Contra Constructivism

“Only an atheist

 need fear infinity.”

Note:   In this place,

 http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/11/ask-dr-massey.html

an unafraid theologian presents an Orthodox account of the doctrine of absolution and the remission of sins,  conscientiously noting  along the way  a possible mathematical objection to the Church’s handling of infinity in this connection, which he is not personally qualified to resolve.

Fortunately, I was able to reply in complete reassurance on this point:  the Church doctrine is fully consonant with set-theory in its post-Cantorian understanding.

For more:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/infinity

Aus dem Nachlass

[Any one of us  might die tonight;  none knoweth when his soul might be required.

And when I expire, should any glance into my drawers, they shall find

many upon many

unfinished thoughts and fragments.

Here, just a sample.

Should I survive, I might flesh it out.]

Chesterton’s “The Wrong Shape”;  but this I shall defend:

the wisdom of the Yin-Yang symbol -- that dot of white  within the swirling black tadpole; that patch of black, within its mirror counterpart….

The Ball and the Cross -- each needs the other.  The Cross, said Chesterton, needs the round earth whereon to stand.  And the great globe needs the cross, …

The honorable atheist, straightforwardly depicted in the autobiography of  CSL.

Yet, more dialectical in the fiction of GKC.

The atheist in this fantasia, respects -- in oppostion - that which he so strenuously denies.

Not outlined, but, by duality, implied -- the theist as well needs the atheist.

-- I don’t want to say more on these lines, lest I turn into some fatuous Frenchman flatulating-out bogus profundities;  but leave this little seed, to work in your imaginations ….

Varieties of Religious Indifference

Here we address no matters of faith, but merely clarify the philosophical terminology.  This is not theology;  this is lexicography.

Theism:   Behind or beyond or standing over the real world (both visible and invisible), there stands a larger pattern, one facet of which we could recognize as a consciousness.

If nothing is added to this minimal stipulation -- especially, if any such additions are denied -- such theism is known as Deism.   As more is added, you get the Abrahamic faiths.  (The distinction between Deism and full Theism is important to, say, Christianity, but not to philosophy as such.)

Atheism:  the denial of this.

Distinguished from this last, by those who are careful with words, is:

Agnosticism:  a wait-and-see stance.

These are the traditional termini;  yet, for the modern panoply of unbelief, more terms are needs;  which, as a licensced wordsmith, we duly coin. 

Thus, Stephen Schwartz, discussing the celebrated English serial-divorcé A.J. Ayer (he also played a philosopher on TV) writes (A Brief Introduction to Analytic Philosophy, 2012, p. 63):

Ayer insisted that he was not an atheist, because an atheist denies the existence of God, which of course Ayer claimed  was just as meaningless as asserting the existence of God.

This (philosophically sophomoric) position we may dub Ontological A-Theism, or (in a snappy style  suitable for headlines) Ayerism.

And here, you may aver, our spade is turned;  the bottom of the barrel has been sounded.

But alas:  there exists a sub-level, even below this -- lower than the paltering of Ayerism (which was fashionably in line with dismissing centuries or rather millennia of human enquiry as philosophically “meaningless”), there is the kind of mind that does not even realize that there is anything to be asserted or denied or artfully dodged.  Traditional terms for this are Indifferentism or  Adiaphorism (which latter word will set you back a fittybone).  But for a more contemporaneously accessible designation, we might dub this  WalMartism:  the attitude of those whose inquisitive spirit  rises no higher  than to wonder what is on sale at the Mall.

Left-handed compliment

Never having been an Anglican, and now less than ever contemplating becoming one, it is not my place to comment on internal Church politics.  But this comment from a reader of the New York Times, upon the occasion of the retirement of ABC Williams, did catch the attention:

As an atheist, I believe that Rowan Williams did an outstanding job to bring his church into the 21 century.

Hard to argue with that.

Florilegium from Sunday’s walk

Have ever you felt what the wind feels,

or seen what the Sun sees?

You too can do it :::   this bright;  this breeze.

~

Like little girls at ballet class,

the buds are blushing, hushing,

for one of them -- just one -- has blossomed:

and O, what a bloom !     !

~

An Athenian jury of daffodils, dozens of them,

massed en banc, all facing the same way,

intently attentive to the evidence presented.

