Faithful Skeptics

Is science spiritually destructive? Does it throw cold water on every flickering spark of mystery? In chasing the fairies from their hills does it leave in its wake a landscape devoid of spirit? Is science the enemy of the soul? …. I propose the following metaphor:

Let this, then, be the ground of my faith: All that we know, now and forever, all scientific knowledge that we have of this world, or ever will have, is as an island in the sea of mystery. We live in our partial knowledge as the Dutch live on polders claimed from the sea. We dike and fill. We dredge up soil from the bed of mystery and build ourselves room to grow. And still the mystery surrounds us. It laps at our shores. It permeates the land. Scratch the surface of knowledge and mystery bubbles up like a spring. And occasionally, at certain disquieting moments in history (Galileo, Einstein, et al) a tempest of mystery comes rolling in from the sea and overwhelms our efforts, reclaims knowledge that has been built up by years of patient work, and forces us to retreat to the surest, most secure core of what we know, where we huddle in fear and trembling until the storm subsides, and then we start building again, throwing up dikes, pumping, filling, extending the perimeter of our knowledge and our security.

Knowledge is an island in the sea of mystery. The metaphor takes its power from a firmly held fact: We live in a universe that is infinite, or effectively so. Our brains are finite…our mental maps of the world are therefore necessarily finite. As time passes, the scale and detail of our maps increase, but they no more exhaust the worldscape they describe than a map of the Grand Canyon depletes [its] power….

If we accept the knowledge is a finite island in a sea of inexhaustible mystery then two corollaries follow: 

1) the growth of the island does not diminish the sea’s infinitude and 

2) the growth of the island increases the length of shore along which we encounter mystery…. 

We are at our human best as creatures of the shore, with one foot on the hard ground of fact and one foot in the sea of mystery. Bureaucrats, technocrats and scientific drudges keep to the high ground, their noses fixed in ledgers and laboratory notebooks. New Age dreamers flounder in water over their heads, with near horizons. It is at the shore that the creative work of the mind is done – the work of the artist, poet, philosopher, and scientist….

At its best, scientific skepticism is a manifestation of curiosity, intelligence, and imagination – in a word, the best of the human spirit. It slowly, patiently builds the domain of knowledge, pushes back the encroaching darkness, the demons of the deep, but it never exhausts the infinitude of mystery. Asked if he was religious, Einstein replied: “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernable concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion.”

 

—Chet Raymo in "Skeptics and True Believers"

Fallor Ergo Sum

What difference, if you are mistaken? For if I am mistaken, I am. For he who is not, assuredly cannot be mistaken; and therefore I am, if I am mistaken. Therefore because I am if I am mistaken, how am I mistaken that I am, when it is sure that I am, if I am mistaken.'

– Augustine

The Root of Empiricism is Rationalism

"Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. … Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

– Richard Lewontin

Thieve No Longer

"It is a foolish commonplace expression, that without this pretended freedom of will, rewards and punishments are useless. Reason, and you will conclude quite the contrary. 

If, when a robber is executed, his accomplice who sees him suffer has the liberty of not being frightened at the punishment ; if his will determines of itself, he will go from the foot of the scaffold to assassinate on the high road; if struck with horror he experiences and insurmountable amount of terror, he will no longer thieve. The punishment of his companion will become useful to him, and moreover prove to society that his will is not free."

– Voltaire "Philosophical Dictionary"

Nasir ad-Din Tusi on Labors Divided

Now, since the Man pivots on mutual aid, while cooperation is realized by men undertaking each other’s important tasks fairly and equally, it follows that the diversity of crafts, which proceeds from the diversity of purposes, demands (a measure of) organization; for if the whole species were to betake themselves in a body to one craft, there would be a return of the situation against which we have just been on guard. For this reason, Divine Wisdom has required that there should be a disparity of aspirations and opinions, so that each desires a different occupation, some noble and others base, in the practice of which they are cheerful and contented.

