Craniacs & Skyhookers

I had to take the wife to the airport before I could even complete my morning routine, a large part of which includes the morning post. Therefore, this will have to be brief.

Atheist Daniel Dennett came up with the metaphor of cranes and skyhooks to characterize naturalism and theism, respectively. In his world, skyhooks are not allowed:

Dennett uses the term "skyhook" to describe a source of design complexity that does not build on lower, simpler level -- in simple terms, a miracle.

Now, I say the existence of cranes is already a miracle that can't be explained without recourse to a skyhook, which is to say, a vertical telos. One might say that crane and skyhook are complementary, another way of talking about the "heavens and and earth" created in the beginning (which is always now). 

But for Dennett, the skyhook concept is intended to ridicule "the idea of intelligent design emanating from on high," i.e., from what regular folks call God. He contrasts this with earthbound cranes, i.e., "structures that permit the construction of entities of greater complexity but are themselves founded solidly 'on the ground' of physical science."

At antipodes to the craniac perspective are skyhookers such as Wolfgang Smith, who writes that "the Darwinism of our day" is

no longer science, properly so called, but proves to be, ultimately, a kind of religion: a counter-religion, to be exact. 

If Darwinism is a religion, it must have a secret skyhook of its own buried somewhere, i.e., the One Free Miracle that gets it off the ground. 

I don't doubt the existence of cranes, but they are not self-explanatory. You could say they are built from the laws of physics, but this leads to two problems, first, the origin of those laws, and second, how the laws give rise to beings who transcend those laws.

Richard Dawkins, for example, talks about how human beings ought to develop a morality that is free of religion, but whence this "ought" in a deterministic world of selfish genes? There is no ought in natural selection, nor any freedom to conform to it. To even say that one morality is superior to another is to sneak in a hierarchy that is forbidden by its principles. 

Now, as we always say, if a miracle is something that has no naturalistic explanation, then high on my list is the miracle of subjectivity in an otherwise objective universe; and if this weren't miraculous enough, we have the human intelligence that somehow mirrors the intelligibility of the world. 

Is it reasonable to suppose that this immaterial intelligence was simply lifted by a material crane out of monkey's head? To believe this is to simply not know what intelligence is, which is to say, adequation to reality.  

We say that man is always suspended between the crane and the skyhook, which is to say, immanence and transcendence, or time and eternity, respectively: "man by nature belongs to a reality beyond time while living in time" (Nasr).  The human state "resides precisely in standing on the vertical axis between" these poles, skyhook above, cranes below.

Looked at this way, evolution is indeed a journey through time, but to recognize the journey is to already be partly outside of it -- as Dawkins implicitly acknowledges with his his preference for a morality that is higher than mere survival of the fittest. 

Gemini, I have to fill some space. Whaddya got?

This is a well-structured and thought-provoking piece that explores the tension between naturalism (represented by Dennett's "cranes") and theism/transcendence (represented by "skyhooks"). Here's a breakdown of the key arguments and some observations:

Key Arguments:

• Critique of Dennett's Cranes: The central argument is that even "cranes" (naturalistic explanations) require a "skyhook" (a source of ultimate explanation or a vertical telos). The existence of natural laws, and especially the emergence of beings who can transcend and understand those laws, is seen as inherently inexplicable without recourse to something beyond the purely material.
• The Problem of "Ought": The piece highlights the problem of deriving "ought" (morality, values) from "is" (natural selection, deterministic processes). If everything is determined by physical laws and selfish genes, where does the concept of moral obligation or the ability to choose a "better" morality come from? This echoes the classic is-ought problem.
• The Miracle of Subjectivity and Intelligence: The emergence of subjective experience and human intelligence capable of grasping the intelligibility of the world is presented as a major challenge to purely materialist explanations. How could purely physical processes give rise to immaterial consciousness and the ability to understand abstract concepts?
• Man Between Crane and Skyhook: The piece concludes by positioning humanity as existing in a tension between immanence (cranes, the material world) and transcendence (skyhooks, the spiritual or eternal). Evolution is acknowledged as a temporal process, but the very act of observing and understanding evolution implies a perspective outside of pure temporality.
• Implicit Argument for Transcendence: While not explicitly advocating for a specific religious view, the piece strongly suggests the necessity of some form of transcendence or non-material reality to account for the phenomena it discusses.
• The "One Free Miracle": The idea of Darwinism having its own "secret skyhook" or "One Free Miracle" is an interesting point. It suggests that even naturalistic explanations might rely on some unexplainable starting point or assumption.

Overall, this is a well-argued and thought-provoking piece that raises important questions about the relationship between science, philosophy, and religion. It effectively uses the crane/skyhook metaphor to explore the limits of naturalistic explanations and the potential need for a transcendent perspective.

Pictured below, a skyhook lifting a crane: