"Tolers, You Absolutely Astonish Me"

Lewis and Tolkien Debate Myths and Lies

On Twitter, @TonyReinke points out that “On the evening of September 19, 1931, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis went for a walk, one of the most important walks in church history.”

At this stage, Lewis was not a Christian; Tolkien was.  Shortly after this conversation, Lewis became a Christian, being “surprised by joy”, as he put it. There are sketchy accounts of the conversation–some from Lewis himself.  Tolkien wrote Lewis a poem to make his points more clear, entitled Mythopoeia.

After that late-night conversation with Lewis, Tolkien wrote a poem called Mythopoeia, in which he set out his views of myth, legend, and fairy story.  he wrote this poem for Lewis, and he put at the head of his poem the words that Lewis had used: “For one who said that myths ‘are lies breathed through silver”.

The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him.  Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost or wholly changed.
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned . . . . 

[Jerram Barrs, Echoes of Eden: Reflections on Christianity, Literature, and the Arts. (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2013.)   p.94f.]

Here’s a dramatic reenactment of their conversation, which attempts to capture the issues if not the exact conversation itself:

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor.

Books

Echoes of Eden

In his recent book, Echoes of Eden, Jerram Barrs [Echoes of Eden: Reflections on Christianity, Literature and the Arts (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2013)]  has a series of chapters on literature and the arts in general and then turns to some exemplars which exemplify his general theme.  Barrs argues that all art worthy of the designation reflects what he calls “echoes of Eden” in one way, shape or form. 

To make reference to Eden is to introduce the great underlying themes of all stories: the innate goodness of the creation in its original perfection, the brokenness of nature and of man which we experience daily, and the longing for redemption and deliverance.  In the latter portion of the book, Barrs turns to some examples or case studies of his theme: namely, Lewis, Tolkien, J K Rowling, Shakespeare and Jane Austen. 

The chapter on Tolkien alone is worth the price of the book.  Tolkien understood that myths are powerful in a culture because they inevitably sustain memories of God.
  Myths–that is, stories which pass down through generations–echo Eden.  He

saw them as containing memories of the truth about God, about the origin and desiny of our world, about the battle against supernatural evil that characterizes every age, and about the hope for redemption through God’s intervention in human history.  Myths hold within them the treasure of echoes of Eden.  Myths and fairy stories are vessels containing truth–and the gospel itself is the greatest of these.  (Op cit, p. 107)

In his elaborate and extensive history of Middle Earth, Tolkien set his stories in a time prior to the coming of Christ into the world.  He always denied his work was allegory–it clearly is not.  But he did describe it as myth.  He lamented the fact that the British had no myths any longer.  They had expunged the mythical stories of their past which were vessels carrying intergenerational truth about God, the creation, man, the Fall, and redemption.  He set out to produce a new mythical story, using the ancient poem, Beowulf as his inspiration which would recapture these truths and infuse them again into our modern culture.  In the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings,

just as in Beowulf, there will be no explicitly Christian story or message, but there will be hints, hope, courage, heroism, love, and self-sacrifice in the fight against evil that characterizes the whole of our age.  (Ibid., p.106.)

The question is, How successful has he been?  Did he achieve his objectives.  It is too early to tell, but the early signs are quite encouraging.  As is so often the case, Tolkien repeatedly tried and failed to get The Rings published.  It was too long, too detailed, too “unreal”, etc.  Thankfully it eventually made its way into print.  No-one could foresee how barren and empty a world relentless materialism would wreak.  Consequently few could have predicted how hungry the modern world would become for myth, for echoes of Eden.  Jerram Barrs asks,

So why do people enjoy these books so much?  Why are books published in the 1950’s creating such a stir today?  Even before the release of the movies there were more than fifty million copies of  The Lord of the Rings in print.  Today, after the huge success of the movies, even the publishers are hesitant to give figures for the overall sales of The Lord of the Rings. Besides the various editions of the book in English, there are translations into many languages. . . . (A)t the turn of the millennium Tolkien was declared the author of the century.  He won this hands down over James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, the authors that the scholars and critics doing the poll, wanted to win; in fact the pollsters were so unhappy that Tolkien won easily, they did their poll a second time hoping for a different result, but to no avail.  In a poll conducted by BBC television The Lord of the Rings was voted the best-loved book of the British people. (Ibid, p. 113.)

Barr puts this success down to the quality of the story itself; to the beauty of the writing; to the depth, complexity and realism of the central characters; and to the realism of Middle Earth itself where almost everything has a long lineage and historical depth and complex authenticity (people after all today communicate and correspond in Tolkien’s invented languages, Quenya and Sindarin).  But above all the popularity of the work rests upon, its mythical character, the echoes of Eden found therein, which have drawn a desperately empty people, living in a bleak and barren and voided land. 

It is certainly true that the books are influenced greatly by Germanic and Norse myths and sagas.  But they are much more deeply influenced by a Christian account of the world.  The stories reflect the Bible’s account of creation, the fall of humanity due to rebellion against God, and the redemption that God will accomplish.  (Ibid., p.117.)

It is for this very reason that some writers have expressed not just a disdain of Tolkien (and Lewis) but hatred.  One, Phillip Pullman, himself a fantasy writer, has said that he is fed up with the Christian impact of Tolkien and Lewis.

Other passionate humanists have said they hate Tolkien and Lewis, whom they see as “riding in on a white horse,” trying to rescue civilization by turning people back to the Christian faith.  (Ibid.)

The Lord of the Rings is not Scripture.  It cannot substitute for the Word of God, by which we are born again and brought to new life.  Tolkien would have abhorred such a notion.  But in a culture which is rapidly  integrating into the void such literature serves a powerful purpose.  It can capture the hearts of people making them long once again for another world, where those who believe that might makes right are defeated and broken by those who believe in honesty, loyalty, oaths and vows, integrity, courage, and righteousness.  Such works of literature so powerfully echo Eden, they can awaken again  a general longing for a Redeemer. 

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, as the works of the Evil One become more manifest, such literary works can prepare hearts, can unclog ears, to long to hear the declaration of Him who says, “I am the Light of the World.”

How Nonsense Became Received Wisdom

The Flat Earth Society Has Nothing on This

When the previous century began, optimism was in the air.  Mankind could finally control its own destiny.  Man could be progressively perfected and Paradise would break forth.  All of his problems could be solved by correcting external influences.  Evil and sin would be progressively removed by enlightened policies of social and human re-tooling.

The first change agent off the rank was Socialism.  If wealth were redistributed and the poor were given other people’s money virtually every social problem would disappear immediately.  The second cab was science.  The more technological advances made, the more disease would be conquered; the more Nature exploited, the more  resources to distribute.

These hopes proceeded on the belief that the Christian doctrines of Original Sin and human depravity were ignorant superstitions of a dark past.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Seven Memes for Keeping Christians in their Place

Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Among other things, a meme is a little bit of a verbal virus that gets passed around in a culture, like the common cold. After it gets passed around enough, people start to think it is the received wisdom. That said, here are seven memes that are common in our culture, and which have been used mightily to keep Christians in their place. Or, to return to the virus metaphor, to hamper the ethos of Christians in public debate by ensuring that they always have the sniffles and red noses.

After each meme, I have included the briefest of replies to each, all while expressing the desire that somebody would write a book on all these.

1. The Crusades were totally uncalled for.
The Crusades were actually a long overdue defensive reaction to many years of Muslim belligerence, militarism, agressiveness, and provocation. If a “crusade” is an unprovoked military attack on religious grounds, then we need to start speaking of the Muslim Crusades. One could, however, criticize Christian Europe for being so slow to respond.

2. The battle between Galileo and the Church was a battle between science and faith.
The actual lesson of the Galileo debacle is that when the Church uncritically accepts the “best science of the day,” as they did with Aristotelian philosophy, and as many are doing today with evolutionary thought, the results are disastrous. That battle was not between faith and science, but rather between the old science and the new science, with many adherents of the old science doing their best to illustrate Max Planck’s dictum — “science advances funeral by funeral.”

3. The Salem Witch Trials were an example of typical Puritan intolerance.
Aktcherly, what went down was this. The charter for Massachusetts expired, and so they had no legal government. The colony sent somebody back to England to get the charter renewed. While he was gone away, the witch hysteria broke out in Salem, and the rest of the colony had no legal means to suppress it. When the emissary returned and legal government was restored, the colony acted, with the support of the Puritan ministers throughout the colony. But by then, the damage was done and Puritans everywhere were tagged with a guilt that they had conscientiously opposed.

4. The rise of the secular Enlightenment saved us all from endless religious bloodletting.
Since secularism took over from the bad old religious bigots who used to kill scores and scores of people, we have since that time had a long millennium of sunshine and glittery rainbows, in which only scores of millions of people have been slaughtered. We celebrate this deliverance and bow our heads in gratitude.

5. Darwinian evolution is the Truth.
Darwinian evolution is actually the funniest thing I ever heard of. It is so dumb that the average Christian needs at least three years of graduate study from white-haired profs to get adjusted to it.

6. Biblical faith stifles and deadens the aesthetic soul.
I will not say much here, except to note that I do not believe that the builders of Salisbury Cathedral, the composer of the Brandenburg concertos, the painter of The Night Watch, or the writer of Paradise Lost, have anything to apologize for in the thin shade of Kanye West, John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Walter Gropius, or Barry Manilow.

7. America was a secular nation in its founding.
Our Constitution was established in the year of our Lord, 1789. We were one of the last nations of the first Christendom to be founded, and we have had our share of scamps and hypocrites (which is actually a prerequisite for even being a nation of Christendom), but at the same time, we were truly founded as a Christian republic. We are in the grip of apostasy fever now, but we weren’t then. To go along with a lie about our founding is to capitulate to a lie about our current apostastic monkeyshines. And we should all resolve to learn more about what those are.

>The Myth of the Dark Ages, Part II

>Rational Exuberance

OK, so the Dark Ages in Medieval Europe did not actually exist. It was a mythical concoction to further a broader ideological cause–to wit, that the Christian faith represents superstitious ignorance. It was a myth to promulgate the religious cause of Unbelief.

But the question is begged–was there any causal connection between the Christianising of Europe from the fourth century AD onwards and the economic and technological progress of Europe at the same time? Rodney Stark argues that there is a causal connection. The Christian faith provided the cultural, intellectual, and social climate that indirectly produced the economic advancement of Europe.

There were, he argues, a number of Christian doctrines which indirectly resulted in technological, scientific, and economic advances. The first turns upon the doctrine of man. Christian doctrine professes the fundamental equality of all men (males, females, and children). All are equally created in God’s image. But equally, and more immediately relevant, the Kingdom of Christ–the realm established by the Saviour of the world–equally redeems male and female, slave and free, rich and poor, “our people” and barbarians, adult and child. All are saved by Christ and made part of His body, the Church. This indirectly meant the death blow to slavery and the oppression of others.

We say indirectly. This is important. The Kingdom of God reconstructs society from the inside out; it does not first tear it down to begin all over again. In fact, our Lord explicitly forbids any revolutionary attempt to “make things right” by force, or instantaneous actions. This is the point of the Parable of the Tares. The uprooting of the tares–getting things cleaned up by apocalyptic action–will damage the wheat. (Matthew 13: 24-30) Rather the Kingdom of God acts like leaven. The truth of the Gospel insinuates itself gradually into human life and society, transforming it from the inside out.

The Christian faith, then, established the fundamental equality of all human beings before God. What God has created and accepted, let not man despise is the upshot. It also established the concept of the “self”. We say, “established” since, of course this was profoundly revealed in the the Word’s Older Testament–witnessed so powerfully in the Psalms, for example–but in Christ these things were unequivocally established for the entire world.

In political theory this meant that Christianity led theorists to focus upon individuals as much as they focused upon the state or the corporation. Stark writes:

Even the Greek philosophers had no concept quite equivalent to our notion of the “person”. Thus, when Plato was writing the Republic, his focus was on the polis, on the city, not on its citizens–indeed, he even denounced private property. In contrast, it is the individual citizen who was the focus of Christian political thought, and this, in turn, explicitly shaped the views of later European political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke. http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0812972333&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrThis was, quite literally, revolutionary stuff, for the Christian stress on individualism is “an eccentricity among cultures.” Freedom is another concept that simply doesn’t exist in many, perhaps most, human cultures–thee isn’t even a word fro freedom in most non-European languages.” Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason, p.23f

One of the upshots was a growing cultural conviction that to be and do what he ought before both God and man. This establishes a vital pre-condition for economic, intellectual, and technological advances.

A second major leavening influence was the Christian idea of progress. Human civilisation was moving toward a glorious end, when not only would all nations become Christian, but the entire creation itself would be freed from groaning under the consequences of Adam’s sin. Augustine, for example, joyfully and exuberantly celebrated the glories of the creation which God had appointed man to discover, exploit, enhance, and enjoy.

Augustine celebrated not only theological progress, but earthly, material progress as well. Writing early in the fifth century, he exclaimed: “has not the genius of man invented and applied countless astonishing arts, partly the result of necessity, partly the result of exuberant invention, so that this vigour of mind . . . betokens an inexhaustible wealth in the nature which can invent, learn, or employ such arts.

What wonderful–one might say stupefying–advances has human industry made in the arts of weaving and building, of agriculture and navigation!” He went on to admire the “skill [that] has been attained in measures and numbers! With what sagacity have the movements and connections of the stars been discovered!” And all of this was due to the “unspeakable boon” that God conferred upon his creation–a “rational nature.” Ibid, p.9f

This world was a wonderful garden in which man could romp around, enjoy, and think God’s thoughts after Him. And every time he did, he enjoyed greater blessings and felicity. The boon was palpable and tangible.

Lastly, but certainly not least, the Christian faith brought the law of God to Europe.  This law established the importance of family, of familial relations, so that the individual self was always integrated into familial structures.  It also established the importance of church and public worship.  Society, therefore, had orders and structures for the blessing of man, the individual.  It also established the state–and the functions and limits of the state.  Absolutist doctrines, such as the Divine Right of Kings were heretical aberrations and could never survive in a Christian culture.  And it established the rights and protections of property.  Finally, it established the fundamental importance of truth telling in all of life.

The Law of God provided the necessary conditions for intellectual progress and economic and technological advance. 

Europe would not have been without its Christian foundations and infrastructure. 

>The Myth of the "Dark Ages"

>Tricks the Dead Have Played Upon the Living

Rodney Stark has written extensively on the myth of a Dark Ages in Europe. Whilst his explosion of the myth should be of interest to all historians of the West, it is of particular interest to Christians because of the widespread hypothesis that the Dark Ages existed due to the influence of Christianity in Europe, which  ignorance and superstition throughout the Continent. The sub-thesis is that since Christianity is a religion of superstition and ignorance were it to become culturally dominant again, a new Dark Ages would descend upon the land.

This hypothesis and its sub-theses were advanced successfully by the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Voltaire, of course, had observed that “history is a trick the living play upon the dead”; he was in no doubt that “meaningful” history existed only as a useful tool to illustrate selectively his preferred narrative of the times. In his day, the preferred narrative was to assert that human reason was sovereign over superstition, and that the Christian religion was primarily a superstition that held the unenlightened in thrall. Thus, Enlightenment propagandists glorified the ages of Greece and Rome and denigrated the age of Christian ascendency in the West.

Voltaire (1694-1778) claimed that after Rome fell, “barbarism, superstition, [and] ignorance covered the face of the world.” According to Rousseau (1712-1778), “Europe had relapsed into the barbarism of the earliest ages. The people in this part of the world . . . lived some centuries ago in a condition worse than ignorance.” Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) also pronounced this era as the “triumph of barbarism and religion”.
Rodney Stark, God’s Battalions, p.65http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0061582603&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

For three centuries this has been the received wisdom of the matter in the West. Most twentieth century historians simply accepted this narrative, or “trick played upon the dead” as true. Like the narrative of evolutionism, one had to espouse it in order to be respected in the academy. Here, for example, is Daniel J. Boorstin, Librarian of Congress, writing in 1983, claiming that the Dark Ages began before the fall of Rome–sometime around the emergence of the Christian gospel. As it grew and expanded, so did a pervasive ignorance.

“Christianity conquered the Roman Empire and most of Europe. Then we observe a Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia, which afflicted the continent from A.D. 300 to at least 1300.” This occurred because “the leaders of orthodox Christendom built a grand barrier against the progress of knowledge.” And in the words of the distinguished historian William Manchester (1922-2004), this was an era “of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness . . . . The Dark Ages were stark in every dimension.” Ibid, p.66

Now the myth of the Dark Ages has been exploded in the mind of the academy–at least for the present.

This has become so well known that rejection of the “Dark Ages” as an unfounded myth is now reported in the respected dictionaries and encyclopedias that only a few years previously had accepted and promulgated the same myth. Thus, while earlier editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had identified the five or six centuries after the fall of Rome as the “Dark Ages”, the fifteenth edition, published in 1981, dismissed that as an “unacceptable” term because it incorrectly claims this to have been “a period of intellectual darkness and barbarity.” Ibid, p. 66

To be sure, ignorance and barbarity existed and captured centres of influence and power at times–even as it does in our own age. (We believe that subsequent ages will look back at our own in horror at the ignorance and barbarity, for example, represented in glorifying the murder of children as a woman’s human right. That is about as ignorant and barbaric as one can get.) But always in Medieval Europe the conflict between a Christian-based reasonableness versus ignorance and superstition was going on. Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose is a classic presentation of this conflict and struggle in the later Middle Ages.http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B003L1ZYK6&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Stark summarises some of the magnificent technological and scientific advances during this period:

-The invention of the collar and harness for horses and oxen that enabled the drawing of very heavy wagons, with substantial increases in speed.

-The invention (eighth century) of iron horseshoes that protected the feet of horses but greatly improved their traction in difficult conditions.

-The development of a harness that allowed horses and oxen to be harnessed in seried pairs, rather than abreast (tenth century). In the ninth century the swivel axel was developed that made large transport carts much more manoeuvrable. These transportation advances all served to make Roman roads ineffective, inadequate and obsolete: they had to be picked apart and new roads laid. (The Enlightenment narrative interpreted this breaking down of Roman roads to be an evidence of Dark Age barbarism!)  

-Food production rose dramatically due to the invention of the horse drawn furrow plough, with adjustable cutting and plowing depths, complete with retractable wheels facilitating easy transportation. This enabled a farming revolution in the heavy soils of mid and northern Europe.

-The exploitation of hydraulic energy. Someone in the Middle Ages invented water powered mills; the technology spread rapidly all over Europe. The Domesday Book (1086) reported that there were at least 5,624 water powered mills operating in England–about one for every 54 families. In the thirteenth century it was recorded that along the Seine, in one section about a mile long, there were 78 mills operating–an average of one mill for every seventy feet of river. In the same century, hydraulic powered sawmills were operating–often being driven by water chutes cascading down from purpose built dams. But not just sawmills: hydraulic power was used for turning lathes, griding knives and swords, fulling (pounding) cloth, hammering metal and drawing wire, and pulping rags to make paper.

And on the subject of paper,

Jean Gimpel noted that paper, “which was manufactured by hand and foot for a thousand years or so following its invention by the Chinese and adoption by the Arabs, was manufactured mechanically as soon as it reached medieval Europe in the thirteenth century. . . . Paper had travelled around the world, but no culture or civilization on its route had tried to mechanize its manufacture” until medieval Europeans did so. Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason, p.39.http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0812972333&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

-Wind energy was quickly exploited as well. Windpower was harnessed to mill, grind, and to pump water. Large areas of what are now Belgium and the Netherlands were under sea during Roman times. Advanced medieval technology pumped the water off and began to farm the land.

By late in the twelfth century, Europe was becoming so crowded with windmills that owners began to file lawsuits against one another for blocking their wind. Ibid, p.40.

-One of the most spectacular technological inventions which hugely increased human knowledge and productivity was the eyeglass. They were invented around 1284 in northern Italy and had a dramatic effect upon productivity–something we take for granted today.

Without glasses, large numbers of medieval craft workers were washed up at forty. With glasses, not only could most of these people continue but because of their experience, their most productive years still lay ahead. Not only that but many tasks are greatly facilitated by use of magnifiers, even by persons with fine eyesight. These tasks were often beyond ancient craftspeople. No wonder glasses spread with amazing speed. Within a century after their invention, the mass production of eyeglasses occupied plants in both Florence and Venice, turning out tens of thousands of eyeglasses a year. Ibid, p.44.

-Finally, we could not fail to mention the dependable, mechanical clock–another thirteenth century invention.

Sometime during the thirteenth century, someone somewhere in Europe invented a dependable mechanical clock. Soon, Europe was the only society where people really knew what time it was. As Lewis Mumford remarked, “the clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the industrial age,” because it made possible precise scheduling and coordination of activities. . . . Like eyeglasses, for centuries mechanical clocks existed only in the West. Ibid, p. 44.

Dark Ages, anyone? Not in medieval Christendom, that’s for sure. Yet, to this day, the myth is taught as beyond dispute in most classrooms and pop-history programmes in the West. Voltaire was only half right. History can be not just a trick the living play upon the dead; it can also be a trick the dead play upon the living. Why have the generations descending from the Enlightenment been so gullible in this regard? We believe it has been due to the emergent animus against the Lord Jesus Christ and His Kingdom.

As they say, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

>Rethinking the Crusades, Part III

>Islamic Revisionism

Sociologist cum historian, Rodney Stark deserves the sobriquet “mythbuster”. In his book on the Crusades, God’s Battalions he tilts his lance at some pretty big academic windmills. One is the thesis that whilst Europe was truly the “Dark Ages” during the medieval period, Islamic society was enlightened, intellectual, artistic, technological and proto-scientific. A corollary is that Europe was only delivered from the Dark Ages by the arrival of Islamic learning, via written texts, in Europe.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0061582603&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrStark argues that all of the so-called Arab (then Turkish) advances were actually intellectual property that was present in captured Byzantine, Persian, and European regions. This applies to shipping and maritime technology (largely developed from Christian Coptic knowledge and skills), architecture (the famous and celebrated Dome of the Rock built in Jerusalem employed Byzantine architects and craftsmen–which is why it resembled Eastern Orthodox church architecture); Avicenna–ranked as the most influential Islamic philosopher-scientist–was actually Persian; the leading figures in Islamic medical knowledge were actually Nestorian Christians–and so on. (God’s Battalions, p.58f)

This explains, in part, why Muslim intellectual progress failed to keep up with the West and it degenerated eventually into widespread ignorance.

But what has largely been ignored is that the decline of that culture and the inability of Muslims to keep up with the West occurred because Muslim or Arab culture was largely an illusion resting on a complex mix of dhimmi cultures, and as such, it was easily lost and always vulnerable to being repressed as heretical. Hence, when in the fourteenth century Muslims in the East stamped out nearly all religious nonconformity, Muslim backwardness came to the fore. Ibid, p.61.

