Non Credo, Quia Absurdum Est

Or in plain English, I'm not buying it, because it's bonkers.

What is?

Scientism in general, but reductive Darwinism in particular. 

Just because something is absurd, that doesn't make it untrue. Indeed, the title of your post is a play on Turtillian's gag about believing Christianity because it is absurd. Who could invent such a tale?

He was arguing that precisely because these events (God dying, a dead man rising) seemed so impossible or "unfitting" from a purely human, rational perspective, their very "absurdity" or "impossibility" served as evidence of their divine origin and miraculous truth. If they were easily explainable by human reason, they wouldn't be divine acts. 

In essence, Tertullian was saying that the extraordinary nature of God's actions transcends human understanding and logic. The fact that something so profound and seemingly contradictory to human experience occurred is precisely what makes it a credible divine revelation.

Fair enough, but for the same reason, this cannot apply to science, which is a thoroughly rational enterprise, and it makes no sense to ground reason in absurdity (nor for reason to redound to absurdity). It reminds me of the social phenomenon of countersignaling: 

Successful people can afford to engage in countersignaling -- doing things that signal high status because they are associated with low status. It is a form of self-handicapping, signaling that one is so well off that they can afford to engage in activities and behaviors that people typically associated with low status.

An example from Ogilvy Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland: If you’re a top executive, turning up to work on a bicycle is a high-status activity because it was a choice and not a necessity. But if you work at Pizza Hut, turning up on a bike means you can’t afford a car. 

So, God is powerful enough to get away with absurdity, whereas it's not such a good idea for low-status and sub-divine creatures such as us. Rather, it's better for us to stay in our lane and try to keep things rational. But what is a cult but a manmade absurdity? And what is postmodern academia but a cult? 

Recall yesterday's quote from Providence Lost: "I find it impossible to to share this faith that supra-human achievements can be encompassed by sub-human means and sub-rational mechanisms" (Spilbury). Here again, he doesn't believe it because it is absurd, and asking science not to be absurd doesn't seem like much to ask.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that science in the absence of God is inevitably absurd. For science --  like any other contingent being or activity -- is not self-explanatory, rather, its reason is outside itself. 

Spilbury asks if we really have a "clear idea how human purposiveness could have arisen or developed from our primitive ancestors, and even ultimately from inorganic ancestry?" Why jump to the absurd conclusion that purpose is grounded in purposelessness? Let's slow down and discuss this rationally before playing the absurdity card.

First of all, we must distinguish between the absurd and the unknowable. For example, we cannot simultaneously know the position and velocity of a subatomic particle, but this doesn't render physics absurd. It's a mystery, but then again, it would be even more mysterious if the quantum world were thoroughly mechanistic and deterministic, for how then could there ever be novelty, creativity, and emergence in the cosmos?  

By the way, if our paradigmatic science, physics, has a permanent zone of unknowability, why would we assume that biology doesn't? In other words, why assume that the realm of biology is mappable by human abstractions, devoid of mystery? If anything, there's even more uncertainty -- in principle -- in biology than in physics. And both are conditioned from the top down, which exploits the uncertainty in order to impose form. But that's a different discussion.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when asked why he hasn't abandoned Catholicism, Stephen Dedalus replies 

What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

It seems there can be coherent and incoherent absurdities, but what we really want to know is whether there can be a coherent non-absurdity that describes all of reality, from top to bottom and both inside and out. 

Recall what Hart said yesterday about another coherent absurdity, eliminatvism:

For all its intrinsic absurdity, eliminativism is the only truly consistent physicalism. Or rather, precisely because of its absurdity. 

It reminds us of an aphorism:

Man calls "absurd" what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence. 

It also reminds us of Gödel, in that a formal system cannot be both consistent and complete. Trying to force it to be both results in absurdity. 

Hart cites one thinker who promulgated a thoroughly rigid and complete scientism, the result being "a bizarre combination of absolute irrationality and absolute logical consistency."

In this chapter -- called Behaviorism and Epiphenomenalism -- Hart rightly observes that "every materialism must become an eliminativism in the end." And what is eliminated is precisely the most interesting, important, and shocking fact in all of existence, the human subject. 

Nevertheless, just because we eliminate eliminativism, it doesn't automatically provide the coherent non-absurdity we seek. We can easily replace it with another coherent absurdity, i.e., an ideological second reality.

Maybe we just have to face the fact that reality is an irreducible mystery, and 

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempts to exclude it by stupid explanations.

In the past, I have suggested that we can reverse engineer an argument for God via the following: first, 

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

But man is not an absolute insignificance. Ergo, God.

This is really just another way of saying that meaning -- significance -- is real, and that it is a top-down phenomenon. As Hart describes it, "meaning exists at another level of agency, distinct from the merely physical, and is therefore irreducible to a physicalist description."

This is very much in Polanyi's wheelhouse, but thus far his name hasn't come up. Indeed, Polanyi's last book was called Meaning, and its bottom line is that we give meaning to science, rather then vice versa, and why not?