Likewise, it has been ordained that there should be diversity in their states in such matters as wealth and poverty, quickness and stupidity; for if all be wealthy, they will not serve one another, as equally they will not if all be poor: in the first case, this is on account of their being independent of each other, in the second because of inability to pay anything in return for the service of one to another. Again, since crafts vary in nobility and baseness, if all men be equal in the faculty of discrimination, they will choose one class (of employment), whereby the other classes will remain vacant and the desired end will not be realized. This is what the Philosophers mean when they say: ‘If men were equal, they would all perish’.

However, since some are distinguished by correct management and others by superior strength, one group by great dignity of manner and another by abundant capability (while some, devoid of discrimination and intelligence, are virtually tools and instruments for men so endowed), all tasks are determined in the manner as observed; and from each undertaking his own important duty, the ordering of the universe and the organization of Man’s daily life becomes act.

Now, since it is impossible to conceive the species to exist without cooperation, while cooperation without combination is an absurdity, therefore the human species is naturally in need of combination. This type of combination, of which we have already given an account, is called ‘civilized life’. The term is derived from ‘city’, a city being a place of combination for individuals carrying on, by their various trades and crafts, the cooperation which is the means of procuring a livelihood. Just as we said, concerning Economics, that what was meant by ‘household’ was not a dwelling, but the combination of the inhabitants of a dwelling in a particular way: so here also, what is meant by ‘city’ is not the dwellings of the inhabitants of a city, but a particular association between the inhabitants of a city. This is what the philosophers mean when they say that Man is naturally a city-dweller, i.e. he is naturally in need of the combination called ‘civilized life’.

– Nasir ad-Din Tusi "The Nasirean Ethics"

Institutionalized Biases of Literate Man

PLAYBOY: But aren’t there corresponding gains in insight, understanding and cultural diversity to compensate detribalized man for the loss of his communal values?

McLUHAN: Your question reflects all the institutionalized biases of literate man. Literacy, contrary to the popular view of the “civilizing” process you’ve just echoed, creates people who are much less complex and diverse than those who develop in the intricate web of oral-tribal societies. Tribal man, unlike homogenized Western man, was not differentiated by his specialist talents or his visible characteristics, but by his unique emotional blends. The internal world of the tribal man was a creative mix of complex emotions and feelings that literate men of the Western world have allowed to wither or have suppressed in the name of efficiency and practicality. The alphabet served to neutralize all these rich divergencies of tribal cultures by translating their complexities into simple visual forms; and the visual sense, remember, is the only one that allows us to detach; all other senses involve us, but the detachment bred by literacy disinvolves and detribalizes man. He separates from the tribe as a predominantly visual man who shares standardized attitudes, habits and rights with other civilized men. But he is also given a tremendous advantage over the nonliterate tribal man who, today as in ancient times, is hamstrung by cultural pluralism, uniqueness and discontinuity — values that make the African as easy prey for the European colonialist as the barbarian was for the Greeks and Romans. Only alphabetic cultures have ever succeeded in mastering connected linear sequences as a means of social and psychic organization; the separation of all kinds of experiences into uniform and continuous units in order to generate accelerated action and alteration of form — in other words, applied knowledge — has been the secret of Western man’s ascendancy over other men as well as over his environment.

Source: https://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/

Fixed & Finite

What was the positive principle behind all the other principles of ’89? I am talking here of the revolution in as far as it was an idea; I leave out material causes—they only produce the forces. The barriers which could easily have resisted or guided these forces had been previously rotted away by ideas. This always seems to be the case in successful changes; the privileged class is beaten only when it has lost faith in itself, when it has itself been penetrated with the ideas which are working against it.

It was not the rights of man—that was a good solid practical war-cry. The thing which created enthusiasm, which made the revolution practically a new religion, was something more positive than that. People of all classes, people who stood to lose by it, were in a positive ferment about the idea of liberty. There must have been some idea which enabled them to think that something positive could come out of so essentially negative a thing. There was, and here I get my definition of romanticism. They had been taught by Rousseau that man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him. Remove all these and the infinite possibilities of man would have a chance. This is what made them think that something positive could come out of disorder, this is what created the religious enthusiasm. Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress.

