Interesting

The Theology of the movie "Fury."

When you have a hammer,... 

...everything looks like a knee cap.

Physicists speculate that consciousness may be a form of matter.

Scientists climb to top of mountain, only to...

...discover Aristotle beat them there by 2,500 years.

A recent Time article on recent development in cognitive psychology:

Study co-author Ralph Adolphs, a professor of psychology at Caltech, explains the distinction by way of a grocery shopping example: “Your valuation network is always providing you with information about what’s rewarding around you — the things you want to buy — but also lots of distracting things like junk food and other items popping into your vision off the shelves.”

Cognitive control is what keeps this network in check. “To be able to get to the checkout counter with what you planned, you need to maintain a goal in mind, such as perhaps only buying the salad you needed for dinner,” says Adolphs. “That’s your cognitive control network maintaining an overall goal despite lots of distractions.”

Understanding how the brain parcels out specific decision-making tasks can offer insight into conditions in which such networks go awry, such as in the case of psychiatric disorders. Depressed people, for example, clearly have difficulty with value-based decision making: because nothing feels good or seems appealing, all options appear equally bleak and making choices becomes impossible. Hoarding disorder, in contrast, may involve overvaluation of certain possessions and impairment of the cognitive control needed to shift one’s attention away from them. That explains why hoarding becomes more important than other life goals like maintaining relationships.

So, basically, our decision are based on "reason" and "will." Reason proposes options to our will and our will decides based on its apprehension of the goodness of the choice. If the will doesn't apprehend goodness, it can't decide. If reason doesn't "tee up" the options, the will has nothing to decide upon.

Pure Aristotle.

Incidentally, that last part on "hoarding" sounds "spot on" from my observations. Aristotle and St. Thomas would say that the problem involves an inordinate or disordered desire for a particular good.

There is no escaping "first philosophy."

Francis Beckwith on Dawkins' inevitable reliance on philosophy:

Second, critics often issue normative judgments that depend on the reasoning of first philosophy. Take, for example, Dawkins’ criticism of the career path of paleontologist Kurt Wise. In The God Delusion, Dawkins laments that even after earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. under the renowned Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Wise did not abandon his belief in young-earth creationism, the view that the first chapters of Genesis should be interpreted literally and that the Bible teaches that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

Although, as I have noted elsewhere, I share Dawkins’ puzzlement with Wise’s tenacity, there is something strangely, and delightfully, non-scientific about Dawkins’ lament. He writes: “I find that terribly sad . . . the Kurt Wise story is just plain pathetic – pathetic and contemptible. The wound, to his career and his life's happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy to escape. . . . I am hostile to religion because of what it did to Kurt Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard educated geologist, just think what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed.”

This is an odd lament for someone of Dawkins’ philosophical leanings, for he denies that nature, which presumably includes Wise, has within it any intrinsic purposes from which we may draw conclusions about our moral obligations to not frustrating those ends. Dawkins claims that Darwin has shown us that natural teleology of any sort, including intrinsic purpose, is an illusion, and thus maintains that belief in teleology is “childish.” (This, by the way, is rhetorical bluster of the worst sort, since as virtually anyone who has studied the subject knows, Darwinism may count against some versions of design but not all, as Ed Feser, Etienne Gilson, and my former professor, James Sadowsky, S. J., have convincingly argued.)

In order to issue his judgment, Dawkins must know something about the nature of the sort of creature Wise is and the obligations that such a creature has to his natural powers and their proper function. But since Dawkins cannot discover the human being’s intrinsic purposes or our obligations to them by the methods and means of the natural sciences, he opines – when he is not lamenting another person’s life choices – that these purposes and obligations must be illusory and to believe in them childish. Yet Dawkins’ brief against Wise depends on these “childish” illusions.

The key to escaping such counter-intuitive dead-ends is to abandon the failed project that the methods of the natural sciences are the model of rationality for all human endeavors. But don’t just take my word for it. Just observe how Richard Dawkins does not practice what he preaches.

First, click on through to the Gilson book and give me a "helpful" vote.

Second, Dawkins' smuggling of teleology into his life occurs constantly. In one interview he explained that "we’re not put here to be comfortable.” [See this video, at 9:30 minutes.]

"Put here"?

By who?

For a purpose?

So, even Dawkins who claims that he can only "dimly" understand the compartmentalization of the mind in the "rational" and "irrational" cannot escape from teleology.

No word yet from the pro-gay marriage lobby about whether this makes a "mockery of marriage"...

...like there was with the lady who married a building.

Nadine Schweigert, North Dakota Woman, 'Marries Herself,' Opens Up About Self-Marriage.

Lower tax bracket... she can visit herself in the hospital...everyone involved consents... it's hard to see a downside here.

Perhaps it's time to put a bullet through the head of the brain dead, narcissistic wreck that is post-modern Western marriage.

Speaking of narcissism, note the bride/groom's explanation for her self-marriage:

Schweigert said the ceremony was a celebration of how far she'd come since her painful divorce six years ago that led to her two children to decide to live with her ex-husband.

"Six years ago I would've handled a problem by going out and drinking," she said. "I smoked, I was 50 pounds overweight ... this is just celebrating how far I've come in my life."

The Fargo-based yoga teacher also takes herself on dates to treat herself and "to invest in this relationship".

I'm totally sure that her self-absorption had nothing to do with her two children choosing to live with their father.

Via Mark Shea.

Amazon Review...

Summa Philosophica by Peter Kreeft.

As always, go here and give me a "helpful" vote.

Peter Kreeft manages to recapture the form and spirit of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. Kreeft approaches the perennial philosophical topics by breaking the questions down into their essential propositions, and, then, sharpening the engagement by following the Scholastic approach of posing objections to the proposition, an argument supporting the proposition and answers to the objections. Anyone familiar with the Summa Theologica will immediately recognize the style.

Kreeft breaks his Summa into ten subject areas - Logic and Methodology, Metaphysics, Natural Theology, Cosmology, Philosophical Anthropology, Epistemology, General Ethics, Applied Ethics, Political Philosophy and Aesthetics. He then breaks these areas down into specific questions covering the great controversies in each area, usually going from general to specific, as he lays the foundation for a later question in a prior answer. In the area of Logic, for example, Kreeft starts with whether philosophy is "still rightly defined as the love of wisdom" and ends with "whether symbolic logic is superior to Aristotelian logic for philosophizing?"

The great thing about Kreeft's book is that it is pure philosophy. What Kreeft provides are the "naked" arguments on the key questions of the important topics. Rather than offering a historical retrospective, which follows the evolution of a controversy through time and which relies on tying particular positions to particular philosophers, Kreeft goes directly to the arguments. There is no historical retrospective here; very few philosophers are identified by name, except in passing. Instead the focus is on the clash of ideas, which, for beginners, and for apologists, and lovers of wisdom, is where philosophy ought to begin.

The philosophical positions staked out are very much those of Peter Kreeft. Consequently, we get very pragmatic answers to pragmatically phrased questions. For example, in responding to the argument that the order in the cosmos is not teleological since "simpler explanations are to be preferred to more complex ones," i.e., Occam's Razor or the principle of parsimony (Q.IV, a.1), Kreeft writes: "Ockham's Razor is a good methodological principle for modern science, but it is not a good ontological principle; for the real universe, as distinct from scientific explanations, is much fuller than it needs to be. There is no need for ostriches. Yet they exist." (Q. IV, a.1.)

Badda-boom, badda-bing.

Perfect Kreeft - simple, succinct and with a startling zing.

Kreeft's Summa is decidedly not academic; there are no footnotes and few references. But it does provide a way of entering into the key philosophical topics from Kreeft's Thomistic perspective. It makes for good, casual reading that one can dip into on specific topics, and is a pretty good manual for a survey of the arguments for and against a broad variety of positions. I think that it would make for a good discussion starting tool, whether in the school or a philosophy club. (Or for that matter, for anyone who wants a good source for pragmatic, Thomistic apologetic arguments.)

Clearly, the reader's satisfaction with the substance of Kreeft's arguments may vary depending on how much they "buy into" Kreeft's pragmatic, Thomistic approach to philosophy. However, I don't think that Kreeft's philosophical perspective should dissuade anyone from reading or using the book. Rather, it ought to challenge them to respond to Kreeft's arguments in as rational, logical and lucid a way as that which Kreeft used to make his argument.

Lawrence Krauss admits that when he said that science "proves" that the universe came from "nothing," he really didn't meant it.

Apparently, Krauss is walking-back the nonsense bit of "shock advertising" that he used to sell his book. On the other hand, after being shown repeatedly to be an intellectual buffoon on the subject, he doesn't get any credit for admitting the obvious.

Science Writer John Horgan writes about Lawrence Krauss's claim that everything came from nothing - and then interacts with Krauss in the comment section:

I’m nonetheless going out on a limb and guessing that science will never, ever answer what I call “The Question”: Why is there something rather than nothing? You might think this prediction is safe to the point of triviality, but certain prominent scientists are claiming not merely that they can answer The Question but that they have already done so. Physicist Lawrence Krauss peddles this message in his new book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (Free Press, 2012).

