Leaps of Faith Above and Below

I'm reading a book called The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree, by William Gairdner. I bought it because I really enjoyed his previous Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defense of Universals.

In fact, I had pulled the latter down from the shelf because I thought it might have something useful to say about King Barry's embarrassing sexual neurosis, which he wishes to force upon the rest of us via federal power. How weird is that?! Talk about violating the separation between crotch and state.

Obviously, one thing -- perhaps the one thing -- that divides liberals and conservatives is the existence and status of absolutes: we believe they exist and place constraints around our existence, while liberals insist -- absolutely! -- they don't.

In a logical world this would end the debate, with liberals hanging their heads in shame over their rudimentary but catastrophic error in reasoning. Fat chance! When your logic is this defective, it cannot be remedied by mere logic.

It's like mental AIDS: when your immune system is that compromised, you cannot expect it to save you from the consequences of a compromised immune system.

Analogously, reason functions very much like a cognitive immune system. It cannot actually bring us to truth as such -- for that always requires a leap -- but it can certainly kill a lot of bad and dysfunctional ideas along the way.

To be only capable of reason would be analogous to suffering from an autoimmune disease whereby the immune system ends up attacking healthy tissue along with the unhealthy. Mere rationalism is always circular and therefore tautologous.

What I find is that liberals are oblivious to this constraint, thinking that their faux absolutes are supported by logic, when they actually result from a leap of faith. Thus, they are the mirror image of religious folk, except their leap is unconscious and not reflected upon. (One definition of theology is conscious reflection upon revealed absolutes.)

Adam's fall repeats itself in the fallen personality. What this essentially means is that man is situated along a vertical axis, such that the fall is not just in the past but very much in our future. But so too is the possibility of ascent. Both the ascent and descent will require leaps of faith.

That is, man cannot go beyond the limits of agnostic rationalism; he is as it were enclosed in a circle, and cannot know what lies beyond this absurcularity without that leap of faith. This goes to Augustine's gag about believing so as to know (credo ut intelligam). Guffaw ha!

You can (implicitly) know a lot without (explicit) understanding, but you can't understand without implicit knowledge.

Which is precisely what the world's greatest logician, Gödel, proved with his ironyclad theorems: not that we can't know the absolutes that lie outside the circle of logic, but that we routinely know them in a translogical way. Frankly, we can't even think without the support of these implicit absolutes. They support everything we do, brainwise.

Thank God for atheists, because these negative agents of humanity perform a vital catabolic function of tearing down bad ideas -- like the logical immune system alluded to above. Being that they are catabolic, they release energy for the purposes of metabolism (i.e., the breaking-down is for the purpose of building-up).

But unalloyed catabolism equates to diabolism, because again, it reduces to an attack on healthy and unhealthy tissue alike. This is how garden-variety village atheism transitions to outright cosmic assoulery.

There are many "sexual absolutes" that are hardwired into man. These are things we don't have to think about or defend -- or at least didn't have to think about and defend until the left began attacking and undermining them.

Many of these absolutes were never thought about consciously, but rather, were settled by thousands of years of natural (and later, cultural) selection. So much for the left believing in Darwinism! For what is Bathroom Barry's peculiar attitude toward sexuality but a war on biology (and above)?

To be continued...