Change My Mind: Relation Is, and Is Is Relation

Continuing with the theme of the previous post, I have a question, and I won't accept a self-refuting answer, least of all from God, who should be above such sophistry:  if God knows what I am about to write, do I have a choice in writing it?  It feels to me like I do, but if the author of Reality is correct, then that can't be the case.  

Much as I like to think that God is the author of my omniscient posts, I have my doubts.  Of course, I want to be in alignment with the great What Is, and indeed, this goes to the ineradicable tension between finite and infinite.  I believe my philosophical approach respects this tension, while the traditional view -- perhaps unwittingly -- abolishes it by its overemphasis on the pole of infinitude and immutability.  But it takes two Tongans to tango.

I have other questions: Jesus, of course, is two natures in one person. How is the sacrifice offered by the human person worthy of merit if it is bound to occur anyway?  Another question:  does the principle of Trinity have any bearing on our conception of monotheism?   Which comes first, so to speak? Do we situate Trinity within a strict monotheism, or must we fundamentally reconceptualize the very meaning of monotheism?

For example, the author of Reality (the book, not the universe) claims that God "knows all future conditionals with absolute certainty by knowing himself."  And "from all eternity" God decrees "the actions of free creatures."  

I find this neither intelligible nor comforting, and more than a little narcissistic.  On the next page the author assures us that "Foreknown does not mean necessitated."  Oh. Okay.  We "are still making the choice. God just knows what [we] will choose."

Just?  No worries. It's just your real freedom.  

Is there a better way -- a way to reconcile God's wisdom with our stupidity?  And with it, a more sensible way to get God off the hook for human evil?  I just don't buy the traditional explanations.  

Hartshorne suggests that "there is a monopolar and a dipolar way of conceiving" of the problem before us.  I would go further and suggest there is a tripolar solution, but we'll leave that for later.  In fact, I have some other helpful suggestions of my own, but let's first lay a metacosmic foundation. 

As we know from our Thomism, God is the being whose essence is to exist: he doesn't merely have existence, rather, he is existence.  He is the only being who exists necessarily.  Moreover, his existence is necessary to the existence of human persons and all this entails.  

This is somewhat tangential to the point I'm trying to make, but if the human intellect isn't anchored in necessity, then knowledge of truth is impossible; you might say that in the absence of the Necessary Being, we are necessarily condemned to a closed world of appearances and our opinions about them.   Fake News would be the law of the universe and not just of the university.  

In short, the human person must have a sufficient principle, and this principle is God.  No principle short of this is adequate -- certainly nothing as meager as materialism, scientism, or evolutionism.  We'll come back around to this subject later.

There is and can be only one being whose essence it is to exist.  God is not a species of a larger genus; he is not a class. By definition there is only one, so we are fully on board with monotheism.  

But what sort of one? And what sort of existence?   For example, we know of two divergent and even opposite forms of oneness: there is the oneness of a brick and there is the oneness of an organism.  Is one of these "higher" or do we just flip a coin?  More to the point, is God a frozen and unfeeling block of eternity?  

If God is a FUBE, then, ironically, we humans have something he doesn't have.  But if we are in the image of God, shouldn't things that are truly essential to us be a distant reflection of something in God?  The question is, what is essential and what is accidental?  If, for example, I am a liar and a thief, it doesn't mean God must be.  

Hartshorne acknowledges that God is perfect.  Yes, but what is perfection?  Perfection means that God "has no possible rival (no equal or superior) among individuals. He could not be equalled or excelled by another. But could he be excelled by himself in another state?"

Maybe, but "how can one go beyond what is already the uttermost possible?"  We don't want to suggest that God somehow "improves." That would make no sense.  

Hmm. Let's consult the Trinity for some guidance.  First of all, there is the Father and the Son. Does it make sense to think of this as another FUBE situation, in which the Father "determines" everything in and about the Son?  If the Son is just a necessary extension of the Father, then what's the point?  

Yes, there is a "oneness" between them, but in my view it must be analogous (not identical!) to the distinction alluded to above between the rock and the organism.  Of course, a big difference is that the organism comes about in time, whereas the relation of Father and Son has nothing prior to it: the relation Is.  Or better, Is is Relation.

Now, if Relation Is, then this changes approximately everything, but we'll have to wait until the next post to find out exactly how. We'll conclude with a conundrum:

"When we are told that it is the world that has relation to God, rather than God to the world, we are in effect informed that, while X is known by God, God does not know X, which seems senseless" (ibid.).

And an aphorism:

If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago.

Change My Mind: Relation Is, and Is Is Relation

Continuing with the theme of the previous post, I have a question, and I won't accept a self-refuting answer, least of all from God, who should be above such sophistry:  if God knows what I am about to write, do I have a choice in writing it?  It feels to me like I do, but if the author of Reality is correct, then that can't be the case.  

Much as I like to think that God is the author of my omniscient posts, I have my doubts.  Of course, I want to be in alignment with the great What Is, and indeed, this goes to the ineradicable tension between finite and infinite.  I believe my philosophical approach respects this tension, while the traditional view -- perhaps unwittingly -- abolishes it by its overemphasis on the pole of infinitude and immutability.  But it takes two Tongans to tango.

I have other questions: Jesus, of course, is two natures in one person. How is the sacrifice offered by the human person worthy of merit if it is bound to occur anyway?  Another question:  does the principle of Trinity have any bearing on our conception of monotheism?   Which comes first, so to speak? Do we situate Trinity within a strict monotheism, or must we fundamentally reconceptualize the very meaning of monotheism?

For example, the author of Reality (the book, not the universe) claims that God "knows all future conditionals with absolute certainty by knowing himself."  And "from all eternity" God decrees "the actions of free creatures."  

I find this neither intelligible nor comforting, and more than a little narcissistic.  On the next page the author assures us that "Foreknown does not mean necessitated."  Oh. Okay.  We "are still making the choice. God just knows what [we] will choose."

Just?  No worries. It's just your real freedom.  

Is there a better way -- a way to reconcile God's wisdom with our stupidity?  And with it, a more sensible way to get God off the hook for human evil?  I just don't buy the traditional explanations.  

Hartshorne suggests that "there is a monopolar and a dipolar way of conceiving" of the problem before us.  I would go further and suggest there is a tripolar solution, but we'll leave that for later.  In fact, I have some other helpful suggestions of my own, but let's first lay a metacosmic foundation. 

As we know from our Thomism, God is the being whose essence is to exist: he doesn't merely have existence, rather, he is existence.  He is the only being who exists necessarily.  Moreover, his existence is necessary to the existence of human persons and all this entails.  

This is somewhat tangential to the point I'm trying to make, but if the human intellect isn't anchored in necessity, then knowledge of truth is impossible; you might say that in the absence of the Necessary Being, we are necessarily condemned to a closed world of appearances and our opinions about them.   Fake News would be the law of the universe and not just of the university.  

In short, the human person must have a sufficient principle, and this principle is God.  No principle short of this is adequate -- certainly nothing as meager as materialism, scientism, or evolutionism.  We'll come back around to this subject later.

There is and can be only one being whose essence it is to exist.  God is not a species of a larger genus; he is not a class. By definition there is only one, so we are fully on board with monotheism.  

But what sort of one? And what sort of existence?   For example, we know of two divergent and even opposite forms of oneness: there is the oneness of a brick and there is the oneness of an organism.  Is one of these "higher" or do we just flip a coin?  More to the point, is God a frozen and unfeeling block of eternity?  

If God is a FUBE, then, ironically, we humans have something he doesn't have.  But if we are in the image of God, shouldn't things that are truly essential to us be a distant reflection of something in God?  The question is, what is essential and what is accidental?  If, for example, I am a liar and a thief, it doesn't mean God must be.  

Hartshorne acknowledges that God is perfect.  Yes, but what is perfection?  Perfection means that God "has no possible rival (no equal or superior) among individuals. He could not be equalled or excelled by another. But could he be excelled by himself in another state?"

Maybe, but "how can one go beyond what is already the uttermost possible?"  We don't want to suggest that God somehow "improves." That would make no sense.  

Hmm. Let's consult the Trinity for some guidance.  First of all, there is the Father and the Son. Does it make sense to think of this as another FUBE situation, in which the Father "determines" everything in and about the Son?  If the Son is just a necessary extension of the Father, then what's the point?  

Yes, there is a "oneness" between them, but in my view it must be analogous (not identical!) to the distinction alluded to above between the rock and the organism.  Of course, a big difference is that the organism comes about in time, whereas the relation of Father and Son has nothing prior to it: the relation Is.  Or better, Is is Relation.

Now, if Relation Is, then this changes approximately everything, but we'll have to wait until the next post to find out exactly how. We'll conclude with a conundrum:

"When we are told that it is the world that has relation to God, rather than God to the world, we are in effect informed that, while X is known by God, God does not know X, which seems senseless" (ibid.).

And an aphorism:

If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago.

Will the Real Reality Please Stand Out

 (Blogspot has forced a new writing format on us. I'll have to figure out how to fix the links later.)

I had no issues with <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1677949775/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=onecos-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=78473c036a67c8b61ab6a4b20636ca57&creativeASIN=1677949775>Reality</a> until the second half, which makes the traditional arguments for God's absolute immutability.  I appreciate the sentiment, but immutable means immutable, and -- well, maybe you're different from me, but I find it impossible to relate to something immutable, in particular, because something immutable literally cannot relate to me.

It seems to me that the traditional arguments for divine immutability should be understand in a negative rather than positive sense, in that they're more about preventing misunderstanding than conveying an unambiguous understanding.  

In short, everything in the world is subject to deterioration, entropy, decay, etc.  Obviously God is not like that.  But why go to the opposite extreme and say that he's incapable of change?  What if -- and we're just spitballin' it here -- the existence of bad change doesn't imply that all change is bad?  What if there's a type of change that doesn't at all imply privation or incompletion, but rather, is a perfection?   

Love, for example.  Or maybe the best surprise ever. Forever and ever.  

Another issue I have with the scholastic arguments about the nature of God is that they could equally apply to Allah -- not just vis a vis immutability, but omniscience and omnipotence, i.e., total knowledge and absolute will.  Of course, I'm familiar with arguments that try to reconcile human freedom and divine foreknowledge, but these always strike me as special pleading.  

You'll hear it argued, for example, that God's omniscience is analogous to how a parent can know what the child is about to do, even though the child is free not to do it.  But that's a massive category error.  It's not even a good analogy, because a reliable hunch isn't the same as absolute certitude.  Nor does the parent create the child with absolute and unbending foreknowledge of everything he will ever say, do, or think. 

Another issue I have revolves around the question of Trinity.  If God goes to all the trouble of telling us about his interior life, it seems to me that we should take it into consideration before making dogmatic and a priori argument from our end.   

From down here we can easily, with our natural reason, conclude that God is immutable.  Nor, prior to God revealing it, did anyone ever argue that what we call "God" is actually three persons in an eternal <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perichoresis">perichoresis</a>.  

The question is, does the Trinity change any of the traditional arguments, or is it irrelevant?  To me, it goes to the very essence of why the Christian God doesn't at all resemble Allah, nor the impersonal Brahman of Vedanta, which is likewise totally detached from human concerns..

I have a lot of disagreements with <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1573928151?ie=UTF8&tag=onecos-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=1573928151">Charles Hartshorne</a>, but his solution to this problem bangs my gong.  It's not just that it makes intellectual and emotional sense, but it makes a whole array of absurdities and  pseudo-problems disappear. 

Of course, this doesn't mean he's correct.  But it sure makes God more approachable and relatable, and in my opinion, does nothing to diminish the divine glory and all-around awesomeness.  Frankly, I consider immutability to be a character flaw.  It's why a lot of people end up needing psychotherapy later in life: unresponsive <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Monkey_studies">wire monkey</a> parents.

Yes, we've discussed this in the past, but not for about seven years, so let's review the argument. In Hartshorne's view, a fundamental error occurs when we take two contradictory terms -- say, change and immutability -- and apply only one of them to God: 

one decides in each case which member of the pair is good or admirable and then attributes it (in some supremely excellent or transcendent form) to deity, while wholly denying the contrasting term.

Let's take the polarity "being-becoming."  In the traditional view, being is privileged.  But what if this isn't a polarity or dualism but an eternal complementarity?  Isn't this what the Trinity is trying to tell us?  "Father <---> Son <---> Holy Spirit."  Isn't that a hint? Aren't they, you know, related? And aren't we invited to participate in that relationship, i.e.,  to relate to the eternal relating via the outpouring of grace?  

The clock is starting to run out, but we'll have much more to say about this in the next post. We'll end with a passage from Hartshorne:

There is good or superior unity and bad or inferior unity....

God is a being whose versatility of becoming is unlimited, whose potentialities of content embrace all possibilities, whose sensitive responsiveness surpasses that of all other individuals, actual or possible.

That may not be orthodox, but at least I can relate to it. 

Will the Real Reality Please Stand Out

 (Blogspot has forced a new writing format on us. I'll have to figure out how to fix the links later.)

I had no issues with <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1677949775/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=onecos-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=78473c036a67c8b61ab6a4b20636ca57&creativeASIN=1677949775>Reality</a> until the second half, which makes the traditional arguments for God's absolute immutability.  I appreciate the sentiment, but immutable means immutable, and -- well, maybe you're different from me, but I find it impossible to relate to something immutable, in particular, because something immutable literally cannot relate to me.

It seems to me that the traditional arguments for divine immutability should be understand in a negative rather than positive sense, in that they're more about preventing misunderstanding than conveying an unambiguous understanding.  

In short, everything in the world is subject to deterioration, entropy, decay, etc.  Obviously God is not like that.  But why go to the opposite extreme and say that he's incapable of change?  What if -- and we're just spitballin' it here -- the existence of bad change doesn't imply that all change is bad?  What if there's a type of change that doesn't at all imply privation or incompletion, but rather, is a perfection?   

Love, for example.  Or maybe the best surprise ever. Forever and ever.  

Another issue I have with the scholastic arguments about the nature of God is that they could equally apply to Allah -- not just vis a vis immutability, but omniscience and omnipotence, i.e., total knowledge and absolute will.  Of course, I'm familiar with arguments that try to reconcile human freedom and divine foreknowledge, but these always strike me as special pleading.  

You'll hear it argued, for example, that God's omniscience is analogous to how a parent can know what the child is about to do, even though the child is free not to do it.  But that's a massive category error.  It's not even a good analogy, because a reliable hunch isn't the same as absolute certitude.  Nor does the parent create the child with absolute and unbending foreknowledge of everything he will ever say, do, or think. 

Another issue I have revolves around the question of Trinity.  If God goes to all the trouble of telling us about his interior life, it seems to me that we should take it into consideration before making dogmatic and a priori argument from our end.   

From down here we can easily, with our natural reason, conclude that God is immutable.  Nor, prior to God revealing it, did anyone ever argue that what we call "God" is actually three persons in an eternal <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perichoresis">perichoresis</a>.  

The question is, does the Trinity change any of the traditional arguments, or is it irrelevant?  To me, it goes to the very essence of why the Christian God doesn't at all resemble Allah, nor the impersonal Brahman of Vedanta, which is likewise totally detached from human concerns..

I have a lot of disagreements with <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1573928151?ie=UTF8&tag=onecos-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=1573928151">Charles Hartshorne</a>, but his solution to this problem bangs my gong.  It's not just that it makes intellectual and emotional sense, but it makes a whole array of absurdities and  pseudo-problems disappear. 

Of course, this doesn't mean he's correct.  But it sure makes God more approachable and relatable, and in my opinion, does nothing to diminish the divine glory and all-around awesomeness.  Frankly, I consider immutability to be a character flaw.  It's why a lot of people end up needing psychotherapy later in life: unresponsive <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Monkey_studies">wire monkey</a> parents.

Yes, we've discussed this in the past, but not for about seven years, so let's review the argument. In Hartshorne's view, a fundamental error occurs when we take two contradictory terms -- say, change and immutability -- and apply only one of them to God: 

one decides in each case which member of the pair is good or admirable and then attributes it (in some supremely excellent or transcendent form) to deity, while wholly denying the contrasting term.

Let's take the polarity "being-becoming."  In the traditional view, being is privileged.  But what if this isn't a polarity or dualism but an eternal complementarity?  Isn't this what the Trinity is trying to tell us?  "Father <---> Son <---> Holy Spirit."  Isn't that a hint? Aren't they, you know, related? And aren't we invited to participate in that relationship, i.e.,  to relate to the eternal relating via the outpouring of grace?  

The clock is starting to run out, but we'll have much more to say about this in the next post. We'll end with a passage from Hartshorne:

There is good or superior unity and bad or inferior unity....

God is a being whose versatility of becoming is unlimited, whose potentialities of content embrace all possibilities, whose sensitive responsiveness surpasses that of all other individuals, actual or possible.

That may not be orthodox, but at least I can relate to it. 

Weaving the Cosmic Tapestry

Over the weekend I read an enjoyable book called Reality. Which is interesting when you think about it: why on earth do we need to read a book about reality? Isn't it kind of... automatic? What's the alternative? That's right: unreality, AKA fiction and fantasy.

Some people claim there's no such thing as reality; or, that if there is, we could never know it. They think this is a sophisticated attitude, which it is, in the original sense of the word, i.e., sophistry. It's reminiscent of the differences between ideas and ideology, intellect and intellectual, human and humanism, science and scientism, etc.