One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.

This view was a little shaken at the time of Darwin. You remember his particular hypothesis, that new species came into existence by the cumulative effect of small variations—this seems to admit the possibility of future progress. But at the present day the contrary hypothesis makes headway in the shape of De Vries’s mutation theory, that each new species comes into existence, not gradually by the accumulation of small steps, but suddenly in a jump, a kind of sport, and that once in existence it remains absolutely fixed. This enables me to keep the classical view with an appearance of scientific backing.

Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.

One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin.

It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed—in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads. The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

– T. E. Hulme

Conscious Conscience Formation

Adams did believe in progress, in amelioration of the human condition, but he warned that “wild snatches at perfection” à la Condorcet or Rousseau would ruin real advancement. Adams also ruled out the common quick fix forwarded by such radicals: education. Once a schoolmaster himself, he sneered at the idea that man is perfect in “nature” and only corrupted by exposure to knowledge and civilization. He knew formal education would only make man more clever, not better. Kirk continues for Adams, writing:

We cannot expect formal education radically to alter the common impulses of the heart; only the much more difficult inculcation of morality, which comes from the snail-slow influence of historical example and just constitutions rather than from deliberate legislation, can effect [sic] that moral improvement which is the real progress of humanity.

As Kirk notes, there is much of life not to be gotten out of schools. A conscience cannot be formed through a library. The struggles and pains of life common to all will not be eliminated by philosophers or legislators, though they may be made worse in the attempt. According to Adams, the drive to perfect man will end in his abolition.

Source: https://www.alabamapolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/API-Research-Kirk-The-Conservative-Mind.pdf

Everything Becomes Nothing

“The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. Time and that perishability of all things existing in time that time itself brings about is simply the form under which the will to live, which as thing-in-itself is imperishable, reveals to itself the vanity of its striving. Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

mene mene tekel upharsin

Extended excerpt from Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis by Greg Bahnsen:

Apologetical disputes between believers and unbelievers depend upon, include by reference, and arise out of conflicting epistemologies. Conflicts over the theory of knowledge in turn incorporate, function within, and must address differing world-and-life views (with divergent concepts of man as a knower), if they would be resolved. The bold defense of the faith offered by Van Til’s presuppositionalism is that the unbeliever’s worldview fails to provide an adequate or workable theory of knowledge in terms of which the non-Christian can intellectually challenge the truth of Christianity. His presuppositions preclude the unbeliever from making claims to know anything intelligible or meaningful.

The Christian worldview begins with the personal, self-sufficient, sovereign, and triune God, who created all things from nothing and made man to be His image. God knows all things, and directs all events by His wise, providential plan. Thus, all objects, properties, minds, events, general laws, and moral prescriptions are determined, controlled, and related to each other by the mind of the Lord. Whatever the Lord says is utterly truthful and unfailing in its purposes, and that includes every passage of the Old and New Testaments. Human behavior and reasoning have become immoral and futile, due to self-centered rebellion against God. Man is biased against and hostile to the Lord and His revelation, wishing to be his own ultimate authority (autonomous). He needs the redemptive work of God’s incarnate Son (as a prophet, priest, and king) and the regenerating work of God’s Holy Spirit to be saved from intellectual foolishness, moral guilt, and eternal damnation. Given this overall “picture” of God, the world, man, value, history, and salvation—the basic biblical world-and-life view—the Christian can give an account of the objectivity of truth; the mind’s correspondence to objects and other minds; the possibility of knowledge; the rational and empirical procedures by which we learn, test, and justify propositions; the possibility of our finite minds knowing universal, absolute, and prescriptive concepts and laws; the human tendency toward disagreement, prejudice, and irrationality, etc.