One-Star Reviews of the Classics

Everyone has to take a look at this. The online magazine, The Morning News, has a great article that looks at some of the scathing one-star Amazon.com reviews that have been given to classic novels. All of them are hilarious reading; I especially liked the reviews of Go Tell it on the Mountain; The Lord of the Flies; and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Francis Turretin

We tend to forget that there were Protestant as well as Catholic scholastics. The best known of the Reformed scholastics is perhaps Francis Turretin. At A Puritan's Mind you can find a brief biography and a number of Turretin's arguments (on the right sidebar). They have quite a few of Turretin's articles on Scripture; the arguments that there needs to be a verbal revelation are particularly interesting. Of course, Turretin, as most Protestant scholastics of the period did, engaged in the typical polemics: the arguments, for instance, about the vocation of the Reformers, or about whether the Pope was Antichrist. The Counter-Reformation, of course, produced scholastic works that were equally polemical.

Spinoza Against Design Arguments

On Spinoza's view, everything that exists, and everything that happens, follows with logical necessity from eternal truths. Everything that exists, exists necessarily; everything that happens, happens necessarily. That we are inclined to think otherwise is due to ignorance -- not recognizing all the causes that go into particular things and events, we fail to realize that everything follows from the nature of God with the same necessity that truths about triangles follow from the nature of triangles.

It's on this basis that Spinoza attacks the doctrine of final causes. It's an old argument: since everything happens of necessity, final causes are otiose. Spinoza goes further, however, and suggests a psychological mechanism for the origin of the doctrine of final causes. Because we human beings have a tendency to see the world entirely insofar as it relates to ourselves, we tend (1) to anthropomorphize the world; and (2) to evaluate everything that exists or happens according as it is convenient or inconvenient for us. This is how we get into the mindset of thinking that things happen for a purpose, when in fact they happen entirely out of necessity. As Spinoza says of the proponents of final causes, "But in seeking to show that Nature does nothing in vain, that is, nothing that is not to man's advantage, they seem to have shown only this, that Nature and the gods are as crazy as mankind" (Ethics P1, Appendix).

A bit tendentious, of course; but for similar reasons Spinoza has no patience for design arguments of any kind:

I must not fail to mention here that the advocates of this doctrine, eager to display their talent in assigning purpose to things, have introduced a new style of argument to prove their doctrine, i.e., a reduction, not to the impossible, but to ignorance, thus revealing the lack of any other argument in its favor. For example, if a stone falls from the roof on somebody's head and kills him, by this method of arguing they will prove that the stone fell in order to kill the man; for if it had not fallen for this purpose by the will of God, how could so many circumstances (and there are often many coinciding circumstances) have chanced to concur? Perhaps you will reply that the event occurred because the wind was blowing and the man was walking that way. But they will persist in asking why the wind blew at that time and why the man was walking that way at that very time. If you again reply that the wind sprang up at that time because on the previous day the sea had begun to toss after a period of calm and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will again persist--for there is no end to questions--"But why did the sea toss, and why was the man invited for that time?" And so they will go on and on asking the causes of causes, until you take refuge in the will of God--that is, the sanctuary of ignorance. Similarly, when they consider the structure of the human body, they are astonished, and being ignorant of the causes of such skillful work they conclude that it is fashioned not by mechanical art but by divine or supernatural art, and is so arranged that no one part shall injure another.

So Spinoza is not impressed by design arguments for God's existence. There is another type of design argument that doesn't impress him, though, and that is the problem of evil argument; for it does exactly the same thing from the other side. It seems to me that when peopl claim that 'intelligent design' arguments are arguments from ignorance, what they are actually grasping toward saying is that they are what Spinoza calls 'reduction to ignorance' arguments. They usually are not so consistent as Spinoza in recognizing that most problem of evil arguments (e.g., arguments from poor design) are exactly the same kind of argument.