One possible exception to this is the early acceptance (via Syrian translations) of the works of Plato and Aristotle amongst the Arabs by the late seventh century. However, rather than actually encourage learning, Plato and Aristotle in Islamic hands actually stifled it. The reason lies in Islamic scholars eventually marrying the Greek philosophers into the straitjacket of Muhammed’s religious monism.

. . . rather than treat these (philosophical) works as attempts by Greek scholars to answer various questions, Muslim intellectuals quickly read them in the same way as they read the Qur’an–as settled truths to be understood without question or contradiction–and thus to the degree that Muslim thinkers analyzed these works, it was to reconcile apparent internal disagreements. Eventually the focus was on Aristotle . . . . Muslim philosophy as it evolved in subsequent centuries merely chose to . . . enlarge on Aristotle rather than to innovate. This eventually led the philosopher Averroes and his followers to impose the position that Aristotle’s physics was complete and infallible, and if actual observations were inconsistent with one of Aristotle’s teachings, those observations were either in error or an illusion.”
Ibid, p. 62.

This may not sound too bad until one realises that Aristotle’s ideas were rarely based upon evidence from observation and experience, but rather developed largely out of his own imagination and conjecture.

Aristotle’s Earth is at the center of a spherical universe, and is immovable. Within the terrestrial or sublunar realm there is continuing change . . . but all such processes are in the long run merely cyclical. There is no genuine transition, evolution, or novelty in the terrestrial realm.
Lynn E. Rose, cited in I. Velikovsky, Mankind In Amnesia (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1982), p. 53f.

This fitted well with the Islamic cosmology; it also locked Islamic scholars into an anti-intellectual, static bind. Thus, in the hands of Islamic scholars, Aristotle became a force for an anti-intellectual, freeze-frame, static, and cyclical world-view.

The narrative of an enlightened Arab age racing ahead of a dying Europe in the thrall of a Dark Age makes for juicy reading. It also served the purposes of Enlightenment historians who wanted to conjoin the Christian religion with ignorant superstition–or, as Voltaire acerbically put it–wanted to play tricks on the dead.

But it is not true–which is why the Crusaders in the late 11th century, and for the next two hundred years, proved to be technologically superior in the theatre of war in the Holy Land–despite overwhelming numerical disadvantage. The Dark Ages had apparently not been so dark after all.

>Worst Scientific Scandal of our Generation

>They Must Not Be Allowed to Get Away With It

Christopher Booker, writing in the Telegraph says that the scientific establishment is now hopelessly compromised. New Zealand is named in the scandal.

Booker makes his case for scandalous behaviour, requiring full accountability, by making three indictments.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious . . . is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal to release the basic data from which the [Climatic Research Unit] CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got “lost”. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide?

The second indictment is:

(T)he leaked documents . . . show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to “adjust” recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the “Harry Read Me” file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the “Harry Read Me” file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

Indeed–the matter is so egregious that in the face of all the assertions and “evidences” of rising global temperatures in the previous century one now has to ask, “How do you know the data is actual data?” Moderate sceptics have adopted the position of agreeing that the evidence points to global warming in the twentieth century, but they remain unconvinced that it is due to the release of CO2. Now, however, there is grounds to doubt whether the earth’s temperatures have increased at all in the twentieth century since the data recording the increases has been so manipulated, adjusted, and messed up.

Third indictment:

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

The pressure and shame to date has been considerable. The University of East Anglia has now reversed its position and agreed to publish all its data (once necessary permissions have been secured). Healthy scepticism requires that we expect yet another long string of delays and obfuscations. Phil Jones, head of CRU remains in denial. He says he has nothing to fear from the release of data because it essentially is consistent with other,

completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.

Phil Jones still has not grasped the crevasse over which he is now suspended. The e-mails disclose an acceptance amongst the leading scientists in all those institutions to accept the CRU’s massaging and adjusting the data, which implies that they are guilty of the same sins. Certainly in New Zealand, the head of NIWA has publicly stated their adjustments to temperature data were consistent with “international standards”. That suggests a consensus acceptance of manipulation of data within the cabal. So, it is not just the data which will need to be released, but every adjustment and justification thereof. We also know that the data sets are hopelessly compromised and the base data thoroughly unreliable.

Meanwhile, according to the BBC the University of East Anglia has announced that it will commission a formal independent inquiry into the leaking of the e-mails and what they revealed. the key thing now is whether this inquiry will be a cover-up or a diligent expose.

Professor Sir David King, the former government chief scientist, told BBC News there are three key issues:

* how did the leakage occur – was there any payment in the process?
* the alleged behaviour of the scientists indicated by the e-mails
* does this have any impact on the scientific conclusion?

If an independent inquiry encompassed all three aspects, Professor Sir David said he would support it.

We hope for the best, but fear the worst.

>Deceitful Science, Part II

>Global Warming Has Become an Expensive Urban Legend

Dr Roy Spencer is a climate scientist researching at the University of Alabama. He is one of the leading world authorities on satellite sourced global temperature data, and has put forward some provocative theories on how the earth’s climate actually works.

Here is is take on the pseudo-scientific foundations of Global Warming theorists.

An Expensive Urban Legend
October 24th, 2009 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

About.com describes an “urban legend” as an apocryphal (of questionable authenticity), secondhand story, told as true and just plausible enough to be believed, about some horrific…series of events….it’s likely to be framed as a cautionary tale. Whether factual or not, an urban legend is meant to be believed. In lieu of evidence, however, the teller of an urban legend is apt to rely on skillful storytelling and reference to putatively trustworthy sources.

I contend that the belief in human-caused global warming as a dangerous event, either now or in the future, has most of the characteristics of an urban legend. Like other urban legends, it is based upon an element of truth. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere is increasing, and since greenhouse gases warm the lower atmosphere, more CO2 can be expected, at least theoretically, to result in some level of warming.