Krauss’s answer is nothing new. Decades ago, physicists such as the legendary John Wheeler proposed that, according to the probabilistic dictates of quantum field theory, even an apparently perfect vacuum seethes with particles and antiparticles popping into and out of existence. In 1990, the Russian physicist Andrei Linde assured me that our entire cosmos—as well as an infinite number of other universes—might have sprung from a primordial “quantum fluctuation.”

I took this notion—and I think Linde presented it—as a bit of mind-titillating whimsy. But Krauss asks us to take the quantum theory of creation seriously, and so does evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages,” Dawkins writes in an afterword to Krauss’s book. “If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe From Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology.”

Whaaaa…??!! Dawkins is comparing the most enduringly profound scientific treatise in history to a pop-science book that recycles a bunch of stale ideas from physics and cosmology. This absurd hyperbole says less about the merits of Krauss’s derivative book than it does about the judgment-impairing intensity of Dawkins’s hatred of religion.

Philosopher David Albert, a specialist in quantum theory, offers a more balanced assessment of Krauss’s book in The New York Times Book Review. And by balanced assessment, I mean merciless smack down. Albert asks, “Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from?” Modern quantum field theories, Albert points out, “have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.”

Krauss and Horgan "get it into it" in the comments:

2. lawkrauss 9:38 am 04/23/2012

Thank you Caleb.. I must say that this kind of silly piece from an author who also “went out on a limb” 20 years ago to say physics was over is rather telling… it is just about as cogent.. and demonstrates more an unwillingness to seriously consider the ideas I and others have raised than a desire to create some interest in his blog..
Link to this

3. jhorgan 10:43 am 04/23/2012

Caleb and Lawrence, thanks for your comments. Larry, I’ll always be grateful to you for helping bring me up to speed on modern cosmology a dozen years ago when I was researching an article for Scientific American. And what’s disappointing is that, apart from the discovery of the acceleration of the cosmic expansion, which was certainly a big surprise, nothing has really changed since then. You and/or your popularizing colleagues–Hawking, Greene, Kaku, Susskind–are still marketing various unsubstantiated versions of inflation, multiverse theories, string theory, vacuum energy, anthropic principle, etc. What’s ironic is that, although you don’t have any more evidence for these speculations, your marketing of them has become more aggressive, a trend that I predicted in The End of Science. Even Caleb implicitly acknowledges that your book’s title oversells its actual content, and yet you accuse ME of hype. Come on Larry, face it, physics, at least in its grandest mode, is in big trouble.(emphasis added.)

Which prompts a walk-back from Krauss:

6. lawkrauss 11:09 am 04/23/2012

John.. first, I didn’t make any definitive claims.. and I get offended when people claim I make such.. second I tried to indicate how much has changed in the last 22 years.. that is the purpose of the book.. things are dramatically different than they were then, and I went through a very careful analysis to describe these changes….. the analysis of fluctuations in the CMB, the discovery that the universe is flat.. these are REAL empirical discoveries that both impact upon and add credence to many of our ideas..
Link to this

7. jhorgan 5:37 pm 04/23/2012

Larry, so you’re saying that you’re not claiming to have answered the question posed by your book’s title? You’re just tossing some ideas around, and you don’t expect anyone to take them too seriously? OK, that’s a useful clarification. It also means that things have not progressed in the last 22 years, in spite of what you just asserted. I think you better tell Dawkins, before he embarrasses himself further.(emphasis added.)

At which point, Krauss apparently takes a powder and doesn't respond.

Complaining about unfairness when he's taken at his word seems to be part of Krauss's ouvre.

Good Question.

What if our ability to have a free society is dependent on our ability to restrain ourselves from exercising our freedom through reasona and prudence?

Designs on the Truth points out:

A frequent mantra from talk-show callers, this statement is often followed by “And that’s why I can’t vote for Santorum” or “That’s why I support Ron Paul.”

The proclamation is usually delivered in a measured tone, calculated to convey how very reasonable and rational the speaker is:

“Yes, as an independent thinker I’ve carefully considered past and present socio-economic trends and sagely concluded that conservatism is definitely called for in fiscal matters, but when it comes to morals well, that’s personal, whatever works for you.”

The glaring problem with this theory is that, all historical evidence to the contrary, it assumes a dualistic view of human nature. It says we’re able to behave one way in this area of our lives and the opposite way in this area. That we can be totally unfettered socially, yet totally disciplined in economic matters.