Sophisticate (the verb) means "to alter deceptively," to falsify, to make artificial and deprive of simplicity, or to debase, spoil, and corrupt. Thus, it is a cause and consequence of what we know of as tenure. If your child attends college and somehow avoids becoming a sophisticate, then the educational system has failed on its own terms. Your child has escaped the progressive Matrix. He is a fugitive slave.

Speaking of which, although our son is homeschooled, some of his classes are taught by other parents. For some reason he's supposed to read the turgid and sentimental Uncle Tom's Cabin, which isn't going to happen. He already deplores racism of any kind, and can't even comprehend how someone could embrace it.

So, I advised him to do what I'd do if I were in his shoes: read the Cliff Notes. We previewed them on amazon, but you still can't get away from the sophistry!

There are probably very few white Americans, if the truth were known, who do not harbor some prejudiced (or, to put it less kindly, racist) ideas about black people, and especially about African Americans....

We all tend to be so conscious today of this prejudiced condition (if not always of the nature of the prejudices) that most white writers would think it foolhardy to attempt a novel whose central characters are African Americans...

Understood. Does this mean black Americans who write and opine about white Americans are fools? Jes' axin'.

The Cliff Notes highlight another problem with Stowe: her Christianity. Of course, "she lived in a less enlightened time," when our unsophisticated citizenry "assumed that the United States was a 'Christian country.'"

Granted, it was founded by Christians upon Christian principles, traditions, and assumptions, but it was really... the notes don't specify. At any rate, Stowe "doesn't apologize for her Protestant chauvinism." The nerve of this woman, to pretend that God abhors slavery! Such a bully.

Here's a non-sequitur: "In our secular time, we tend to avoid the discussion of religion in ordinary 'non-religious' circumstances." But "the separation of Church and State meant something quite different to Stowe." Wait, what? The Constitution forbids a principled Christian opposition to slavery?

End of tangent. What was original point? Right: reality and its alternatives. Note that the latter is necessarily plural, since reality is by definition one. The principle of oneness is why we can both have a reality and know it (more on this point as we proceed). It reminds me of a tweet I read this morning:

I’m a conservative in chess for the same reason I am in politics: because however many good moves there are, there are infinitely more bad moves.

I'm a conservative traditionalist because however many realities there are, there are infinitely more unrealities.

In this context it is permissible to posit more than one reality, so long as we acknowledge verticality, i.e., hierarchy, continuity, and integration, for there are physical, biological, and spiritual (and more) realities. It's just that it's impossible in principle to conceive of these from the "bottom up." If man is intelligent -- which he is -- intelligence can only descend from the top down. If intelligence ascends from below, it's no longer intelligent.

Which is a central point of this other book I'm reading, God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy by Fulton J. Sheen. Don't let his popularity fool you. This guy was a major brainiac before he became a TV star in the 1950s.

I've already lost the handle on this post. Might as well go with the flow. "The intelligence is the key to the communion of the human and the angelic and the divine. From God, who is the source of intellectual light, knowledge descends progressively" through the vertical hierarchy.

But "modern philosophy" -- as articulated by the sophisticates described above -- "in rejecting the intelligence, has rejected the cornerstone of the whole edifice of continuity and progress in the universe."

Progress. That's another key idea we've discussed in the past, in that the metaphysical underpinning of "progressivism" renders progress impossible in principle. For if truth, morality, and culture are relative, there is no standard but power, i.e., opinion and the will to enforce it. Don't believe me. Just look at what's happening in our Democrat run cities and universities: obey! Or else.

Evolution? Not only are we all for it, but our metaphysic is the only one that renders it both possible and necessary. In other words, God is the sufficient reason of evolution (natural selection is only a means, not the principle). We Coonfolk

did not have to wait for modern biology to reveal continuity and progress in the universe. For it [scholasticism], biological discoveries were confirmations, not revelations. They merely proved in a lower order what reason has already verified in the higher orders.

In short, the universe isn't a static block but a living hierarchy full of intelligence and intelligibility everywhere we turn.

We're out of time, so I'm going to have to pull all of these lucent threads together in the subsequent post. Don't worry: I got this. Everything's under control. Just not mine

Weaving the Cosmic Tapestry

Over the weekend I read an enjoyable book called Reality. Which is interesting when you think about it: why on earth do we need to read a book about reality? Isn't it kind of... automatic? What's the alternative? That's right: unreality, AKA fiction and fantasy.

Some people claim there's no such thing as reality; or, that if there is, we could never know it. They think this is a sophisticated attitude, which it is, in the original sense of the word, i.e., sophistry. It's reminiscent of the differences between ideas and ideology, intellect and intellectual, human and humanism, science and scientism, etc.

Sophisticate (the verb) means "to alter deceptively," to falsify, to make artificial and deprive of simplicity, or to debase, spoil, and corrupt. Thus, it is a cause and consequence of what we know of as tenure. If your child attends college and somehow avoids becoming a sophisticate, then the educational system has failed on its own terms. Your child has escaped the progressive Matrix. He is a fugitive slave.

Speaking of which, although our son is homeschooled, some of his classes are taught by other parents. For some reason he's supposed to read the turgid and sentimental Uncle Tom's Cabin, which isn't going to happen. He already deplores racism of any kind, and can't even comprehend how someone could embrace it.

So, I advised him to do what I'd do if I were in his shoes: read the Cliff Notes. We previewed them on amazon, but you still can't get away from the sophistry!

There are probably very few white Americans, if the truth were known, who do not harbor some prejudiced (or, to put it less kindly, racist) ideas about black people, and especially about African Americans....

We all tend to be so conscious today of this prejudiced condition (if not always of the nature of the prejudices) that most white writers would think it foolhardy to attempt a novel whose central characters are African Americans...

Understood. Does this mean black Americans who write and opine about white Americans are fools? Jes' axin'.

The Cliff Notes highlight another problem with Stowe: her Christianity. Of course, "she lived in a less enlightened time," when our unsophisticated citizenry "assumed that the United States was a 'Christian country.'"

Granted, it was founded by Christians upon Christian principles, traditions, and assumptions, but it was really... the notes don't specify. At any rate, Stowe "doesn't apologize for her Protestant chauvinism." The nerve of this woman, to pretend that God abhors slavery! Such a bully.

Here's a non-sequitur: "In our secular time, we tend to avoid the discussion of religion in ordinary 'non-religious' circumstances." But "the separation of Church and State meant something quite different to Stowe." Wait, what? The Constitution forbids a principled Christian opposition to slavery?

End of tangent. What was original point? Right: reality and its alternatives. Note that the latter is necessarily plural, since reality is by definition one. The principle of oneness is why we can both have a reality and know it (more on this point as we proceed). It reminds me of a tweet I read this morning:

I’m a conservative in chess for the same reason I am in politics: because however many good moves there are, there are infinitely more bad moves.

I'm a conservative traditionalist because however many realities there are, there are infinitely more unrealities.

In this context it is permissible to posit more than one reality, so long as we acknowledge verticality, i.e., hierarchy, continuity, and integration, for there are physical, biological, and spiritual (and more) realities. It's just that it's impossible in principle to conceive of these from the "bottom up." If man is intelligent -- which he is -- intelligence can only descend from the top down. If intelligence ascends from below, it's no longer intelligent.

Which is a central point of this other book I'm reading, God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy by Fulton J. Sheen. Don't let his popularity fool you. This guy was a major brainiac before he became a TV star in the 1950s.

I've already lost the handle on this post. Might as well go with the flow. "The intelligence is the key to the communion of the human and the angelic and the divine. From God, who is the source of intellectual light, knowledge descends progressively" through the vertical hierarchy.

But "modern philosophy" -- as articulated by the sophisticates described above -- "in rejecting the intelligence, has rejected the cornerstone of the whole edifice of continuity and progress in the universe."

Progress. That's another key idea we've discussed in the past, in that the metaphysical underpinning of "progressivism" renders progress impossible in principle. For if truth, morality, and culture are relative, there is no standard but power, i.e., opinion and the will to enforce it. Don't believe me. Just look at what's happening in our Democrat run cities and universities: obey! Or else.

Evolution? Not only are we all for it, but our metaphysic is the only one that renders it both possible and necessary. In other words, God is the sufficient reason of evolution (natural selection is only a means, not the principle). We Coonfolk

did not have to wait for modern biology to reveal continuity and progress in the universe. For it [scholasticism], biological discoveries were confirmations, not revelations. They merely proved in a lower order what reason has already verified in the higher orders.

In short, the universe isn't a static block but a living hierarchy full of intelligence and intelligibility everywhere we turn.

We're out of time, so I'm going to have to pull all of these lucent threads together in the subsequent post. Don't worry: I got this. Everything's under control. Just not mine

2 + 2 = Don't Boink Your Sister

Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give opinions. --Dávila

I guess I don't have any pressing agenda at the moment. When last we met, we were -- just for fun -- seeing what might happen if ideological Darwinism collided head on with the anti-ideological Voegelin, using Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World as our crash test dummy.

It reminds me of when David Letterman used to drop objects -- from watermelons to TVs -- from a high-rise, just to see what it looks like when they splatter on the ground. Same. We're going to push Henrich's naively reductive scheme off the top floor just to watch it break into pieces.

Before doing so -- or as a prelude -- why in principle is metaphysical Darwinism doomed to failure? Here's one informal way to measure the magnitude of the problem: I do a lot of highlighting when I read a book, and have evolved an array of idiosyncratic symbols, depending upon the importance of the point. This allows me to pull a book from the shelf and immediately identify everything from its One Big Idea to its granular facts and details.

When I come across a really stupid point, I put a ? in the margin. If it's really, really stupid, I might put a ?!. But if it's really, really, really stupid, I put a dismissive or contemptuous HA! Suffice it to say, there are a great many ?s, ?!s, and HA!s in the margins of this book. I cited an example the other day:

And from a scientific [?!] perspective, no "rights" have yet been detected hiding in our DNA or elsewhere. This idea sells because it appeals to a particular psychology."

Was he just trying to be ironic, or funny? Then stick to your day job and leave the gags to us!

Here's another example: do you like living in Western civilization? I do. Well, it's all just a big misunderstanding, an accident of natural selection: "there were many religious groups competing in the Mediterranean and Middle East," and "The Church was just the 'lucky one' that bumbled across an effective recombination of supernatural beliefs and practices."

Okay fine. What's good for the nous is good for the tenured: what is the principle Henrich is defending? That humans habitually confuse what is true with what has merely survived the ordeal of natural selection.

This being the case, it is equally logical to say that "there were many philosophical ideas competing in academia, and sociobiology was just the lucky one that bumbled across an effective recombination of infra-rational beliefs and practices."

Dávila: Reducing another’s thought to his supposed motives prevents us from understanding him. Reducing another's thought to the accidents of biology is just... HA!

Memo to Henrich: all beliefs are supernatural, which is to say, transcendent. Otherwise you're in the absurcular position of arguing that the theory of natural selection was naturally selected. I realize this is basic stuff, but c'mon, man! Stop conflating science and philosophy. Scientism isn't a philosophy, just a quick way to commit intellectual suicide.

Here's another beaut: "The much-heralded ideals of Western civilization, like human rights, liberty, representative democracy, and science, aren't monuments to pure reason, as so many assume."

Rather, they are ultimately traceable to "a peculiar package of incest taboos, marriage prohibitions, and family prescriptions that developed in a radical religious sect -- Western Christianity."

Where to even begin? It's like trying to debate Biden, which cannot overcome Brandolini's Law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

Please don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that it's okay to boink your sister or marry your first cousin. Rather, Henrich is conflating necessary and sufficient conditions. Yes, you shouldn't boink your sister; no, refraining from doing so doesn't automatically result in the U.S. Constitution, natural science, human rights, and the Pieta.

Here's another problem: is there such a thing as an objective human norm? NO!, says the ideological Darwinian. For how can there be an objective norm when anything we call a "norm" is just an accidental consequence of natural selection?

Recall that WEIRD is a cute acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democrat. Me? I rather enjoy being an affluent and educated individual living in a liberal democracy rooted in self-evident truth. I suspect you like it too, trolls excepted.

But if you were born in China or Saudi Arabia, you would have a very different psychology, and there's no way to arbitrate between the two: one is as good or bad as the other. Natural rights? They are fundamentally no different from lactose tolerance. Some people didn't evolve the digestive ability to tolerate milk. Others can't tolerate free speech. Same difference.

No, I'm not exaggerating. For example, I have an Evangelical friend who -- unlike me, the second laziest man in LA county -- is a conspicuously ambitious and hard worker. I wonder what drives him? Well, "research suggests" that

some forms of Protestantism may have stumbled onto an ingenious way to harness men's cravings for forbidden sex to motivate them to work harder, longer, and more creatively. Protestants can boil off their guilt through productive work, by heeding their calling.

It is indeed amazing what a man accomplish by not boinking his sister.

Here in the Christian west we like the idea of an abstract and impersonal rule of law. Or at least we used to. Conservatives are still rather attached to it, while the left is at war with it. Is it because we don't boink our sisters? Pretty much: "who's to even say that two legal decisions stand in contradiction?" For

in many societies, law is about restoring harmony and maintaining the peace, not, as it is for more analytic thinkers, about defending individual rights or making sure that abstract principles of "justice" are served.

Correct: there's no justice, only "justice." And yet, try telling that to some inbred leftist!

I didn't intend this post to descend into pure insultainment. Here's one last example. Henrich, in his eagerness to attack Christianity, writes on p. 145 that the Greek and Roman gods were "upholders of public morality," and that unflattering depictions of them are merely a result of "Christian spin doctors" making them look bad.

Twenty pages later he discusses this fine Roman morality, writing, for example, that "It was within the father's power to kill his slaves or children."

Does this imply that Christian morality is somehow superior to Roman morality? Can't be. Our genes permit and perhaps even necessitate moralizing, but there is in principle no objective way to arbitrate between diverse moralities, any more than the genes permit us to distinguish between Darwinism and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

But what if 2 + 2 really is 4? In other words, what if truth exists and man may know it? That changes everything.

The natural sciences, where the process of falsification prevails, take only errors out of circulation; the social sciences, where fashion prevails, also take their achievements out of circulation. --Dávila.

2 + 2 = Don't Boink Your Sister

Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give opinions. --Dávila

I guess I don't have any pressing agenda at the moment. When last we met, we were -- just for fun -- seeing what might happen if ideological Darwinism collided head on with the anti-ideological Voegelin, using Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World as our crash test dummy.

It reminds me of when David Letterman used to drop objects -- from watermelons to TVs -- from a high-rise, just to see what it looks like when they splatter on the ground. Same. We're going to push Henrich's naively reductive scheme off the top floor just to watch it break into pieces.

Before doing so -- or as a prelude -- why in principle is metaphysical Darwinism doomed to failure? Here's one informal way to measure the magnitude of the problem: I do a lot of highlighting when I read a book, and have evolved an array of idiosyncratic symbols, depending upon the importance of the point. This allows me to pull a book from the shelf and immediately identify everything from its One Big Idea to its granular facts and details.

When I come across a really stupid point, I put a ? in the margin. If it's really, really stupid, I might put a ?!. But if it's really, really, really stupid, I put a dismissive or contemptuous HA! Suffice it to say, there are a great many ?s, ?!s, and HA!s in the margins of this book. I cited an example the other day:

And from a scientific [?!] perspective, no "rights" have yet been detected hiding in our DNA or elsewhere. This idea sells because it appeals to a particular psychology."

Was he just trying to be ironic, or funny? Then stick to your day job and leave the gags to us!

Here's another example: do you like living in Western civilization? I do. Well, it's all just a big misunderstanding, an accident of natural selection: "there were many religious groups competing in the Mediterranean and Middle East," and "The Church was just the 'lucky one' that bumbled across an effective recombination of supernatural beliefs and practices."

Okay fine. What's good for the nous is good for the tenured: what is the principle Henrich is defending? That humans habitually confuse what is true with what has merely survived the ordeal of natural selection.

This being the case, it is equally logical to say that "there were many philosophical ideas competing in academia, and sociobiology was just the lucky one that bumbled across an effective recombination of infra-rational beliefs and practices."

Dávila: Reducing another’s thought to his supposed motives prevents us from understanding him. Reducing another's thought to the accidents of biology is just... HA!

Memo to Henrich: all beliefs are supernatural, which is to say, transcendent. Otherwise you're in the absurcular position of arguing that the theory of natural selection was naturally selected. I realize this is basic stuff, but c'mon, man! Stop conflating science and philosophy. Scientism isn't a philosophy, just a quick way to commit intellectual suicide.

Here's another beaut: "The much-heralded ideals of Western civilization, like human rights, liberty, representative democracy, and science, aren't monuments to pure reason, as so many assume."

Rather, they are ultimately traceable to "a peculiar package of incest taboos, marriage prohibitions, and family prescriptions that developed in a radical religious sect -- Western Christianity."

Where to even begin? It's like trying to debate Biden, which cannot overcome Brandolini's Law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

Please don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that it's okay to boink your sister or marry your first cousin. Rather, Henrich is conflating necessary and sufficient conditions. Yes, you shouldn't boink your sister; no, refraining from doing so doesn't automatically result in the U.S. Constitution, natural science, human rights, and the Pieta.

Here's another problem: is there such a thing as an objective human norm? NO!, says the ideological Darwinian. For how can there be an objective norm when anything we call a "norm" is just an accidental consequence of natural selection?