I don't want to get sidetracked, but the main point again is that meaning is conditioned from the top down. It is an irreducibly vertical phenomenon, which is why a purely horizontal and immanent cosmos not only eliminates any possibility of meaning, but tosses out man -- the discoverer of meaning -- in the bargain. To repeat what Schuon said the other day,

Without objectivity and transcendence there cannot be man, there is only the human animal; to find man, one must aspire to God.  

Yesterday we were wondering what would be the opposite of reductionism, which must be some form of holism, since it has top-down and part-whole relations. Alternatively, we could say humanism -- no, not secular (AKA absurcular) humanism, but rather, the human phenomenon and all it entails. I've always felt that Schuon is a true humanist. For example, he writes that

There is a great deal of talk these days about “humanism,” talk which forgets that once man abandons his prerogatives to matter, to machines, to quantitative knowledge, he ceases to be truly “human.”

On the one hand, "nothing is more fundamentally inhuman than the 'purely human,' the illusion of constructing a perfect man starting from the individual and terrestrial." A false humanism

is the reign of horizontality, either naïve or perfidious; and since it is also -- and by that very fact -- the negation of the Absolute, it is a door open to a multitude of sham absolutes, which in addition are often negative, subversive, and destructive. 

But in reality, 

the “human miracle” must have a reason for being that is proportionate to its nature, and it is this that predestines -- or “condemns” -- man to surpass himself; man is totally himself only by transcending himself. 

Quite paradoxically, it is only in transcending himself that man reaches his proper level; and no less paradoxically, by refusing to transcend himself he sinks below the animals.

Bottom line: "What is most profoundly and authentically human rejoins the Divine by definition." 

I think we've arrived at a framework for our coherent non-absurdity: a true humanism that doesn't cut itself off from the divine, but rather, is open to it and thereby conditioned from the top down. But let's see if Hart is anywhere near the same attractor. 

Regarding a completely consistent reductionism, he writes that "to deny the evidence of one's own experience on purely doctrinaire, abstractly metaphysical principles... is an abdication of reason." But to then go so far as to 

produce an entirely intentional artifact like a book arguing that intentionality is an illusion isn't merely odd; it's stirringly perverse, almost to the point of a mad heroism.

Again, this is so radical a humanism that it destroys the human. It is a completely consistent and coherent absurdity, but "Its chief defect, it seems to me, is that it's self-evidently false."

Again, if your theory can't accommodate the phenomenon at issue, eliminate the damned theory, not the phenomenon.

The human phenomenon. Can we explain it without explaining it away? Or nah?

This image is designed to visually represent the core tension and arguments within the text you provided, which critiques reductive scientism while acknowledging the paradoxical nature of certain profound beliefs.

Understanding the Image

The image is split into two distinct halves, each representing a different approach to understanding reality:

• Left Side (Warm, Awe-Inspiring): This side represents the realm of faith, mystery, and divine revelation, particularly referencing Tertullian's "Credo quia absurdum" ("I believe because it is absurd").

  • Elements: You see elements hinting at a divine light, perhaps a figure ascending or a profound spiritual event. The colors are warmer, softer, and evoke a sense of awe, transcendence, and the miraculous. This visually aligns with the idea that certain truths, like God dying and rising, transcend human reason and logic, yet are believed precisely because of their extraordinary, seemingly "absurd" nature from a purely human perspective. It speaks to the idea that the divine is powerful enough to "get away with absurdity."
  • Meaning: This side symbolizes the "coherent absurdity" that the text attributes to certain theological doctrines—logically paradoxical yet held as profoundly true.

• Right Side (Cooler, Analytical, with a Flaw): This side represents science and rational inquiry, particularly the reductive scientism and Darwinism that the text critiques.

• Elements: The imagery here is more geometric, abstract, and analytical, featuring elements like DNA helices and neural networks, symbolizing biology and the physical sciences. The colors are cooler and more precise. However, there's a crucial visual element: a subtle crack, gap, or distortion within this otherwise ordered scientific representation.
• Meaning: This crack or flaw symbolizes the author's argument that when science becomes reductive (trying to explain everything through "sub-human means and sub-rational mechanisms"), it leads to "absurd" conclusions that deny fundamental human experiences like meaning, consciousness, and purpose. The text argues that this type of scientism, especially eliminativism, is a "coherent absurdity" that, while internally consistent, is "self-evidently false" because it eliminates the "human subject" and meaning. The visual crack suggests that this framework is incomplete or broken when it attempts to fully account for reality without a transcendent dimension. 

The Central Divide and Implied Message

The division between the two sides, often subtly highlighted, represents the tension between these two modes of understanding. The author of the text argues that while divine truth can embrace paradox (as Tertullian suggested), science, as a rational enterprise, should not lead to absurd conclusions. The image visually conveys this struggle: the "absurdity" in the divine realm is seen as a sign of power, while the "absurdity" resulting from reductive science is depicted as a fundamental flaw or incompleteness.

Essentially, the image aims to capture the text's core message: while belief in the "absurd" can signify divine truth, a scientific worldview that leads to absurdities about human existence is fundamentally flawed.