But if we’re generally freewheeling when it comes to our personal lifestyle choices, how do we magically develop restraint or responsibility in fiscal matters?

We don’t. As our friends across the pond are slowly, and painfully, realizing

Practical Thomas.

Stacy Trasancos finds the scholastic approach useful in dealing with a question that plagues all parents:

“Whether it is fitting that I should be called the mother of these children?”

Objection 1: It would seem not, for mothers are wise, kind, and loving, but when I am reduced to screeching like a deranged heathen, it does not seem fitting that I should be called anyone’s mother.

Objection 2: Further, the essence of a motherhood is gentleness, guiding children in the precepts of moral life, and I often chase quarreling kids out of the kitchen with a wet towel, which is not gentle guidance, so the title of mother is not fitting.

Objection 3: It is written, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” (Ephesians 6:1) Obey? They don’t even listen, unless they are asking for food, money or transportation.

On the contrary: It is written (CCC 1657) that, “the father of the family, the mother, children, and all members…exercise the priesthood of the baptized in a privileged way.” Yes, this is my family, so they are my children, therefore, it is fitting that I should be called their mother.

I answer that: I know, I know. The home is where children learn first about Christian life, and by committing to “the reception of the sacraments, prayer and thanksgiving” then we will grow in virtue and charity in spite of our sinful natures. The home is the “first school of Christian life.” We have a responsibility to create a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and service are the rule. (CCC 2223)

Reply to objection 1: I am their mother in two senses. First I am their physical mother because they depend on me to nurture them. Second, I am their spiritual mother because the family is the domestic church.

Reply to objection 2: “By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them.” Alright, there are plenty of learning opportunities.

Reply to objection 3: “Whoever obeys the Lord will refresh his mother.” (Sirach 3:6) Yes, even on the worst days I have but to hear their refreshing little prayers, and realize that truly it is only by God’s grace that is it fitting that I should be called their mother.

Radio Free Aquinas.

Woman marries building, calls it a "gay union"...

...gay community declares that calling a marriage to a building a "gay marriage" is "irresponsible."

It's almost like words are supposed to have meaning or something, and that, like copyrights, words have to be protected or they become completely valueless.

Check out the "gay 'marriage'" supporters' sign with its assertion that "marriage is between 2 'people.'" 

Why people? 

More importantly, why "2"? 

What is there in human experience that comes in two's and is relevant to marriage?  Hands? Eyes? Feet? Lungs?

Don't know...it's a complete mystery.

Here's the story:

A Seattle woman recently exchanged one-sided wedding vows with an abandoned warehouse building that is set to be demolished to make way for a new apartment building.

In December, Babylonia Aivaz and 16 friends occupied the warehouse, located on 10th and Union streets, to protest the planned development of an apartment complex on the site.

"Gentrification is happening," Aivaz said. "It's a serious issue that affects poor people and especially people of color and this is just the beginning of the fight."

Calling it a "gay marriage," Aivaz was asked by the attending minister if she would "love and cherish and protect this warehouse."

Aivaz reportedly responded in verse, quoting the Cat Power song "Sea of Love."

"Come with me my love, to the sea, the sea of love. I want to tell you how much I love you."

She then added her own verses:

"Do you remember when we met? I cleaned your rooms and washed your floors, built community, opened some doors. You changed my life. I'll never forget the day we met. I'll cherish your community sprit until the day I die."

After the ceremony, a large banner reading, "I Do" was hung outside the building as the estimated 50 attendees sang, "Lean on Me." Nonetheless, demolition on the building began ahead of schedule, starting last Friday.

Aivaz caused some unintended controversy with her ceremony. A pair of protestors showed up to the event, objecting to her use of the term "gay marriage" because it weakens the fight to legal same-sex marriage in the state.

"With the delicate nature of Washington state and the attempt to legalize gay marriage, I find her saying it's a gay marriage disrespectful," Phoenix Lopez told KOMO.

"Her saying it's a gay marriage sets the community back with Christians and politicians and gives them a chance to say, 'See, we told you, they're going to want to marry everything if we give them the opportunity,'" added fellow protestor Johnny McCollum-Blair. "Having compassion against something you love, I understand, but to call it a gay union is irresponsible."

But, heck, who is to say that they don't love each other, and it's not hurting anyone, so what's the problem?

A nice summary of the "Four Causes."