“We have reached our verdict,”

the foreflower says.

“There is some thing Good, above the gods.”

~

Sun on the tips  of the trees and the waters,

ducks fall in love on the peace of the pond.

Butterflies busily  tend to the blossoms,

as the perching birds  burst   into song.

The walkways are littered with weeping atheists,

bitterly regretting their wasted lives.

For the truth of Spring, and geese, and Resurrection,

blooms now before their very eyes.

The Honorable Atheist (II)

Relativism gets a very bad press from most moral philosophers.  The ‘freshman relativist’ is a nightmare figure of introductory classes in ethics, rather like the village atheist (but what’s so good about village theism?)

-- Simon Blackburn, Being Good (2001), p. 19

Both Chesterton and C. S. Lewis knew the value of the honorable atheist -- nay, valued him beyond what even his fellow unbelievers might offer, since both of them saw both the inflexible rectitude…. and the immortal soul.  We likewise have honored him  here.

Re-reading Blackburn’s delightful treatise on ethics -- epigram after epigram (as above), yet deep to boot -- we were reminded of Chesterton’s outstanding story “The Hammer of God”, in which both the village atheist, and the village Puritan, get their due.  (Spoiler alert:  Neither one of them was the murderer.)   My sage advice to you young folks (meaning:  everyone under eighty) is to drop whatever it is you are doing and read that wonderful bit of detective fiction, featuring that noted clerical shamus, Father Brown.

Omigosh I was wrong !!

Turns out there isn’t any God after all !  It’s all in the genes!

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-thompson-atheism-20110718,0,5682260.story

Is my face red !   And I am so-o-o sorry  for having made fun of wonderful atheists.  ( … *sniffle*  * sob * … )

-- Well, still, a relief; enough with the morality already.  Think I’ll go out now and pillage some villages.

This genetic approach is immensely powerful:  you can pretty much prove anything you like.   You find some vague and metaphorical feature which, in your own mind, you casually associate with X; you extend  -- s-t-r-e-e-e-e-t-ch -- the metaphor to apply to some gene or other;  and voilà !  X is meaningless, merely genetic!  Blahblah hoc, ergo propter hoc ! (That last is a scientific principle -- and Latin to boot; above your pay-grade; don’t bother your pretty little heads.)

Thus:  We are hard-wired, to recognize shapes, and solid objects.  This is the genetic source of the absurd folk-belief in the existence of penguins, definitively refuted here.  The toddler is programmed to be bemused by his fæces;  hence our fascination with Donald Trump.

Free will?  A sense of purpose?  The existence of other minds?  -- Heck, all that nonsense is handled by junk DNA.

And as for your pitiable belief in the abstract fol-de-rol of the Urysohn Metrization Theorem   (ha !  ha !! ha !!!  laugh the Nominalists:  the “Urysohn”  “”Metrization”” “””Theeeeorem””” !!!!!!),  it has been decisively mulched by modern genetic theory, here.

“A Committed Atheist”

In an earlier essay, we mentioned, in passing, the description of Hugh Everett (perpetrator of the “Many-Worlds” extension of quantum theory)  as “a committed atheist”.   It suddenly struck me what an odd phrase that is.

We can certainly understand someone being an atheist, just as we can understand how someone might be a divorce lawyer, cosmetic surgeon, bank robber or what have you.   But --- “a committed atheist”?  What does that even mean?  Presumably not “committed” as in “he has been committed” (i.e., to an asylum) -- mere atheism doesn’t get you that, though prolonged exposure to the madness of “Many-Worlds” just might.

Generally a “commitment” to something refers to something tough, that you stick with against the odds.  Like, a commitment to marriage, or parenthood -- for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, through thick and through thin.   But even there, you don’t idiomatically use the adjective -- you don’t usually say “a committed husband” (though you might say “a devoted husband”).  Nor, come to think of it, do you say “a committed astronaut” (though that profession certainly requires major commitments of several sorts), “a committed Senator”, “a committed novelist”, or… much of anything, really.  

Still, nihil humani etc.; and so, in solidarity with my atheist brothers and sisters, I shall now attempt to empathize with what it must be like to be “a committed atheist”, bearing the cross -- well, the Gucci bag -- they must have to bear.