Causa Sui

Richard notes that someone is making a family-tree of the blogosphere. The idea is that your blogfather/mother is the blog that most inspired you to start blogging. I'm a little weird in this, I suppose: I have no blogparent. Phemius once said, (Odyssey XXII, 347) "I am self-taught; a god has inspired me." I could say, "I am self-taught, no blog inspired me." I sprang Athena-like from my own brain (that's a picture worth keeping before you). More seriously, I came across Blogger's homepage during some idle searching to see how I could make my classes more interactive, so what inspired me to blog was simply that it seemed an easy way to do something interactive online. That was the old Houyhnhnm Land; I found it useful, and so made Siris, and then, after the course was over, moved Houyhnhnm Land to a new location.

This, incidentally, is why I occasionally point out that Siris is primarily just a sort of public online notebook. I didn't start it up to join the blogosphere, or to debate; I started it up as a way to give my unruly mind a forum for being unruly. The blogosphere and occasional debates were just a nice bonus on the side. And thank you, readers; you are my perpetual encouragement for being even more unruly.

Against Death No Simple Grows

I read with some interest this argument by Nick Bostrom that searching for a cure for aging is "an urgent, screaming moral imperative" (HT: Philosophy, etc.) He doesn't ever really give us a clear idea of whose moral imperative this is supposed to be; it isn't possible to have a moral imperative that isn't a moral imperative for somebody. Who is violating their responsibility by not searching for a cure for aging? It also seems to me to exaggerate massively the dangers of aging -- it is "the principal cause of an unfathomable amount of human suffering and death"; research on diseases is ignoring aging as "the underlying cause." The metaphor of the dragon is a violent metaphor; whereas aging is not itself a violent cause of death. One of Bostrom's bits of advice is to challenge shortsighted and snide remarks about aging; but there is at least some case that his own argument, which requires us to see aging as a monstrous and terrible condition, is precisely that. He also criticizes the use of fine words and rhetoric to hide the fact that aging is a bad thing; he himself could very well be criticized for using scare words and rhetoric to hide the fact that aging is a natural thing. It is one thing to argue that expanding our 'health-span' is a good thing; it obviously would be, and I think it is right to advocate it. But it is another thing entirely to argue that we have an "urgent, screaming moral imperative" to eliminate aging. (And again, whose moral imperative?) Argument for the first just isn't a sufficient argument for the second.

What I find particularly interesting about the argument is in fact that it seems to depend for much of its force on the assumption that aging is not natural to us, which implies that death is not natural to us, either. Bostrom, for instance, says, that aging "has become a mere 'fact of life'", which is a phrase that only makes sense if we suppose that it once was not a fact of life. He says that our society has been "deformed" by the presence of aging; this makes no sense unless there is a natural non-deformed state for society. The case of the dragon is only isomorphic (as Bostrom claims it is) if aging is as foreign and uniformly terrible as a dragon. Since my own view is that aging and death are natural to us, I would like to see more of the argument for this not-so-hidden assumption.

There's also the serious question, which Bostrom glosses over, of whether the elimination of aging is actually a practicable proposal, particularly in the face of the fact that there are so many much more clearly practicable things that we are botching miserably -- stamping out malarial epidemics in Africa, which should take scarcely more than a few million dollars of mosquito nets and insecticide sent to the right places, or curbing the AIDS epidemic, or dealing with floods, or dealing with famine (which is only rarely caused by drought and the like, and more often caused by maldistribution of food that is actually available). How expensive will anti-aging treatment be? And how will it be distributed? Bostrom speaks as if the really difficult thing were the research. We have no idea how difficult that will be, but the really difficult thing is less likely to be the research than the proper distribution of its results. Who will be paying to give the whole multi-billion population of the world anti-aging treatment? What money will be diverted? How will we manage to give them all the treatment more or less at once? And if we do the treatment in stages, how do we decide who gets the first rounds? Will it be a treatment available only to the rich and powerful? But if not, how will we guarantee equitable distribution? Eliminating aging won't ever be as simple as pointing a missile at a dragon; and it is simply irresponsible to advocate something without taking a moment to figure out how you'll actually manage to bring about what you're advocating. Somehow our best intentions always go haywire when we are irresponsible in this way. And given the point on which Bostrom's whole argument is based -- namely, that there are all those people dying from age in the meantime -- he can't afford to gloss over this problem. This is particularly true given that his reasons for advocating anti-aging research are also reasons for fixing maldistribution of health care first, rather than haring off immediately after some Elixir of Life that might not turn out to be practicable, and which will still be foiled by a bad distribution of health care, and which will still have to contend with the fact that we haven't even managed the relatively easy tasks of preventing people from dying from malaria, AIDS, and famine, even if we do eventually find it.

Thomas Aquinas on the Word of the Cross

Then when he says, For since, he states the reason why the faithful are saved by the foolishness of preaching. He had already stated that the word of the cross is foolishness to them that perish, but the power of God to them that are saved; for it pleased God by the folly of what we preach, i.e., by the preaching which human wisdom considers foolish, to save them that believe; and this because the world; i.e., worldly men, knew not God by wisdom taken from things of the world; and this in the wisdom of God.

For divine wisdom, when making the world, left indications of itself in the things of the world, as it says in Sirach (1:10): “He poured wisdom out upon all his works,” so that the creatures made by God’s wisdom are related to God’s wisdom, whose signposts they are, as a man’s words are related to his wisdom, which they signify. And just as a disciple reaches an understanding of the teacher’s wisdom by the words he hears from him, so man can teach an understanding of God’s wisdom by examining the creatures He made, as it says in Romans (1:20): “His invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”

But on account of the vanity of his heart man wandered from the right path of divine knowledge; hence it says in Jn (1:10): “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not.” Consequently, God brought believers to a saving knowledge of Himself by other things, which are not found in the natures of creatures; on which account worldly men, who derive their notions solely from human things, considered them foolish: things such as the articles of faith. It is like a teacher who recognizes that his meaning was not understood from the words he employed, and then tried to use other words to indicate what he meant.

This is a brief selection from Aquinas's discussion of I Corinthians 1:17b-25, in his Commentary on the work, as translated by Fabian Larcher, O.P. (see here (PDF) par.50 on p. 17). Aquinas's scriptural commentaries are insufficiently studied; I highly recommend this one to those who have a taste for scriptural commentary. (HT: Redeem the Time)

Russell on Hume on Religion

Paul Russell's article on Hume on Religion at SEP (HT: Prosblogion) is worth reading. This is a very difficult, very controversial subject, and Russell handles it with a masterly hand. The oneinor quibble I would have about his handling of the Dialogues is that he repeats the old cliché that Philo 'reverses' himself in Part XII, which I think is clearly false. As I think I've noted before, my own view of the dialogues is that Philo's position in Part XII actually follows strictly from what has gone on before. At the beginning he attacks the possibility of Cleanthes' inference at all, and ends up confounded by the end of Part III, because he has no real basis for such an attack. Then, following the lead of Demea, he begins to criticize Cleanthes's views of what this inference will actually get him, and emerges victorious. In Part XII he simply sums up this dialectic: Cleanthes's inference is legitimate; the legitimate conclusion from this inference, however, is immensely vague, far more vague than someone like Demea could accept and far less than Cleanthes thinks he can get. It would also have been nice to get a bit more on the Dialogues's Ciceronian influences. The discussion of Hume on miracles is an excellent summary. I'm not convinced that Hume's acceptance of the design argument in NHR (which is still peppered with ambiguities) is a 'veil of orthodoxy'; this type of interpretive move never convinces me, in part because if Hume thought it veiled anything he was naive to the point of almost being stupid about it. But the Natural History of Religion is very difficult to interpret, and Russell has a great summary of the argument. The discussion of whether Hume was an atheist would have been improved by considering the external evidence or two we have that Hume might have considered himself a theist (e.g., Diderot's summary of Hume's remarks at d'Holbach's party), but that, like the other things I've mentioned, is a minor issue. The big omission, I think, is that there is no discussion of Hume's conception of superstition and enthusiasm; Hume has an essay devoted to the subject, and the two concepts play an immensely important role in his historical analysis in the History of England, as well as occasionally peeking out elsewhere. That, I think, is my only serious disappointment with the article, since it's not a small omission. Well worth reading, for those who are interested in the subject.