At Brutally Honest:

Imagine four sheets of paper. One has been folded into an airplane. One has been shaped into an origami frog. One has been crumpled into a ball, a paper wad. And one sheet is left alone.


All four objects are made of the same stuff but they are different things. Philosophers call that stuff the Material Cause. The last sheet represents that cause; the stuff of each object. It is important how the sheets were made, by whom and why. But for now consider just sheets of paper taking different forms.

Their form makes the objects different. Philosophers call that the Formal Cause. The paper wad represents that cause; a different form than the sheet. I read recently that crumpled paper has deep mystery to science. It cannot be accurately modeled! But for now, it is enough to see that a paper wad is different from a sheet. It has a different form.

An origami frog might be folded by an eight year old, but I couldn't do it. Philosophers call the eight year old the Efficient Cause. Almost anyone can make a paper wad. But it takes skill to make a frog. If you'd never seen a real frog, you might have trouble distinguishing the frog from the wad. But for now, it is important to note that an Efficient Cause must be up to the task. I couldn't do it. I am not an efficient cause of origami though you might be.

The paper airplane was made to fly. Philosophers call that purpose, the Final Cause. If the paper plane doesn't fly or doesn't fly well, we say it isn't well made because it doesn't fulfill its purpose.

My friend says that the universe is merely "atoms and void". We agree on this material cause. We agree on the formal causes, the different forms atoms can take. But I continue to be amazed that anyone, especially Randy, can think that natural laws are an efficient cause for those forms of matter that are alive. Nothing in nature, not even natural selection, has demonstrated the creativity necessary for a DNA molecule, let alone a human brain. Nature by itself is simply not up to the task. Believing life happened naturally seems to take an enormous leap of faith.

But the most troubling aspect of my friend's atheism is the loss of purpose. For Randy, there is no final cause for the universe, no purpose to life except what he gives it. When he is gone, so is the purpose.

Why evolution and much of science require faith...

...because humans suffer from a "poverty of imagination."

Although it may be a faith in reason, but then so is much of Christian faith a "faith in reason."

Michael Denton observes in "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis":

One of the strategems adopted by Darwin in the Origin and used by many evolutionary biologists since, when faced with the difficulty of envisaging transitional forms, is to allude to the poverty of human imagination and to the very surprising and curious adaptations and behaviour pattersn many organisms exhibit - the implications and being that had we not known of such bizarre adaptations we would never have believed them possible.

Id. at p. 227 - 228.

Interestingly, St. Augustine noted that this limitation - and its attendant consequences - are a feature of the human mind which understands by taking what it has experience of and adding or subtracting those things about which it also has experience. In "On the Trinity," Augustine wrote:

10, 17. But then if we only remember what we have sensed, and only think what we have remembered, how is it that we often think false things though we do not of course remember falsely what we have sensed?23 It must be that the will, which I have been at pains to present to the best of my ability as coupler and separator of this kind of thing, it must be that the will leads the thinking attention where it pleases through the stores of memory in order to be formed, and prompts it to take something from here out of the things we remember, something else from there, in order to think things we do not remember. All these assembled in one sight make something that is called false because it is not to be found outside in the nature of bodily things, or because it does not seem to have been derived from memory, since we do not remember ever having sensed such a thing. Has anyone ever seen a black swan? So no one remembers one. But is there anyone who cannot think of one? It is easy enough to suffuse that shape which we know from seeing it with the color black which we have seen no less in other bodies, and because we have sensed them both we remember them both. Nor do I remember a four-footed bird, because I have never seen one;24 but it is very easy for me to look at such a fancy when to some winged shape I have seen I add two more feet of a sort that I have also seen. So when we think of two things in combination which we remember having sensed one by one, we appear to think of something which we do not remember, though we do it under the limitations set by memory, from which we take all the things that we put together in many and various ways as we will.

Again, we cannot think of bodies of a size we have never seen without the aid of memory. We can extend the masses of any bodies when we think of them to the maximum extent of space that our gaze is accustomed to range over through the magnitude of the universe. Reason can go further, but fancy does not follow, inasmuch as reason declares an infinity of number, and this no thinking about bodily things can grasp with inner sight. The same reason teaches that even the smallest corpuscles can be divided to infinity; but when we reach the limits of minuteness or fineness that we remember having seen, we cannot now gaze on any slighter or minuter fancies, though reason does not stop proceeding to divide. So we do not think of any bodily things except what we remember or unless they are composed out of what we remember.

Saint Augustine of Hippo; John E. Rotelle; Edmund Hill (2011-01-23). The Trinity (The Works of Saint Augustine) (pp. 319-320). New City Press. Kindle Edition.