Recall that WEIRD is a cute acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democrat. Me? I rather enjoy being an affluent and educated individual living in a liberal democracy rooted in self-evident truth. I suspect you like it too, trolls excepted.

But if you were born in China or Saudi Arabia, you would have a very different psychology, and there's no way to arbitrate between the two: one is as good or bad as the other. Natural rights? They are fundamentally no different from lactose tolerance. Some people didn't evolve the digestive ability to tolerate milk. Others can't tolerate free speech. Same difference.

No, I'm not exaggerating. For example, I have an Evangelical friend who -- unlike me, the second laziest man in LA county -- is a conspicuously ambitious and hard worker. I wonder what drives him? Well, "research suggests" that

some forms of Protestantism may have stumbled onto an ingenious way to harness men's cravings for forbidden sex to motivate them to work harder, longer, and more creatively. Protestants can boil off their guilt through productive work, by heeding their calling.

It is indeed amazing what a man accomplish by not boinking his sister.

Here in the Christian west we like the idea of an abstract and impersonal rule of law. Or at least we used to. Conservatives are still rather attached to it, while the left is at war with it. Is it because we don't boink our sisters? Pretty much: "who's to even say that two legal decisions stand in contradiction?" For

in many societies, law is about restoring harmony and maintaining the peace, not, as it is for more analytic thinkers, about defending individual rights or making sure that abstract principles of "justice" are served.

Correct: there's no justice, only "justice." And yet, try telling that to some inbred leftist!

I didn't intend this post to descend into pure insultainment. Here's one last example. Henrich, in his eagerness to attack Christianity, writes on p. 145 that the Greek and Roman gods were "upholders of public morality," and that unflattering depictions of them are merely a result of "Christian spin doctors" making them look bad.

Twenty pages later he discusses this fine Roman morality, writing, for example, that "It was within the father's power to kill his slaves or children."

Does this imply that Christian morality is somehow superior to Roman morality? Can't be. Our genes permit and perhaps even necessitate moralizing, but there is in principle no objective way to arbitrate between diverse moralities, any more than the genes permit us to distinguish between Darwinism and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

But what if 2 + 2 really is 4? In other words, what if truth exists and man may know it? That changes everything.

The natural sciences, where the process of falsification prevails, take only errors out of circulation; the social sciences, where fashion prevails, also take their achievements out of circulation. --Dávila.

There is No God, and Matter is His Prophet

With regard to the debate between Ideological Darwinism and St. Thomas, I'm trying to consider it from the widest possible angle -- or at least a new angle -- since we've already circled this goround ad nauseam. So why does it keep coming up? No doubt because we failed to dig down deep enough and pull it out by the roots. Instead, we leave a stump which sprouts new growth the moment we turn our backs.

It seems that some errors will always be with us: not Darwinism per se, but something deeper than Darwinism. (And I hasten to emphasize that we're not talking merely about the mechanism of natural selection, which no one disputes, but rather, the naive and uncritical reduction of everything that transcends the genes back into the genes: spirit into matter, subject into object, truth into reproductive success, wisdom into tenure, etc.)

It seems to me that the Perennial Error that Cannot be Eradicated is a form of immanentizing the Christian eschaton. Ironically, the anti-theism expressed by Henrich could only occur in a post-Christian world (which is still a variant of Christianity).

After all, natural selection wasn't discovered by Buddhists or Muslims. With regard to the former, no intellectual would waste his time focused on the illusory ins, outs, and what-have-you's of ceaseless change. We get it: the only permanence is the impermanent. As for Islam, any changes are dictated by Allah. There is no randomness, including the genetic kind. End of story.

So, the truth of the matter is that Henrich is high up in the Christian tree of Western civilization, enthusiastically sawing away at the branch he's sitting on. But more than that, he's really attempting the chop down the whole tree -- the tree of transcendence -- and return it to the immanent ground of the forest, i.e., a world of pure horizontality.

To help us see the forest for the trees (and vice versa), let's turn to Voegelin. Maybe he's not always as clear as he could be and should be, but who else gets to the root of the problem as he does? He's like metaphysical Roundup. No, literally:

The soul grows full of weeds unless the intelligence inspects it daily like a diligent gardener (Dávila).

Look at the size that menu! Where to begin? This looks like a good appetizer: Evolutionary Theory and Kant's Critique. Let's chew on it and see if it's digestible. Hmm. We may have bitten off more than we can chew:

if the radically immanent theory of evolution were accepted, researchers would have to ascribe to the universal mother, with her generative power, an expedient organization geared to all the creatures that have come forth from her and without which the appropriate forms of the animal and plant worlds would be impossible.

Okay what? I think he means that if you radically immanentize the process of evolution, you end with a kind of de-differentiated Womb of Nature -- perhaps similar to the worldview of paleolithic cave painters. They too noticed how mother earth ceaselessly throws out forms from her womb, which is why they thought they could participate in the process by tunneling down into the earth and putting those images on the walls. Is this what Henrich is doing? Yes, only with banal words and ideas instead of glorious images. No, literally:

Without aesthetic transfiguration all of reality is pedestrian.

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

The work of art is a covenant with God.

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

The laws of biology in themselves do not have sufficiently delicate fingers to fashion the beauty of a face.

So, our cavedwelling cousins were the first to discover transcendence, and their paintings are urgent memos to that effect. They launched us into this vertical space, but people such as Henrich would literally reduce this space to a meaningless horizontal shuffling of genetic material. There's an ap(horism) for that:

Reducing another’s thought to his supposed motives prevents us from understanding him.

In other words, reducing our thought to the selfish motives of our genes obviously prevents Henrich from understanding us. But more to the point, it also prevents him from understanding himself. I realize this is basic stuff, but has it really never occurred to him that he isn't magically immune from his own theory, and that his ideas cannot possibly be true, only genetically useful? Yes, he's only a biologist and not a philosopher, but c'mon, man!

Back to Voegelin, then we have to get some work done:

If this idea is followed to its logical conclusion, the law according to which species develop moves closer and closer to the beginning of the history of evolution, until the first life-form is endowed with the evolutionary tendency for the entire living world, and finally speculation pushes back beyond the first life-form into inorganic matter, from which the former spontaneously originated.

The "explanatory" law that was intended to be immanent thus turns again into a transcendent one, into a law that "precedes" the evolutionary series of life...

In other words, there is no God, and matter is his prophet.

We are far from finished with this subject (we've only just begun), but we'll end this post with a few aphorisms that are as paper to the rockheadedness of ideological Darwinism:

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book.

Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest (Dávila).

There is No God, and Matter is His Prophet

With regard to the debate between Ideological Darwinism and St. Thomas, I'm trying to consider it from the widest possible angle -- or at least a new angle -- since we've already circled this goround ad nauseam. So why does it keep coming up? No doubt because we failed to dig down deep enough and pull it out by the roots. Instead, we leave a stump which sprouts new growth the moment we turn our backs.

It seems that some errors will always be with us: not Darwinism per se, but something deeper than Darwinism. (And I hasten to emphasize that we're not talking merely about the mechanism of natural selection, which no one disputes, but rather, the naive and uncritical reduction of everything that transcends the genes back into the genes: spirit into matter, subject into object, truth into reproductive success, wisdom into tenure, etc.)

It seems to me that the Perennial Error that Cannot be Eradicated is a form of immanentizing the Christian eschaton. Ironically, the anti-theism expressed by Henrich could only occur in a post-Christian world (which is still a variant of Christianity).

After all, natural selection wasn't discovered by Buddhists or Muslims. With regard to the former, no intellectual would waste his time focused on the illusory ins, outs, and what-have-you's of ceaseless change. We get it: the only permanence is the impermanent. As for Islam, any changes are dictated by Allah. There is no randomness, including the genetic kind. End of story.

So, the truth of the matter is that Henrich is high up in the Christian tree of Western civilization, enthusiastically sawing away at the branch he's sitting on. But more than that, he's really attempting the chop down the whole tree -- the tree of transcendence -- and return it to the immanent ground of the forest, i.e., a world of pure horizontality.

To help us see the forest for the trees (and vice versa), let's turn to Voegelin. Maybe he's not always as clear as he could be and should be, but who else gets to the root of the problem as he does? He's like metaphysical Roundup. No, literally:

The soul grows full of weeds unless the intelligence inspects it daily like a diligent gardener (Dávila).

Look at the size that menu! Where to begin? This looks like a good appetizer: Evolutionary Theory and Kant's Critique. Let's chew on it and see if it's digestible. Hmm. We may have bitten off more than we can chew:

if the radically immanent theory of evolution were accepted, researchers would have to ascribe to the universal mother, with her generative power, an expedient organization geared to all the creatures that have come forth from her and without which the appropriate forms of the animal and plant worlds would be impossible.