But skillful storytelling has elevated the danger from a theoretical one to one of near-certainty. The actual scientific basis for the plausible hypothesis that humans could be responsible for most recent warming is contained in the cautious scientific language of many scientific papers. Unfortunately, most of the uncertainties and caveats are then minimized with artfully designed prose contained in the Summary for Policymakers (SP) portion of the report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This Summary was clearly meant to instill maximum alarm from a minimum amount of direct evidence.

Next, politicians seized upon the SP, further simplifying and extrapolating its claims to the level of a “climate crisis”. Other politicians embellished the tale even more by claiming they “saw” global warming in Greenland as if it was a sighting of Sasquatch, or that they felt it when they fly in airplanes.

Just as the tales of marauding colonies of alligators living in New York City sewers are based upon some kernel of truth, so too is the science behind anthropogenic global warming. But there is a big difference between reports of people finding pet alligators that have escaped their owners, versus city workers having their limbs torn off by roving colonies of subterranean monsters.

In the case of global warming, the “putatively trustworthy sources” would be the consensus of the world’s scientists. The scientific consensus, after all, says that global warming is…is what? Is happening? Is severe? Is manmade? Is going to burn the Earth up if we do not act? It turns out that those who claim consensus either do not explicitly state what that consensus is about, or they make up something that supports their preconceived notions.

If the consensus is that the presence of humans on Earth has some influence on the climate system, then I would have to even include myself in that consensus. After all, the same thing can be said of the presence of trees on Earth, and hopefully we have at least the same rights as trees do. But too often the consensus is some vague, fill-in-the-blank, implied assumption where the definition of “climate change” includes the phrase “humans are evil”.

It is a peculiar development that scientific truth is now decided through voting. A relatively recent survey of climate scientists who do climate research found that 97.4% agreed that humans have a “significant” effect on climate. But the way the survey question was phrased borders on meaninglessness. To a scientist, “significant” often means non-zero. The survey results would have been quite different if the question was, “Do you believe that natural cycles in the climate system have been sufficiently researched to exclude them as a potential cause of most of our recent warming?”

And it is also a good bet that 100% of those scientists surveyed were funded by the government only after they submitted research proposals which implicitly or explicitly stated they believed in anthropogenic global warming to begin with. If you submit a research proposal to look for alternative explanations for global warming (say, natural climate cycles), it is virtually guaranteed you will not get funded. Is it any wonder that scientists who are required to accept the current scientific orthodoxy in order to receive continued funding, then later agree with that orthodoxy when surveyed? Well, duh.

In my experience, the public has the mistaken impression that a lot of climate research has gone into the search for alternative explanations for warming. They are astounded when I tell them that virtually no research has been performed into the possibility that warming is just part of a natural cycle generated within the climate system itself.

Too often the consensus is implied to be that global warming is so serious that we must do something now in the form of public policy to avert global catastrophe. What? You don’t believe that there are alligators in New York City sewer system? How can you be so unconcerned about the welfare of city workers that have to risk their lives by going down there every day? What are you, some kind of Holocaust-denying, Neanderthal flat-Earther?

It makes complete sense that in this modern era of scientific advances and inventions that we would so readily embrace a compelling tale of global catastrophe resulting from our own excesses. It’s not a new genre of storytelling, of course, as there were many B-movies in the 1950s whose horror themes were influenced by scientists’ development of the atomic bomb.

Our modern equivalent is the 2004 movie, “Day After Tomorrow”, in which all kinds of physically impossible climatic events occur in a matter of days. In one scene, super-cold stratospheric air descends to the Earth’s surface, instantly freezing everything in its path. The meteorological truth, however, is just the opposite. If you were to bring stratospheric air down to the surface, heating by compression would make it warmer than the surrounding air, not colder.

I’m sure it is just coincidence that “Day After Tomorrow” was directed by Roland Emmerich, who also directed the 1996 movie “Independence Day,” in which an alien invasion nearly exterminates humanity. After all, what’s the difference? Aliens purposely killing off humans, or humans accidentally killing off humans? Either way, we all die.

But a global warming catastrophe is so much more believable. After all, climate change does happen, right? So why not claim that ALL climate change is now the result of human activity? And while we are at it, let’s re-write climate history so that we get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice age, with a new ingenious hockey stick-shaped reconstruction of past temperatures that makes it look like climate never changed until the 20th Century? How cool would that be?

The IPCC thought it was way cool…until it was debunked, after which it was quietly downgraded in the IPCC reports from the poster child for anthropogenic global warming, to one possible interpretation of past climate.

And let’s even go further and suppose that the climate system is so precariously balanced that our injection of a little bit of that evil plant food, carbon dioxide, pushes our world over the edge, past all kinds of imaginary tipping points, with the Greenland ice sheet melting away, and swarms of earthquakes being the price of our indiscretions.

In December, hundreds of bureaucrats from around the world will once again assemble, this time in Copenhagen, in their attempts to forge a new international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. And as has been the case with every other UN meeting of its type, the participants simply assume that the urban legend is true. Indeed, these politicians and governmental representatives need it to be true. Their careers and political power now depend upon it.

And the fact that they hold their meetings in all of the best tourist destinations in the world, enjoying the finest exotic foods, suggests that they do not expect to ever have to be personally inconvenienced by whatever restrictions they try to impose on the rest of humanity.

If you present these people with evidence that the global warming crisis might well be a false alarm, you are rewarded with hostility and insults, rather than expressions of relief. The same can be said for most lay believers of the urban legend. I say “most” because I once encountered a true believer who said he hoped my research into the possibility that climate change is mostly natural will eventually be proved correct.

Unfortunately, just as we are irresistibly drawn to disasters – either real ones on the evening news, or ones we pay to watch in movie theaters – the urban legend of a climate crisis will persist, being believed by those whose politics and worldviews depend upon it. Only when they finally realize what a new treaty will cost them in loss of freedoms and standard of living will those who oppose our continuing use of carbon-based energy begin to lose their religion.