Reason can tell us that something exist in some sense - the concept of infinity, for example - but try as we might we are not going to be able to "imagine" - picture, understand, grasp - infinity because we don't have an experience of infinity, we only have an experience of finite things, and add as many finite things as you want, you still only have finity.

On the other hand, even Augustine could imagine a "black swan" because he had an experience of "swans" and "black" and by compounding the two ideas, he came up with an image  of a "black swan."

Evolution, black holes and the experience of travelling at the speed of light, but also God's infinity, omniscience and simplicity, are places where are reason can travel further than our imagination.

Religion answers the factual questions that science neglects...

...acording to the philosopher Keith Ward:

Julian Baggini raises the question of whether religion and science are compatible. But, as he implies, that question is too generally phrased to be helpful. We need to ask if particular religious and scientific claims conflict, or whether they are mutually supportive or not. Some are and some are not, and it would be silly to say that all religious claims conflict with all scientific claims, or that they do not.


Many religious statements are naturally construed as statements of fact – Jesus healed the sick, and rose from death, and these are factual claims. So Stephen Gould's suggestion that religion only deals with value and meaning is incorrect, though it is correct that scientists do not usually deal with such questions.

A huge number of factual claims are not scientifically testable. Many historical and autobiographical claims, for instance, are not repeatable, not publicly observable now or in future, and are not subsumable under any general law. We know that rational answers to many historical questions depend on general philosophical views, moral views, personal experience and judgment. There are no history laboratories. Much history, like much religion, is evidence-based, but the evidence is not scientifically tractable.

I do not see why Baggini says that religions "smuggle in" agency explanations where they do not belong (for instance, claiming that the cosmos exists because it is created by a God with a purpose). That seems to be a perfectly acceptable factual claim that no known scientific technique can answer. The physical sciences do not generally talk about non-physical and non-law-like facts such as creation by God. That does not mean that such questions are meaningless, or that there are not both rational and silly ways of answering them.

Claims that the cosmos is created do not "trespass onto" scientific territory. They are factual claims in which scientific investigators are not, as such, interested. Scientific facts are, of course, relevant to many religious claims. But not all facts are scientific facts – the claim that I was in Oxford last night, unseen by anyone, will occur in no scientific paper, but it is a hard fact. So it is with the miracles of Jesus, with the creation of the cosmos and with its end. The interesting question is not whether religion is compatible with science, but whether there are important factual questions – and some important non-factual questions, too, such as moral ones – with which the physical sciences do not usually deal. The answer seems pretty obvious, without trying to manufacture sharp and artificial distinctions between "hows" and "whys".

Climbing the Ladder of Inference.

Michael Flynn explains how we move from facts to conclusions and back to facts again.

Murray Gell-Mann on Truth and Beauty.

More on Teleology, including the Final Cause of Beauty.

A lawyer - but not me - writes:

Jim and Peter,


Jim introduced the words vs. meaning discussion in response to my proposition that,

“First, the fact that we choose (some would say, are evolutionarily driven) to assign meaning to something, doesn’t prove that there’s any meaning there beyond our arbitrary assignment of meaning.”

My point was really pretty simple-minded, and I hope that it’s not necessary to get into the linguistic tall grass on this issue, because I haven’t given the linguistic aspects a great deal of thought, much less study.

When I refer to “objective” or “arbitrary/subjective” meaning, I am referring to the question of whether the meaning that was assigned represents a truth that should apply to everyone similarly situated, or just to the person who assigned the meaning. (N.B., I typically use “arbitrary” and “subjective” interchangeably, but am open to being persuaded that one should distinguish between them.)

In these terms, objective meaning exists when a proposition has falsifiability (a la Popper). Jim mentioned the proposition that “It is raining.” While it may or may not, in fact, be raining, the proposition that it is raining is a testable one, so regardless of whatever words are used to express that proposition, it is one that has an objective meaning.

I do not know whether he miswrote or I misread, but I interpret Peter’s second paragraph in his email below to define all meaning in terms that I would describe above as objective. Perhaps Peter does not include statements of values, opinions, etc. as being “propositions”.

However, we all know that there are statements that reflect meanings that are subjective. Just try answering a woman’s question, “Do these pants make my butt look fat?” Or, a more current example: “Millionaires and billionaires should pay their fair share of taxes!”

Statements or propositions of opinion, judgments, values are inherently subjective: reasonable, informed people can disagree. The exception would be where there is some external authority (logic, revelation) that converts them into universal truths.