*

The stroke of noon.  An alarm clock rings shrilly, and Everett slaps it down with his hairy palm, pries open his smut-sticky eyelids, and groans.   He staggers to the window, and draws the blinds.

OH NOES !!  The splendor of the Creation stares him in the face.  He staggers back, shielding his eyes with a beefy forearm.  He hastily shuts the blinds, and flips on the bigscreen TV to “Bowling for Dollars”.  A flood of atheistic sentiments rushes into his arteries, and he sinks back into the Lay-Z-Boy with a sigh.

He gives a grim little smile of satisfaction at how he had just managed to foil the wiles of the Big Guy with his own Free Will, his own … uh-oh.  Free… -- Feverishly he hits the channel-changer and is rewarded by the splendid silver head of the Great One, none other than The Donald al-Trump himself.   The thick liquor of atheism purls through his veins, like enriched goat-sperm.   A deeper sigh -- his body feels as good as if he’d just jerked off.

But alas -- it’s a workday, and so he hastens out the front door and (squinting his eyes against the radiant appeal of the sun and the sky and the birds in their nests all warbling in praise of Him), sets his SUV in motion and is soon at the casino, where he works as a pimp.   Yet no sooner does he step outside the tinted windows of his heavily armored vehicle than -- Behold, -- in the East -- like, like a kind of shining, like

=> like shining from shook foil  <=   …

Truly, it’s a tough row to hoe.

(Those who feel their atheist faith wavering  can restore their unbelief here.)

Vicarious

The current issue of the New York Review of Books  has a couple of especially fine reviews.

(1)   He reads it so you don’t have to

One of the very best books I have read, and re-read, concerning the life of faith, is Bare Ruined Choirs, by Gary Wills.   He is best known for historical and political writing,  but always this foundation lies at the back of it.

Here he lays bare  the shallows into which atheism wades:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/07/superficial-sublime/

(2)  She watches it so we don’t have to

There is perhaps nothing on this planet -- nothing inside the Oort cloud -- that could interest me less than some TV special starring Sarah Palin.  On the other hand, there is no keener analytic mind than that of Janet Malcolm:   if she puts her byline to something, it is worth a read, however unlikely the subject.   This proves true once again:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/07/special-needs/

This, merely by way of illustrating, that, given the right craftsman, you can indeed make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

A Proof of God’s Point-lessness (Not)

 Stephen Hawking, in A Brief History of Time (1988; 2^nd edn. 1996) p. 146, attempts to wave away the otherwise lurking Big-Bang singularity  by an appeal to Heisenberg Uncertainty.  Well, fine;  actually the whole enterprise of physics around that moment strikes me as eminently Uncertain -- but fine;  passe encore.  Instead of a pointy sugar-cone, you have one of those paper cones with a rounded bottom.  Fine.

Only -- from this he leaps to:

If the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end:  it would simply be.  What place, then, for a creator?

“Simply be”:  as though that were self-explanatory.   -- On the contrary:  philosophical-theological wonder has focussed on, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?”, and in no way on “Yipes!  There’s a singularity!  Ergo God!”

If Hawking is an atheist, fine, no problem.  What is bothersome is rather the chance that an ignorant and mesmerized public might fancy that, with such pronouncements from a media star, he has brought some startling new scientific insight into play, that would make Aquinas slap his forehead and say “Oops, you win!  K sry -- my-bad.  No God after all.”

(For an alternate proof of the non-existence of God, click here.)

A Proof of the Non-Existence of God

The Catholic Church was for centuries distinguished by the devotion of its Schoolmen to logic, developed along Aristotelian lines.  Among their efforts, not especially successful, were purported Ontological Arguments for the existence of God.  But to be fair, atheists too have been given the divine gift of Reason.  Now,  I have just discovered an ingenious proof of God’s non-existence, which we may dub the Proctological Argument.  And since, to my knowledge, no-one has yet published it, at least not in so perspicuous a form, we do so here.

Premise.   I am the Center of the Universe, the fons existentiae, Lord and Master of all I survey.

Lemma.  Ergo,  any Deity worth his salt  would cater to my every need instantly.

Fact.  Yet I feel blue/ my hamster died/ etc.

Conclusion.  There is no God.

The syllogism above is perfectly valid -- given its premise.   Such, one suspects, is the logical understructure beneath many of the cogitations of our fellows, though seldom expressed with such dazzling clarity.