>Deceitful Science, Part I

>The Pseudo-Science of Global Warming

Bob Carter was one of the four independent climate scientists who, at Australian Senator Fielding’s request, undertook a due diligence audit of the global warming advice being provided to Climate Minister Penny Wong by her Department. (The three other scientists were David Evans, Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth.)

Quadrant Online recently carried a piece by Carter on the dubious scientific foundations of anthropogenic global warming. (Part II will carry an article along similar lines by Dr Roy Spencer.) Carter helps expose the global warming hysteria as one of the biggest hoaxes in living memory.

Doomed Planet

“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”

Vaclav Klaus
Blue Planet in Green Shackles

The science of deceit

by Bob Carter

October 26, 2009

Science is about simplicity

A well-accepted aphorism about science, in the context of difference of opinion between two points of view, is “Madam, you are entitled to your own interpretation, but not to your own facts”.

The world stoker of the fires of global warming alarmism, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), cleverly suborns this dictum in two ways.

First, the IPCC accepts advice from influential groups of scientists who treat the data that underpins their published climate interpretations (collected, of course, using public research funds) as their own private property, and refuse to release it to other scientists.

Thus, confronted in 1996 with a request that he provide a U.S. peer-review referee with a copy of the data that underpinned a research paper that he had submitted, U.K. Hadley Climate Research Centre scientist Tom Wigley responded:

First, it is entirely unnecessary to have original “raw” data in order to review a scientific document. I know of no case at all in which such data were required by or provided to a referee ….. Second, while the data in question [model output from the U.K. Hadley Centre’s climate model] were generated using taxpayer money, this was U.K. taxpayer money. U.S. scientists therefore have no a priori right to such data. Furthermore, these data belong to individual scientists who produced them, not to the IPCC, and it is up to those scientists to decide who they give their data to.

In the face of such attitudes, which treat the established mores of scientific trust and method with contempt, it is scarcely surprising that it took Canadian statistics expert Steve McIntyre many years to get the primary data released that was used by another Hadley Centre scientist, Keith Briffa, in his published tree-ring reconstructions of past temperature from the Urals region, northern hemisphere. When he finally forced the release of the relevant data, McIntyre quickly proceeded to slay a second climate hockey-stick dragon which – like the first such beast fashioned by U.S. scientist Michael Mann, and widely promulgated by the IPCC – turned out to be based on faulty statistical methodology . . .

A variant on this, along “the dog ate my homework” path, also involves the Hadley Centre – which is the primary science provider of global temperature statistics to the IPCC. Faced with requests from outside scientists for the provision of the raw temperature data so that scientific audit checks could be undertaken, Hadley’s Phil Jones recently asserted that parts of the raw data used to reconstruct their global temperature curve for the period before about 1980 cannot be provided to outsiders because it has been lost or destroyed. In other words, it is now impossible to conduct an independent audit of the Hadley temperature curve for 1860-2008, on which the IPCC has based an important part of its alarmist global warming advice.

So much for data perversions. The second type of common distortion of normal scientific practice by the IPCC and its supporters concerns not data but hypotheses – which IPCC likes to define in its own way to suit its own ends. This attitude often manifests itself in the fashion expressed in a recent letter sent to me, viz:

Proponents of AGW claim that their theory is supported by peer reviewed literature whilst the case against it is not. This is a very effective argument and, although Solomon’s book The Deniers goes some way to counter it, I am not aware of an equally effective refutation. . . .

In an Australian variation of this, Greg Combet, assistant to climate Minister Penny Wong, earlier this year asserted with blatant inaccuracy that “we use only peer reviewed science and our opposition doesn’t”. Other IPCC sycophants phrase it slightly differently, such as: “if you climate sceptics had a scientific point of view it would have been published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals”.

Statements such as these all reflect a fundamental lack of understanding about the way that science works. They also exemplify the way in which climate alarmists always seek to frame the debate in ways that delivers them control, especially by clever choice of language (clean energy; climate change instead of global warming; carbon dioxide is a pollutant instead of a beneficial trace gas, etc.), or, in this case, by framing a hypothesis for testing that suits their political ends rather than Science’s ends.

If you accept at face value questions and comments like the ones enumerated above, you fall into a carefully laid climate alarmist trap. For the question “why are there no papers in peer-reviewed journals that disprove the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming” is predicated, as is all related IPCC writing, on faulty science logic; specifically, it erects a wrong null hypothesis.

Scientists erect hypotheses to test based upon the fundamental science assumption of parsimony, or simplicity, sometimes grandly referred to as Occam’s Razor. That is to say, in seeking to explain matters of observation or experiment, a primary underlying principle is that the simplest explanation be sought; extraneous or complicating factors of interpretation, such as “extraterrestrials did it”, are only invoked when substantive evidence exists for such a complication.

Concerning the climate change that we observe around us today – which, importantly, is occurring at similar rates and magnitudes to that known to have occurred throughout the historical and geological past – the simplest (and therefore null) hypothesis, is that “the climate change observed today is natural unless and until evidence accrues otherwise”.

In regard to which, first, no such evidence has emerged. And, second, like any null hypothesis, that about modern climate change is there to be tested, as it has been. There are literally tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers in major scientific journals that contain observations, data, experiments and theoretical reasoning that are consistent with the null hypothesis, which has therefore yet to be falsified (but, of course, one day might be).

The onus is therefore on Penny Wong and her scientists to provide some “evidence otherwise”. To give a clue how hard that task is, note that since 1988 (when the IPCC was created) western nations have spent more than $100 billion, and employed thousands of scientists, in attempts to measure the human signal in the global temperature record. The search has failed. Though no scientist doubts that humans influence climate at local level – causing both warmings (urban heat island effect) and coolings (land-use changes) – no definitive evidence has yet been discovered that a human influence is measurable, let alone dangerous, at global level. Rather, the human signal is lost in the noise of natural climate variation.