Craig has raised an interesting point in this area, when he talks about elevating beauty to a status above truth (or, perhaps, knowledge). In my terms, in order to do that he must believe that there is an objective standard of beauty. I do not share such a belief in objective beauty – it really is in the eye of the beholder, and judgments on beauty differ among cultures, individuals within cultures, and over time. Nonetheless, I love the image that Craig poses of, “Dame Beauty stands there with a ferule smacking the knuckles of Truth.” My world is so much more prosaic! Alas.

In sum, I think that all of us in this discussion probably agree that materialists act as though there are propositions that are very important in their lives (such as moral judgments that others should live by), which they treat as objective, but which science cannot reach one way or the other. I also suspect (but cannot prove) that science never will be able to do so, because the nature of those propositions is not falsifiable in a Popperian sense.

Where Jim and I tend to disagree is the extent to which logic can suffice, or revelation is required, to deal with that sort of proposition, and that’s a different discussion entirely.

An English professor responds:

Let me say rather that Beauty raps our idea of Truth on the knuckles to push us in the direction of greater Truth. In describing reality, physicists are right to distrust ugly equations.

On the fat buttocks issue, it is much more politic to go with the idea that beauty and truth are subjective, but line up a panel of experts and they'll be at least as close in their assessments as olympics diving judges.

I don't think that beauty is merely subjective. Has anyone read Umberto Eco's The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas? That looks like a good place to start thinking.

My response:

Russ, all -

Subjective, objective and arbitrary -

The point I was making is that all propositions/meanings are discovered outside the person for who experiences the meaning or states the proposition. Things are meanings or propositions because they are about something, and that something is not arbitrary or pure subjectivity. Even the proposition contained in the statement like "I like ice cream" is about something - ice cream and my preference for it - and however much it may be about my subjective preference, it is not "arbitrary."

A point here is that propositions that are apparently "subjective" are still "objective" in the sense that propositions are truer or falser to the extent that they are a product of the mind and the mind seeks the truth, which means the conformance of the mind to reality. The reality in the statement "I like ice cream" is that I really do prefer this thing called ice cream.

Beauty -

Classical philosophy recognized that truth, beauty, goodness and being are fundamentally the same thing. Something cannot be good without actually existing. Something cannot be beautiful without existing. Something cannot be true without existing. Something cannot be beautiful without also being good. Something cannot be beautiful without also being true.

And something cannot be true without being beautiful.

As Gilson, and others. point out, an odd meta-principle used by scientists in deciding the truth of a theory is whether it is beautiful. In this sense "beauty" means simplicity, elegance, fruitfulness and the ability to explain facts without ugly epicycles.

This is one indication that beauty is not "arbitrary" and that it is an objective fact of reality.

Another indication is illustrated by the question of whether a beautiful sunset would be any less beautiful if no one was there to appreciate it?

A third indication is that there are things that are universally understood to transcend time and culture in their beauty.

I suspect that before the Modern era the assertion that beauty is purely a matter of taste would be incomprehensible. In the Modern era, it seems apparent that art has seen a departure away from the classical ideas of beauty that has sent it in search of idiosyncratic meanings.

There can be beauty in such art because there can be art and goodness in such art, but it may be more debatable because such art is not trying to ascend the ladder of existence to the highest place where beauty, truth, goodness and existence are unified.

Modernity denies the unity of truth, goodness, beauty and existence or that there can be an ordering of beauty or truth or goodness or existence. A casualty of this attitude is that Modernity denies people the virtues by which they can decide whether something is more beautiful than another thing.

This attitude leads us to our confusion about subjectivity and objectivity of beauty. Let's say there is a questionable bit of Modern Art. I say it is ugly; an art critic says it is beautiful. Who is right? The answer is not that we are both right. The answer is that there is beauty in the art - and there has to be because the art exists and therefore has being and therefore has goodness insofar, at least, as it exists - but neither one of us may be properly ordered with respect to our appreciation of beauty.

Let's consider the clear case of disorder and the good and the beautiful. In movies and books about serial killers, it is a cliche to have the killer describe their deeds as being works of art. This seems like nuts - and it is - but insofar as executing a plan efficiently and cleverly can be called beautiful, then the precise, meticulous murders of serial killers of fiction are beautiful.

The problem is that serial killings are not ordered toward the human good or to love. Because they aren't ordered to the human good and love, whatever "beauty" there is in such things is warped, distorted and disordered. Things that are warped, distorted and disordered are things that essentially lack existence or the good that is proper to them, and things that lack their proper good also lack their proper beauty. They are, in a word, ugly.

