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Believing Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Determinism: All human thoughts and actions are the product of blind, brute, physical, deterministic forces unconnected to truth, reason, or logic. Including the thought that all human thoughts and actions are the product of blind, brute, physical, deterministic forces unconnected to truth, reason, or logic. Hence, self-refuting. If it’s true, there is no reason for believing it.

Identity politics: If all beliefs are the product of race, class and gender, and one’s position within intersectional power dynamics of oppression, then so is the belief that all beliefs are the product of race, class and gender, and one’s position within intersectional power dynamics of oppression. And not truth.

Evolutionary psychology: If everything we do and say is the product of our genes and environment, then so is the notion that everything we do and say is the product of our genes and environment. And not truth.

Post-Modernism: If all the world is a giant “text” subject to an indefinite number of interpretations with no one interpretation being superior to the others, then so is the thought that all the world is a giant “text” subject to an indefinite number of interpretations with no one interpretation being superior to the others. That interpretation is no better than the assertion that some interpretations are stupid and inferior to others.

Foucault-ism: There is no truth. Just power. Whoever has power determines what is true. Then that assertion that there is no truth, just power, and whoever has power determines what is true, is itself the product of power and has no connection to the truth.

Atomic nihilism: If all your hopes, dreams, beliefs, and feelings are simply the result of atoms and molecules banging around inside you following no particular rhyme or reason, then so is the belief that all your hopes, dreams, beliefs, and feelings are simply the result of atoms and molecules banging around inside you following no particular rhyme or reason.

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Addition to Perception: I/Thou

After writing several articles on the topic of perception, I belatedly remembered my PhD dissertation submitted in 1996 on the topic of the meaning and value of music.

The moment we are born, we take in the world using all our senses. Babies are notorious for sticking everything in their mouths and thus tasting and feeling everything in that way, among others. They are building up an encyclopedic knowledge and familiarity with the world involving all the senses. This takes maybe three or four years. Very young children are typically bored and frustrated going to an adult museum because they are only permitted to use their eyes and they would like to find out what all their other senses would tell them. Just looking cannot yet activate or resonate with all the additional aspects of what they are seeing. Should a velvet rope be available, they will often prefer to swing on that rather than just viewing the exhibits.

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From Cosmic Coherence to Christianity

The other day I wrote that if readers were interested, I would explain how theism and then by extension Christianity – taking the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement as the basic doctrines thereof – are entailed in the miracle of cosmic coherence. Longtime commenter and orthospherean Bill Luse expressed his interest, to my chagrin. So, now I’m obliged. Here goes, then.

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The Church Wants to be Every Man’s Shadow

“Pope Francis said on Sunday [Aug. 6]  that the Catholic Church is open to everyone, including the gay community, and that it has a duty to accompany them on a personal path of spirituality but within the framework of its rules.”

Philip Pullelia, “Pope Says Church Open to Everyone, Including LGBT People, but has Rules.” Reuters (Aug. 7, 2023)

I am not sure whether this means the gay community has its own personal path to spirituality, or whether personal paths are now licit for everyone.  I am also not sure of the connection, if any, between spirituality and salvation.   As with so many Papal utterances, this utterance is clouded in ambiguity, affording hope and comfort to liberals and conservatives alike.  On the one hand, it says nothing new.  On the other, it intimates something radical. Continue reading →

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Babies and Morality: Death to the Blank Slate

Dr. Karen Wynn runs “the Baby Lab,” Yale University’s Infant Cognition Center. She collaborates with Paul Bloom, her husband, and also a former professor at Yale. In the accompanying video clips, five-month-old babies are shown puppet shows depicting various events. One involves just colored shapes, rather than puppets per se. One of the colored shapes is seen apparently struggling to get up a “slope.” In the picture below, it is the red circle.

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In one scenario, another colored shaped, in this case, the yellow triangle, appears to help it get up the slope. In another, a third colored shape, a blue square, actively and seemingly maliciously stops the shape from achieving its goal. When the babies are given a choice between the colored shapes by someone who does not know which shape did what, and with the mothers’ eyes closed in order to prevent them from skewing the results, over 80% of the babies reach out to grab the “helper” figure, the yellow triangle, rather than the “antagonistic” blue square. With three-month-olds who are too young to reach like that, which they prefer is determined by which one they look at longer which comes out at 87% preference for the “nice” shape. Continue reading →

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The Argument from Cosmic Coherence; from the Cosmos; from Your Life Now

If events are not determined ex ante, then at each moment of its career, every creaturely particle of being in the transformations it therein suffers conducts anew a stochastic quantum computation of a way through a solution space (that itself evolves from each moment to each next) to its own next optimal configuration – or to something adequately proximal thereto – mutatis mutandis. In each such computation it must take account of its entire past – of, that is to say, the entire past of its actual world; for, in no other way might any event take a place in a history of its world as congruent thereto, and as a meet participant thereof – so that, in no other way might a coherent world be cobbled together from one time slice to the next. But, what a particle of being has inherited from its past cannot suffice to a solution of its own problem of what to make of itself. To be sure, its mundane data are needed as the foreground and basis – the proscenium, as it were – of its process of becoming; but each particular event must make of those data something new, and more; or, at least, different. Else it were moot, thus nil; so that, if it should fail to be different, it should fail to be, at all. It should rather in that case be just another episode in some other already actual thing. It could not in that case make any contribution to history of its own; could not act upon some others in a way peculiar to itself; so, could not act, at all; so, could not be, at all.

What has no effect upon another is to all others as nothing. What has no effect upon any other then *just is* nothing.

So, the only way to procure reality is to generate novelty. This is why Whitehead put Creativity in his Category of the Ultimate (together with the Many and the One).

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The Reprehensible Peter Singer

I should admit that Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher and utilitarian, has always rubbed me the wrong way and, consequently, I have been motivated to find a reason to denigrate him, like those stupid special investigators who are given permission to examine all aspects of one’s life looking for a crime.  That opportunity has now presented itself. Singer has announced that he would be the ultimate traitor to the human race, should the opportunity present itself, in the form of assisting happiness enjoying aliens. He says that he would actively cooperate with the hypothetical aliens in ridding the planet of humans if they had a greater capacity for happiness than humans and if they would only be so kind as to accept his help; presumably ending all his killing and betraying with his own termination. He would need to kill his wife and three daughters to achieve his aim. Perhaps the aliens could consult his other writings to confirm that he really is a turncoat and not a human patriot hoping to subvert their plans.

The hunchbacked and deformed betrayer of the Spartans in “300” comes to mind. Normally, Spartans would have thrown him off a cliff as a baby, but for some reason, he was spared. As an outsider, he identifies with the outgroup and lets the Persians know about a mountain path that would let them mount a rearguard action on the Spartans, bypassing their blocking of the “Hot Gates,” Thermopylae.

Consequentialism is a morbid non-ethical perspective that is adopted by psychopaths, schizophrenics, and people with autism, as well as some pretty horrible philosophers; some of whom overlap with the other categories. Consequences should be considered, for instance, for choosing between competing ethical principles (e.g., honesty or not harming the innocent) in a particular circumstance, but, it cannot simply supplant ethical considerations. Continue reading →

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The Difference Between Affectionate Merriment and Malicious Mockery

“His dislike for Disraeli was perhaps aggravated by his dislike of Jews.  He had a true Teutonic aversion for that unfortunate race.  They had no humor, for one thing, and showed no trace of it at any period of their history—a fatal defect in Carlyle’s eyes, who regarded no man or people as good for anything a without ‘genial sympathy with the under side.’”

James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, 1834-1881 (1884)*

This line arrested my attention because I have always been led to believe that Jews are exceptionally humorous, or at least very funny, and that comedy is one of the many departments in which that “unfortunate race” has had the good fortune to excel.  Unravelling this riddle repays the effort because it shows us that Jews became funny when our sense of humor changed.  Like the Jews, we are now deficient in, perhaps may soon be devoid of, what Carlyle calls “a genial sympathy with the under side.”  Our funny bone is now more often tickled by malicious wit and mocking scorn.

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Moloch Wants His Meals

Attentive and faithful readers will recall my post of shortly after the rejection of Roe versus Wade, in which I proposed that despite the righteous rule of the Supreme Court, Moloch would try to find some other way to sate his insatiable appetite for human lives. He shall ever want his human food – of attention, lives, bodies, worship – so as to maintain himself for a time until the end, which is foredoomed by his own evil and thus his inaptitude for being, if not by the judgements of the Most High (which – the conditions of being per se being wholly aspects of the Most High, eternally and so necessarily, amount to the same thing: to controvert the conditions of successful being just is to controvert the Logos of being as such).

Sure enough, the Dutch seem set to come through for their omniphagous Master, ensuring a constant supply of victims to his holocaust. The Canadians likewise are doing their part in his behalf, with their burgeoning program of killing people who suffer more than the bureaucracy of death considers quite proper.

Let’s be clear here: the Dutch proposal is that parents should be able to kill their children up to age 12.

Age 12.

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The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating (or, By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them)

“The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness.  Where we find a heroic life appearing as the uniform fruit of a particular mode of opinion, it is childish to argue in the face of fact that the result ought to have been different.” 

James Anthony Froude, Short Topics on Great Subjects (1892)*

Froude draws this very valuable conclusion after telling the story of St. Patrick preaching the Gospel to the Irish king Leoghaire, on Tarah Hill in the middle of the fifth century.  Froude tells us that the Druids of Leoghaire’s court opposed Patrick because, as they anxiously counseled their king, the Christian doctrine of repentance and forgiveness must issue in infinite sin. Continue reading →