus regarding rational materialism.

I explained my reasoning on the non-existence of scientific evidence for the supernatural in a 2002 column entitled Satan, Science, and the Supernatural. Jesus taught that we cannot enter into the light until we first recognize and reject the darkness within us, so if you are going to find evidence for the supernatural in a fallen world, you must begin by searching for evil. To paraphrase Nietzsche, if you stare into the abyss long enough, it will eventually meet your eyes. You may not be a Christian once you reach that point, but you will certainly no longer be a pure materialist either. Nietzsche was speaking metaphorically, of course, but I believe his words are more literally true than he realized or intended at the time.

History’s verdict

Economics and Moral Courage, by Llewellyn Rockwell, is one of the most intellectually inspiring articles I have ever read. It is a beautiful reminder of the transience of what we think is worldly success and accomplishment:

While Mises worked at the Chamber of Commerce because he was denied a paid position at the University of Vienna, [Hans] Mayer served as one of three full professors there, along with socialist Othmar Spann and Count Degenfeld-Schonburg. Of Spann, Mises wrote that “he did not teach economics. Instead he preached National Socialism.” Of the count, Mises wrote that he was “poorly versed in the problems of economics.”

It was Mayer who was the truly formidable one. Yet he was no original thinker. Mises wrote that his “lectures were miserable, and his seminar was not much better.” Mayer wrote only a handful of essays. But then, his main concern had nothing to do with theory and nothing to do with ideas. His focus was on academic power within the department and within the profession….

[Mayer] thrived before the Nazis. He thrived during the Nazi takeover. He helped the Nazis purge the Jews and the liberals from his department. Note that Mayer was no raging anti-Semite himself. His decision was a result of a series of discrete choices for position and power in the profession against truth and principle. For a time, this seemed harmless in some way. And then the moment of truth arrived and he played a role in the mass slaughter of ideas and those who held them.

Perhaps Mayer thought he had made the right choice. After all, he maintained his privileges and perks. And after the war, when the Communists came and took over the department, he thrived then too. He did all that an academic was supposed to do to get ahead, and achieved all the glory that an academic can achieve, regardless of the circumstances…. He played the game and that was all he did. He thought he won, but history has rendered a different judgment. He died in 1955. And then what happened? Justice finally arrived. He was instantly forgotten. Of all the students he had during his life, he had none after death. There were no Mayerians. Hayek reflected on the amazing development in an essay. He expected much to come out of the Wieser-Mayer school, but not much to come out of the Mises branch. He writes that the very opposite happened. Mayer’s machine seemed promising, but it broke down completely, while Mises had no machine at all and he became the leader of a global colossus of ideas.

If we look at Mark Blaug’s book Who’s Who in Economics, a 1,300-page tome, there is an entry for Menger, Hayek, Böhm-Bawerk, and, of course, Ludwig von Mises. The entry calls Mises “the leading twentieth-century figure of the Austrian School” and credits him with contributions to methodology, price theory, business-cycle theory, monetary theory, socialist theory, and interventionism. There is no mention of the price he paid in life, no mention of his courageous moral choices, no mention of the grim reality of a life moving from country to country to stay ahead of the state. He ended up being known only for his triumphs, about which not even Mises was ever made aware during his own life.

And guess what? There is no entry at all in this same book for Hans Mayer.

Mayer was the typical academic intellectual dwarf and richly deserves to be forgotten by history, but to me the ultimate villain of the piece is Friedrich von Wieser. Can you imagine having the opportunity to anoint either Ludwig von Mises or Joseph Schumpeter as your successor and then somehow deciding to choose neither of them? That has got to be the worst employment decision in the history of economics, and quite possibly academics. It may even have been the most calamitous if one thinks through how much unnecessary economic pain and devastation could have been prevented.

As brilliant and revolutionary as Mises was, I think I would have preferred to hire Schumpeter to head the department. His History shows that his perspective was unusually broad and saddling him with the bureaucratic responsibilities would have kept Mises free to focus entirely on research. Then Schumpeter could have gotten rid of Spann, hired Hayek, and you’d have had the greatest economics department in history despite its small size. And with that collection of highly functioning brainpower assembled in one place, it’s quite possible that they would have achieved sufficient prestige to prove capable of preventing the Keynesian ascension. What a tremendous opportunity for Mankind missed. And what an interestingly esoteric possibility for an alternate history novel….