Similarly, because Modern Art denies the traditional ordering of beauty toward love or humanity it creates things that are distorted, warped and disordered. It seems obvious to any objective person that Modernity has been singularly responsible tor generating the most mediocre and ugly art ever created in the history of man.

In other words, the denial of telos leads to the belief that all things are subjective which leads to the loss of meaning and leads to ugliness.

An English Professor's additur:

Taking Yosemite Valley as a less fraught example than the human form, isn't the fact that so many people are astounded by it, and that they have to go to Yosemite Valley itself to be fully astounded, no matter how many memories they have, indicate that the beauty and sublimity of the place reside there, with at least a measure of independence from the minds that apprehend it? What Peter says makes sense to me. Beauty reveals an underlying order, which is itself intellectually beautiful, and also true. Keats got the right message from the Grecian Urn.

 

Is "Meaning" the Ghost in the Machine?

Is it the case that while words can be arbitrary, meanings - or propositions - can never be arbitrary?


"Meanings", it seems to me, are developed, constructed or drawn from "truth" in the sense that "truth" is the "conformity of the mind" to what really is "the case." (Which is an Aquinas meets Wittgenstein mashup.)

So, meanings are "discovered" outside of the "meaning being," which means that they are not invented by the "meaning being" and so cannot be arbitrary.

But meanings - or propositions - are not material entities. They can't be measured, weighed, scanned, seen or tested by the methods of science in themselves. As Etienne Gilson notes in "From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution."

"Since he himself is a material being, the knowledge of the scientist is assuredly tied to matter, but it is not matter.We have seen the face of Einstein, but have we seen his knowledge (savoir), his thought ceaselessly moving between two or more possible physical universes? We have heard his voice, which was sensible, but how is it that we have perceived the sense of the words he pronounced? If there is that which is knowable, and that which is known, then there is that which is immaterial, and since it is tied to our body, which is sensible, the knowable then exists in the sensible. There is a fact which constitutes one of the oldest constants of philosophy. The inevitability of Platonism, in its own right or mediated through Aristotle, comes visibly to the surface here. Since only knowledge could have conceived these things, matter then has the immaterial in it. Centuries, millennia of philosophical speculation have puzzled over the source from whence this immaterial could come. Aristotle replied before them, "From without." Translated: scientifically speaking, we do not know." (Gilson, 149)"

Without meanings or propositions, we couldn't do science. But, it seems, that (a) the most important aspect of science as a human enterprise is immaterial and (b) that most important aspect is an immaterial, metaphysical - perhaps even, supernatural - element planted right in the heart of our material universe.

Which should be a weird thought for anyone who believes that they are pure materialists.

Defining our values based on which party is in the White House.

Chris Wallace's interview with White House National Security Adviser Tom Donilon:

Wallace: We'll stipulate -- I think we'll all stipulate -- that bin Laden was a monster, but why is shooting an unarmed man in the face legal and proper while enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding of a detainee under very strict controls and limits -- why is that over the line?

Donilon: Well, let me talk first about the first half of the statement that you made. Again, the president met with the operators yesterday at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and here are the facts. We are at war with al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden is the emir or commander, indeed the only leader of al-Qaeda in its 22 year history. This was his residence and operational compound. Our forces entered that compound and were fired upon in the pitch black. It's an organization that uses IEDs and suicide vests and booby traps and all manner of other kinds of destructive capabilities.

Wallace: Mr. Donilon, let me just make my point. I’m not asking you why it was OK to shoot Osama bin Laden. I fully understand the threat. And I’m not second-guessing the SEALs. What I am second guessing is, if that’s OK, why can’t you do waterboarding? Why can’t you do enhanced interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was just as bad an operator as Osama bin Laden?

Donilon: Because, well, our judgment is that it’s not consistent with our values, not consistent and not necessary in terms of getting the kind of intelligence that we need.

Wallace: But shooting bin Laden in the head is consistent with our values?

Donilon: We are at war with Osama bin Laden.

Wallace: We’re at war with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Donilon: It was a military operation, right? It was absolutely appropriate for the SEALs to take the action -- for the forces to take the action that they took in this military operation against a military target.

Wallace: But why is it inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

Donilon: I didn’t say it was inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Wallace: You said it was against our values.

Donilon: I think that the techniques are something that there’s been a policy debate about, and our administration has made our views known on that.

The Flavor of Truth.

Burke Rea at Photismos has a nice little parable about the modern approach to that most ancient project, the quest for truth.