Okay what? I think he means that if you radically immanentize the process of evolution, you end with a kind of de-differentiated Womb of Nature -- perhaps similar to the worldview of paleolithic cave painters. They too noticed how mother earth ceaselessly throws out forms from her womb, which is why they thought they could participate in the process by tunneling down into the earth and putting those images on the walls. Is this what Henrich is doing? Yes, only with banal words and ideas instead of glorious images. No, literally:

Without aesthetic transfiguration all of reality is pedestrian.

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

The work of art is a covenant with God.

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

The laws of biology in themselves do not have sufficiently delicate fingers to fashion the beauty of a face.

So, our cavedwelling cousins were the first to discover transcendence, and their paintings are urgent memos to that effect. They launched us into this vertical space, but people such as Henrich would literally reduce this space to a meaningless horizontal shuffling of genetic material. There's an ap(horism) for that:

Reducing another’s thought to his supposed motives prevents us from understanding him.

In other words, reducing our thought to the selfish motives of our genes obviously prevents Henrich from understanding us. But more to the point, it also prevents him from understanding himself. I realize this is basic stuff, but has it really never occurred to him that he isn't magically immune from his own theory, and that his ideas cannot possibly be true, only genetically useful? Yes, he's only a biologist and not a philosopher, but c'mon, man!

Back to Voegelin, then we have to get some work done:

If this idea is followed to its logical conclusion, the law according to which species develop moves closer and closer to the beginning of the history of evolution, until the first life-form is endowed with the evolutionary tendency for the entire living world, and finally speculation pushes back beyond the first life-form into inorganic matter, from which the former spontaneously originated.

The "explanatory" law that was intended to be immanent thus turns again into a transcendent one, into a law that "precedes" the evolutionary series of life...

In other words, there is no God, and matter is his prophet.

We are far from finished with this subject (we've only just begun), but we'll end this post with a few aphorisms that are as paper to the rockheadedness of ideological Darwinism:

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book.

Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest (Dávila).

If You Can Read This Sentence, You Have a Soul

We have to distinguish between two types of atheism, negative and positive. The former type of atheist is simply apathetic: he doesn't pretend to know and pretends not to care. It is a fundamentally unserious view of life, and not worthy of Homo sapiens sapiens, AKA the doublewise homo. We won't spend any more time on him. He's not even clever enough to be wrong.

Positive atheism makes the bolder and more grandiose claim that God definitely does not exist. Of course, it depends upon what the atheist means by "God." Generally speaking, nor do we believe in the atheist's conception of God, but we'll leave that to the side.

What? Have you been listening to the Bob's story? You have no frame of reference, do you?

I'll say it one more time: we are immersed in the unpleasant and thankless task of reconciling the pure Darwinism -- or evolutionary psychology, to be precise -- of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, with the pure Thomism of Introduction to the Science of Mental Health. Both of these cannot possibly be true, at least not in the same way.

By the way, which book is the more difficult? Which requires more brainpower, both to read and write? No contest: anyone with a room temperature IQ can comprehend the mechanism of natural selection. After all it has only three moving parts: genetic variation, differential reproduction, and survival. According to this view, every human trait is a consequence of this trinity.

Well, not exactly, for any number of traits slip through the net of natural selection. In other words, just because a trait survives and persists, we can't necessarily say it was adaptive to a particular environment. Noses weren't selected to hold up eyeglasses, and all that.

Anyway, the big black book of Thomism is much more challenging. The WEIRD book is just tedious and predictable. It very much brings to mind a number of apt observations by the Aphorist:

Science easily degrades into fools’ mythology.

To believe that science is enough is the most naïve of superstitions.

The natural sciences can be adequately cultivated by slaves; the cultivation of the social sciences requires free men.

Scientific ideas allow themselves to be easily depraved by coarse minds.

In this context, Henrich is like a child who wanders in in the middle of a movie and wants to know what it's about. He's out of his element!

Really, he wants to have it both ways; he wants to have his crock and eat it too. What I mean is that he acknowledges the centrality of Christianity in laying the groundwork for our WEIRDness -- our Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic civilization -- but wants to pretend it's all just a random genetic aberration. As Professor Backflap puts it,

Henrich reveals how the Roman Catholic Church unintentionally shifted people's psychology, and the trajectory of Western civilization, by transforming the most fundamental off human institutions: those related to marriage and kinship. It was these social and psychological changes in Europe that... [laid] the foundation for the modern world (emphasis mine).

Unintentionally? The Church was trying to make the world a worse place?

Bear in mind that biology cannot evaluate whether or not the changes wrought by the Church were Good Things. Rather, they're only Things. Biology is descriptive, not prescriptive. It describes what is, not what ought to be. Ought Henrich avoid such breathtakingly simplistic and anti-intellectual generalizations? Biology can't say.

A few years ago we wrote a series of posts on an excellent book called Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. As I recall, it tills much of the same ground as does The WEIRDest, only without the fanciful attempt to squeeze it all into a scientistic bed of genetic reductionism.

What I want to ask is: who is the anti-intellectual here? Henrich? Or St. Thomas? Who is the more generous, the more curious, the more open-minded, the more humanistic? The less dogmatic, narrow-minded, and doctrinaire? The questions answer themselves.

Although Christianity is responsible for our progress from premodern anonymity to modern individuality, from tyranny to democracy, and from subsistence to abundance, here is the sum-total of what Henrich knows about religion and God (for if this is all he knows, this is all he can know, i.e., it is a frank confession of total ignorance):

Just to be clear, I'm not praising either world religions or big gods. To me, they are simply another interesting class of cultural phenomena that demands explanation.... These beliefs evolved not because they are accurate representations of reality but because they help communities, organizations, and societies beat their competitors.

Oh. I was wondering why sociobiology evolved. Henrich's ideas are so adaptive, he must have like a dozen children!

Back to one of our main points: which is the more capacious metaphysic? Which has more explanatory power? Well, by definition the theistic view does, since there can be nothing more capacious than God. My God is always larger than your godlessness.

I'm going to briefly switch gears to overdrive and see what Fr. Spitzer has to say about the subject:

At first glance there appears to be a conflict between the Bible and evolutionary theory. The Bible suggests that human beings are a special creation of God independent of other biological species....

However, the theory of evolution suggests that human beings did come from an evolutionary progression. Can the two be reconciled?

Not only can they be reconciled, they must be reconciled. It is only for us to understand how. In other words, the reconciliation already exists. It not only precedes us, but is a necessary condition for the very possibility of science. You are free to drain the world of transcendence, but doing so necessarily drains it of both immaterial knowledge and the transphysical knower. Spitzer:

The Bible is making the theological point in Genesis that human beings were created as distinct from the animals and “made in the image and likeness of God.” Can these two theological truths be consistent with the truth of evolution?

Yes -- so long as we hold that human beings are not only biological organisms (subject to an evolutionary process), but have a unique transphysical soul individually created by God.

Is the existence of the soul in any way inconsistent with natural selection? Of course not, any more than is the existence of music, poetry, painting, and science. Obviously, evolution does not "create" transcendence. And it certainly doesn't prevent it, or I'm not typing this sentence and you're not understanding it. Spitzer:

the soul cannot be reduced to any physical or biological structure or process.... Can Catholics believe that the physical-biological part of human beings evolved from other species? Yes. Can they believe that even the cerebral cortex came from an evolutionary process -- from homo-erectus to Neanderthal to homo-sapien? Yes.

Is there a problem? Not for us. The more truth, the merrier: "Catholics should always seek the truth, for there can be no contradiction between reason and faith. As St. Thomas Aquinas implied -- how can there be a contradiction?" There can only be a contradiction if we get things out of order. Beginning with our own minds.

To be continued....

If You Can Read This Sentence, You Have a Soul

We have to distinguish between two types of atheism, negative and positive. The former type of atheist is simply apathetic: he doesn't pretend to know and pretends not to care. It is a fundamentally unserious view of life, and not worthy of Homo sapiens sapiens, AKA the doublewise homo. We won't spend any more time on him. He's not even clever enough to be wrong.

Positive atheism makes the bolder and more grandiose claim that God definitely does not exist. Of course, it depends upon what the atheist means by "God." Generally speaking, nor do we believe in the atheist's conception of God, but we'll leave that to the side.

What? Have you been listening to the Bob's story? You have no frame of reference, do you?

I'll say it one more time: we are immersed in the unpleasant and thankless task of reconciling the pure Darwinism -- or evolutionary psychology, to be precise -- of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, with the pure Thomism of Introduction to the Science of Mental Health. Both of these cannot possibly be true, at least not in the same way.

By the way, which book is the more difficult? Which requires more brainpower, both to read and write? No contest: anyone with a room temperature IQ can comprehend the mechanism of natural selection. After all it has only three moving parts: genetic variation, differential reproduction, and survival. According to this view, every human trait is a consequence of this trinity.

