Take Me To the River

After all these years -- two decades now -- it has never occurred to me to conduct one of those breezy year end reviews. For starters, there's just too much information, in this case, 320 posts, each consisting of at least 1,000 words, so, let's say a total of 350,000. 

Gemini informs me that the average 300 page book has about 82,500 words, so 350,000 translates to a book of at least 1,200 pages, probably more like 1,500 pages. Now, how am I supposed to reduce a 1,500 page book to a 1,000 word post? 

900 words. You've already wasted 100.

It's frankly too much for my poor brain to think about, even though it would be nice to know how I spent 2024. I mean, back when the blog started, the idea was to complement the "news" with the "eternals." But if I don't somehow memorialize what I've written, it's as transitory and frivolous as yesterday's -- or worse, today's -- journalism.  

Sand paintings.

Good point... er, excuse me, the preferred nomenclature is sand mandalas... but they are destroyed and forgotten upon completion in order "to symbolize Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of material life." The sand particles are actually taken to a river, where they are "released back into nature to disperse the healing energies of the mandala to sentient beings in water and throughout the world."

Groundhog Day, only played out in eternity.

Vexed. That's what I am. Perhaps I should gather the 320 posts and toss them in the nearest body of moving water?

Christ didn't write anything.

True, but he didn't say "take everything I've said and toss it in the river," rather, to go out and spread the word. 

Now, if I were a professor, I could simply command some lowly grad student to go back into 2024 and tell me what I wrote. Sure, much of it -- perhaps even most of it -- may be trivial nonsense, self-important bloviating, repetitive circumnavelgazing, or a good idea at the time, but that's the point. I don't want to summarize it, I want someone else to do it. 

My son likes philosophy. I've actually dropped little hints here and there, but of course, I didn't have much interest in my dad's thoughts when I was his age. Frankly, I had no interest in thoughts, period. Rather, I preferred to make them go away by merging them into a river of Rocky Mountain sparkling water, AKA, Coors.

At this point it is safe to say I am addicted to blogging. What does the addict do to forget about his addiction? Engage in more of it. 

Don't look back.

That's good for Bob Dylan, but he's got plenty of other people singing his songs. He also has a handy website with the lyrics to every song he's written in alphabetical order. But of course, he has some low-level flunky doing that for him. I suspect he's only interested in the next song, not the previous 600.

In an interview twenty years ago he was asked how he wrote those early songs, and he said he didn't know: “It just came, uh, it came from, like um, right out of that wellspring, uh, of creativity, uh, I would think, you know.” 

So, ironically, I can't say how we spent 2024, only how we'll be spending 2025: trying to, um, pull stuff out of that same, uh, vertical wellspring. 

The only cure for time is timelessness.

Something like that. At the moment I'm reading a book called A Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. Why a Catholic case? Because it seems most Catholic thinkers don't have much use for it. Rather, it's more of a Protestant thing, since they can't simply bat away the puny metaphysics of scientism with the superior metaphysics of Aquinas. Ed Feser, for example, writes that 

From an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, one of the main problems with “Intelligent Design” theory is that it presupposes the same mechanistic conception of nature that underlies naturalism. 

Yada yada, for me it's sufficient to say irreducible Intelligence and Intelligibility, and be done with it. But this author feels we "should see ID scholars as allies, not enemies." Which is why I'm giving this book a whirl. A reviewer says Hilbert 

does not follow the easy and greatly wanting path of mixing Christianity with naturalism in the form of theistic evolution. Instead, he looks at evidence with an open mind and incorporates anything good and true he finds in modern science and traditional theology. This book will be an eye-opener for those who never thought that a Catholic can support intelligent design and be scientifically informed.

Some of the intelligent design proponents are young Earth creationists, which is obviously a nonstarter. Rather, I go back to the two questions we asked a couple of posts ago, What must the world be like in order that man may know it?, and What must nature, including man, be like in order that science be possible at all?  

In other words, start with what we know and what we do. And clearly, we do science that we may know reality. But how is this even possible? By virtue of what principle(s) do we have knowledge of reality, including the reality of organisms, DNA, natural selection, etc? 

Obviously information is everywhere, from physics to chemistry to the genome to the laws governing the big bang, and everything in between. And all of this information is intelligible to us, at every level, which I find... odd. Can the mind that comprehends it really be reducible to one of the things comprehended? 

That's what we're asked to believe -- at least in principle -- that ultimately the humanities 

will be eliminated because man is just an animal, and an animal is just fancy biology, and biology is just complex chemistry, and chemistry is physics.

This may be a reductio absurdum, but absurdity in, absurdity out. What's the alternative? 

Well, lately we've been discussing some of its features, which include the primacy of vertical causation, irreducible wholeness, nonlocality, and the miracle of subjectivity that abides between immanence and transcendence. 

But the latter is really only a miracle if it were to inexplicably emerge from below, rather than being the reflection of something above. So, grant a metaphysical Darwinian just this One Free Miracle -- of intelligence -- and he can explain (away) the rest.

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will have not explained anything.

Or rather, everything but One.