Well, not exactly, for any number of traits slip through the net of natural selection. In other words, just because a trait survives and persists, we can't necessarily say it was adaptive to a particular environment. Noses weren't selected to hold up eyeglasses, and all that.

Anyway, the big black book of Thomism is much more challenging. The WEIRD book is just tedious and predictable. It very much brings to mind a number of apt observations by the Aphorist:

Science easily degrades into fools’ mythology.

To believe that science is enough is the most naïve of superstitions.

The natural sciences can be adequately cultivated by slaves; the cultivation of the social sciences requires free men.

Scientific ideas allow themselves to be easily depraved by coarse minds.

In this context, Henrich is like a child who wanders in in the middle of a movie and wants to know what it's about. He's out of his element!

Really, he wants to have it both ways; he wants to have his crock and eat it too. What I mean is that he acknowledges the centrality of Christianity in laying the groundwork for our WEIRDness -- our Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic civilization -- but wants to pretend it's all just a random genetic aberration. As Professor Backflap puts it,

Henrich reveals how the Roman Catholic Church unintentionally shifted people's psychology, and the trajectory of Western civilization, by transforming the most fundamental off human institutions: those related to marriage and kinship. It was these social and psychological changes in Europe that... [laid] the foundation for the modern world (emphasis mine).

Unintentionally? The Church was trying to make the world a worse place?

Bear in mind that biology cannot evaluate whether or not the changes wrought by the Church were Good Things. Rather, they're only Things. Biology is descriptive, not prescriptive. It describes what is, not what ought to be. Ought Henrich avoid such breathtakingly simplistic and anti-intellectual generalizations? Biology can't say.

A few years ago we wrote a series of posts on an excellent book called Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. As I recall, it tills much of the same ground as does The WEIRDest, only without the fanciful attempt to squeeze it all into a scientistic bed of genetic reductionism.

What I want to ask is: who is the anti-intellectual here? Henrich? Or St. Thomas? Who is the more generous, the more curious, the more open-minded, the more humanistic? The less dogmatic, narrow-minded, and doctrinaire? The questions answer themselves.

Although Christianity is responsible for our progress from premodern anonymity to modern individuality, from tyranny to democracy, and from subsistence to abundance, here is the sum-total of what Henrich knows about religion and God (for if this is all he knows, this is all he can know, i.e., it is a frank confession of total ignorance):

Just to be clear, I'm not praising either world religions or big gods. To me, they are simply another interesting class of cultural phenomena that demands explanation.... These beliefs evolved not because they are accurate representations of reality but because they help communities, organizations, and societies beat their competitors.

Oh. I was wondering why sociobiology evolved. Henrich's ideas are so adaptive, he must have like a dozen children!

Back to one of our main points: which is the more capacious metaphysic? Which has more explanatory power? Well, by definition the theistic view does, since there can be nothing more capacious than God. My God is always larger than your godlessness.

I'm going to briefly switch gears to overdrive and see what Fr. Spitzer has to say about the subject:

At first glance there appears to be a conflict between the Bible and evolutionary theory. The Bible suggests that human beings are a special creation of God independent of other biological species....

However, the theory of evolution suggests that human beings did come from an evolutionary progression. Can the two be reconciled?

Not only can they be reconciled, they must be reconciled. It is only for us to understand how. In other words, the reconciliation already exists. It not only precedes us, but is a necessary condition for the very possibility of science. You are free to drain the world of transcendence, but doing so necessarily drains it of both immaterial knowledge and the transphysical knower. Spitzer:

The Bible is making the theological point in Genesis that human beings were created as distinct from the animals and “made in the image and likeness of God.” Can these two theological truths be consistent with the truth of evolution?

Yes -- so long as we hold that human beings are not only biological organisms (subject to an evolutionary process), but have a unique transphysical soul individually created by God.

Is the existence of the soul in any way inconsistent with natural selection? Of course not, any more than is the existence of music, poetry, painting, and science. Obviously, evolution does not "create" transcendence. And it certainly doesn't prevent it, or I'm not typing this sentence and you're not understanding it. Spitzer:

the soul cannot be reduced to any physical or biological structure or process.... Can Catholics believe that the physical-biological part of human beings evolved from other species? Yes. Can they believe that even the cerebral cortex came from an evolutionary process -- from homo-erectus to Neanderthal to homo-sapien? Yes.

Is there a problem? Not for us. The more truth, the merrier: "Catholics should always seek the truth, for there can be no contradiction between reason and faith. As St. Thomas Aquinas implied -- how can there be a contradiction?" There can only be a contradiction if we get things out of order. Beginning with our own minds.

To be continued....

In the Meantime...

I commend this essay to readers: How the Great Truth Dawned, by Gary Saul Morson. It is surprisingly relevant to the Current Project in a number of ways, beginning with the importance of narrative as vehicle for truth:

Novels of ideas... exhibit a masterplot: a hero or heroine devoted to an idea discovers that reality is much more complex than the idea allows.

For example, a materialist believes that love is nothing but physiology and that individual people differ no more than frogs, yet he falls deeply in love with a particular woman (the plot of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children). A moralist asserts that only actions, not wishes, have moral value, yet winds up consumed by guilt for a murder he has fostered only by his wish for it (the plot of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov)....

As mentioned in the previous post, our Current Project involves the reconciliation of evolutionary and Thomistic psychologies -- where they converge, where they diverge, and where only one can possibly walk out alive. This cosmos -- no cosmos -- is big enough for two ultimate truths.

If I were a novelist, perhaps I'd write a story of a strict sociobiologist who insists that love is nothing but a deception of the genes to trick us into reproducing, yet falls deeply in love with a particular woman. Only then does he discover a reality that transcends his little ideology, and that frogs and persons aren't of equal value and significance.

On an even deeper level, I wonder if the biblical narrative -- the arc of salvation that spans from creation to the beatific vision -- isn't a bug but a feature? In other words, this metastory not only must be told in history, but with history. What if history is made of truth -- the truth of fall and redemption?

I have a note to myself: consequences of Darwinism. Suffice it to say that no Darwinist actually thinks and lives the consequences of his ideology. Indeed, if he takes them seriously, he could under no circumstances take them seriously, because they abolish the very possibility of knowing truth. Only a sociopath could be an intellectually and morally consistent Darwinian.

Volodin recalls Epicurus’s words: “Our inner feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction are the highest criteria of good and evil,” and only now does he understand them. “Now it was clear: Whatever gives me pleasure is good; what displeases me is bad. Stalin, for instance, enjoyed killing people -- so that, for him, was good?”

How wise such philosophy seems to a free person! But for Volodin, good and evil are now distinct entities. “His struggle and suffering had raised him to a height from which the great materialist’s wisdom seemed like the prattle of a child.”

Similarly, compared to St. Thomas, the wisdom of evolutionary psychology seems like the prattle of a child.

Solzhenitsyn explains: “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.... it is in the nature of a human being to seek a justification for his actions.”

Here again, a strict Darwinian can never speak of natural law or of a transcendent human nature.

Why is it, Solzhenitsyn asks, that Macbeth, Iago, and other Shakespearean evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses, while Lenin and Stalin did in millions? The answer is that Macbeth and Iago “had no ideology.” Ideology makes the killer and torturer an agent of good, “so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.” Ideology never achieved such power and scale before the twentieth century.

How does the ideology of Darwinism explain this? More to the point, from the perspective of Darwinism, on what basis can we say that Stalin and his ideology are evil?

Anyone can succumb to ideology. All it takes is a sense of one’s own moral superiority for being on the right side; a theory that purports to explain everything; and -- this is crucial -- a principled refusal to see things from the point of view of one’s opponents or victims, lest one be tainted by their evil viewpoint.

If we remember that totalitarians and terrorists think of themselves as warriors for justice, we can appreciate how good people can join them.

Ideologies have consequences. The consequences of atheism are absolutely ruinous:

Bolshevik ethics explicitly began and ended with atheism. Only someone who rejected all religious or quasi-religious morals could be a Bolshevik because, as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and other Bolshevik leaders insisted, the only standard of right and wrong was success for the Party.

The bourgeoisie falsely claim we have no ethics, Lenin explained.... But what we reject is any ethics based on God’s commandments or anything resembling them, such as abstract principles, timeless values, universal human rights, or any tenet of philosophical idealism. For a true materialist, Lenin maintained, there can be no Kantian categorical imperative to regard others only as ends, not as means.

Each of our lives is a narrative, a story. Indeed, how could human life even be conceived if not as an unfolding drama? But what is the drama about? Does it point to a telos beyond itself, or is it only about the past -- about our past adaptations to this or that contingent environment? Can it really be about nothing other than selfish genes, or class warfare, or the elimination of people with white privilege?

Kopelev, Solzhenitsyn, and others describe the key event of their life as the discovery that just as the universe contains causal laws it also contains moral laws. Bolshevik horror derived from the opposite view: that there is nothing inexplicable in materialist terms and that the only moral standard is political success.

To be continued...

In the Meantime...

I commend this essay to readers: How the Great Truth Dawned, by Gary Saul Morson. It is surprisingly relevant to the Current Project in a number of ways, beginning with the importance of narrative as vehicle for truth:

Novels of ideas... exhibit a masterplot: a hero or heroine devoted to an idea discovers that reality is much more complex than the idea allows.

For example, a materialist believes that love is nothing but physiology and that individual people differ no more than frogs, yet he falls deeply in love with a particular woman (the plot of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children). A moralist asserts that only actions, not wishes, have moral value, yet winds up consumed by guilt for a murder he has fostered only by his wish for it (the plot of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov)....

As mentioned in the previous post, our Current Project involves the reconciliation of evolutionary and Thomistic psychologies -- where they converge, where they diverge, and where only one can possibly walk out alive. This cosmos -- no cosmos -- is big enough for two ultimate truths.

If I were a novelist, perhaps I'd write a story of a strict sociobiologist who insists that love is nothing but a deception of the genes to trick us into reproducing, yet falls deeply in love with a particular woman. Only then does he discover a reality that transcends his little ideology, and that frogs and persons aren't of equal value and significance.

On an even deeper level, I wonder if the biblical narrative -- the arc of salvation that spans from creation to the beatific vision -- isn't a bug but a feature? In other words, this metastory not only must be told in history, but with history. What if history is made of truth -- the truth of fall and redemption?

I have a note to myself: consequences of Darwinism. Suffice it to say that no Darwinist actually thinks and lives the consequences of his ideology. Indeed, if he takes them seriously, he could under no circumstances take them seriously, because they abolish the very possibility of knowing truth. Only a sociopath could be an intellectually and morally consistent Darwinian.

Volodin recalls Epicurus’s words: “Our inner feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction are the highest criteria of good and evil,” and only now does he understand them. “Now it was clear: Whatever gives me pleasure is good; what displeases me is bad. Stalin, for instance, enjoyed killing people -- so that, for him, was good?”

How wise such philosophy seems to a free person! But for Volodin, good and evil are now distinct entities. “His struggle and suffering had raised him to a height from which the great materialist’s wisdom seemed like the prattle of a child.”

Similarly, compared to St. Thomas, the wisdom of evolutionary psychology seems like the prattle of a child.

Solzhenitsyn explains: “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.... it is in the nature of a human being to seek a justification for his actions.”

Here again, a strict Darwinian can never speak of natural law or of a transcendent human nature.

Why is it, Solzhenitsyn asks, that Macbeth, Iago, and other Shakespearean evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses, while Lenin and Stalin did in millions? The answer is that Macbeth and Iago “had no ideology.” Ideology makes the killer and torturer an agent of good, “so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.” Ideology never achieved such power and scale before the twentieth century.

How does the ideology of Darwinism explain this? More to the point, from the perspective of Darwinism, on what basis can we say that Stalin and his ideology are evil?

Anyone can succumb to ideology. All it takes is a sense of one’s own moral superiority for being on the right side; a theory that purports to explain everything; and -- this is crucial -- a principled refusal to see things from the point of view of one’s opponents or victims, lest one be tainted by their evil viewpoint.

If we remember that totalitarians and terrorists think of themselves as warriors for justice, we can appreciate how good people can join them.

Ideologies have consequences. The consequences of atheism are absolutely ruinous:

Bolshevik ethics explicitly began and ended with atheism. Only someone who rejected all religious or quasi-religious morals could be a Bolshevik because, as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and other Bolshevik leaders insisted, the only standard of right and wrong was success for the Party.

The bourgeoisie falsely claim we have no ethics, Lenin explained.... But what we reject is any ethics based on God’s commandments or anything resembling them, such as abstract principles, timeless values, universal human rights, or any tenet of philosophical idealism. For a true materialist, Lenin maintained, there can be no Kantian categorical imperative to regard others only as ends, not as means.

Each of our lives is a narrative, a story. Indeed, how could human life even be conceived if not as an unfolding drama? But what is the drama about? Does it point to a telos beyond itself, or is it only about the past -- about our past adaptations to this or that contingent environment? Can it really be about nothing other than selfish genes, or class warfare, or the elimination of people with white privilege?

Kopelev, Solzhenitsyn, and others describe the key event of their life as the discovery that just as the universe contains causal laws it also contains moral laws. Bolshevik horror derived from the opposite view: that there is nothing inexplicable in materialist terms and that the only moral standard is political success.

To be continued...

Project 2 + 2 = 5

Just for metaphysical kicks & giggles, I'm reading two books that represent opposite sides of the spectrum, after which I will try to reconcile them and thereby fashion a daring jailbreak from a supposedly inescapable, ultra-postmodern ideological prison surrounded by impenetrable and crock-solid walls of pure nothingness!

The first is the unwieldy and dryasdust Introduction to the Science of Mental Health, which exhaustively and exhaustingly lays out the Christian/Thomistic view of our predicament. I'm about halfway through with that one. It's somewhat slow-going, like reading a medication insert that goes on forever.

The second is called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. I'm only 20 pages into this one, which comes at it -- or us, rather -- from a strictly evolutionary standpoint.

Now, both of these can't be true. And yet, let's assume they are. How can this be? We can't simultaneously have a universal human nature if what we call "human nature" is just a contingent adaptation to everchanging environmental circumstances. Can we?

The challenge is in figuring out how both perspectives can possibly be true. Of course, there are levels of truth, so that's one way to pull it off. Still, we want details: how exactly can contradictory truths be true on a deeper or higher level?

So, that's what we're working on at the moment, and I first have to get further into the books before putting them into the cosmic blender. And as usual, I have other responsibilities gumming up the works, including my dreaded semiannual continuing education requirements and the upcoming MLB playoffs.

Therefore, if things are a bit slow around here, that's my excuse. I'll leave off with a few aphorisms which may point the way upward and provide a bit of preluminary light for the journey:

Two contradictory philosophical theses complete each other, but only God knows how.

Every truth is a tension between contradictory evidences that claim our simultaneous allegiance.

Truths do not contradict each other except when they get out of order.

It is not the false idea that is the dangerous one, but the partially correct one.

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

There are sciences that can be taught and others we can only learn. Natural sciences, social sciences.

Whoever appeals to any science in order to justify his basic convictions inspires distrust of his honesty or his intelligence

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

Without philosophy, the sciences do not know what they know.

The Christian who is disturbed by the “results” of science does not know what Christianity is or what science is.

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book (Dávila).

Project 2 + 2 = 5

Just for metaphysical kicks & giggles, I'm reading two books that represent opposite sides of the spectrum, after which I will try to reconcile them and thereby fashion a daring jailbreak from a supposedly inescapable, ultra-postmodern ideological prison surrounded by impenetrable and crock-solid walls of pure nothingness!

The first is the unwieldy and dryasdust Introduction to the Science of Mental Health, which exhaustively and exhaustingly lays out the Christian/Thomistic view of our predicament. I'm about halfway through with that one. It's somewhat slow-going, like reading a medication insert that goes on forever.

The second is called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. I'm only 20 pages into this one, which comes at it -- or us, rather -- from a strictly evolutionary standpoint.

Now, both of these can't be true. And yet, let's assume they are. How can this be? We can't simultaneously have a universal human nature if what we call "human nature" is just a contingent adaptation to everchanging environmental circumstances. Can we?

The challenge is in figuring out how both perspectives can possibly be true. Of course, there are levels of truth, so that's one way to pull it off. Still, we want details: how exactly can contradictory truths be true on a deeper or higher level?

So, that's what we're working on at the moment, and I first have to get further into the books before putting them into the cosmic blender. And as usual, I have other responsibilities gumming up the works, including my dreaded semiannual continuing education requirements and the upcoming MLB playoffs.

Therefore, if things are a bit slow around here, that's my excuse. I'll leave off with a few aphorisms which may point the way upward and provide a bit of preluminary light for the journey:

Two contradictory philosophical theses complete each other, but only God knows how.

Every truth is a tension between contradictory evidences that claim our simultaneous allegiance.

Truths do not contradict each other except when they get out of order.

It is not the false idea that is the dangerous one, but the partially correct one.

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

There are sciences that can be taught and others we can only learn. Natural sciences, social sciences.

Whoever appeals to any science in order to justify his basic convictions inspires distrust of his honesty or his intelligence

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

Without philosophy, the sciences do not know what they know.

The Christian who is disturbed by the “results” of science does not know what Christianity is or what science is.

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book (Dávila).