That the correct null hypothesis is the simplest hypothesis is, of course, no reason why other more complex hypotheses cannot be erected for testing. For instance, should you wish to test (as the IPCC should) the idea that “human carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous global warming”, then there are several ways that that can be done.

The result, long ago, has been the falsification of the dangerous human-caused warming hypothesis. Failed tests include: that global cooling has occurred since 1998 despite an increase in carbon dioxide of 5%; the lack of detailed correlation between the carbon dioxide and temperature records over the last 100 years; consideration of cause and effect timing of past carbon dioxide and temperature levels in ice core records; the absence of the model-predicted temperature hotspot high in the tropical troposphere; the low sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide forcing as judged against empirical tests; and the demonstrable failure of computer GCMs to predict future climate.

These matters, and that the dangerous warming hypothesis fails numerous empirical tests, have been described in many places. Such writings, whether in refereed journals or not, are simply disparaged or ignored by those who wish to pursue the alarmist IPCC line.

It bears repeating that the onus is on Minister Wong, or her advisory IPCC scientists, to provide any evidence that the null hypothesis regarding modern climate change is false. Because she cannot do so, the clever trick is used of inverting the null hypothesis to demand that climate rationalist scientists demonstrate that human-cased global warming is not occurring.

Perhaps none of this would matter particularly were we dealing only with a squabble amongst scientists. But when ministers in our governments write, as did the Queensland Minister for Climate Change recently, that “The Queensland Government, along with the Australian Government and governments around the world, supports the findings of the IPCC”, it becomes a critical matter of necessity to understand that, in addition to being political in the first place, IPCC advice is also based upon faulty, indeed manipulative, science practice.

As independent scientific advisors to Senator Fielding have shown, the IPCC-derived science advice that the Australian Government is using as the basis for its carbon dioxide tax legislation is utterly flawed. This finding has yet to be rebutted.

Senators who vote for the second version of the misbegotten and misnamed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bill will be supporting strongly harmful legislation that is based upon faulty science. Thereby, they will be abandoning their duty of care for the welfare of the Australian people.

>Paternalism and Soft-Racism

>Soft Racism Excuses Failure

We all know that indulgence, excuse-making, and blameshifting have devastating consequences. Institutionalised indulgence, excuse making and blameshifting magnifies the devastation many times over.

In this regard the liberal-academic-media complex has a lot for which it must answer. In this regard also, the Maori Party is a perpetrator of great harm.

It is helpful and salutary when someone stands up to expose the harm and sheet home the blame. We applaud Michael Laws piece in the Sunday Star Times, accusing Maori racism of building a culture of failure.

RODNEY HIDE to a secret, and taxpayer-sponsored, skinhead conference: “Why are we fighting blood against blood? There’s so much enemy that isn’t white!”

Had this empathetic admonition been among the revelations released last Sunday by this newspaper, then the Act leader would be an ex-minister today – especially given he had also congregated the skinhead and white supremacist leaders with the public purse and then thanked them for being a bit more co-operative with each other “because parliament sure hasn’t”.

There would have been an ensuing week of condemnation, the Act Party would be in fundamental disarray and John Key would be attempting to extricate himself, as quickly as possible, from the tar baby that was his coalition partner.

And the above exchange did happen. Except substitute Maori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples for Rodney Hide, and the skinhead leaders for the leaders of the criminal gangs Mongrel Mob and Black Power. Oh yes, and substitute the colour. There is so much enemy that isn’t “brown”.

Incredibly, the state of both this country’s politics and media is that we allow racism and we allow racial preference so long as the protagonist is Maori. It is the unwritten rule of liberal political correctness that the normal standards don’t apply if the subject is tangata whenua. The chosen people shall receive a licence and a liberty that may not be applied to any other ethnicity. Especially a white one.

I was reminded of the double-standard again last week in the unveiling of the John Ballance statue in Wanganui – New Zealand’s first Liberal premier/prime minister and something of an enlightened politician of his time. Ballance was a Wanganui boy (oh, all right, via Ireland) but a Wanganui boy made good. Apart from former governor-general Arthur Porritt: probably the goodest of them all.

A dispassionate and academic overview of Ballance is that he was a clever, driven and compassionate premier with no shortage of courage nor acumen. He was a paternalistic native affairs minister, a far-sighted finance minister and a supporter of the female franchise.

For some reason, he is seen by some Maori as some sort of provincial pariah. An unscrupulous land grabber who ensured indigenous misery. It is a perception wholly at variance with the facts. And yet like much oral Maori history, there is a touch of the cargo cult built into the memory. This postmodern grievance mentality needs historic harbingers to explain the current state. Someone else must always have been to blame and Ballance is dead enough, remote enough and white enough to wear that collar.

So where does this antipathy come from? This hate?

One answer is local kura kaupapa. Their rendering of New Zealand history is hopelessly skewed and often wrong. They teach grievance as a part of the curriculum. It explains their existence and excuses their inadequacy. They also build myths that Maori are a kind of chosen people, vested with privilege, and solely because they arrived here first. These myths include that Maori were instinctive environmentalists, living life in harmony with nature and themselves, until the advent of the white man.

Even 21st-century rates of child abuse are blamed on the effects of nineteenth century colonisation. It is the stock in trade of the Maori Party and its leadership that anything afflicting Maori is always Pakeha fault. It is the politics of the ghetto and designed to reinforce the ghetto as the only rational existence.

Maori success – individually or collectively – shatters such politics, challenges excuses for the excesses of the gangs, the making of brothers of the monsters that are the Mongrel Mob and Black Power.

Certainly this is not the Maori way. There is growing evidence that Maori have had enough too; the rahui against gang insignia at Murupara being repeated on many marae. Gang lore is not tikanga: no matter how Sharples tries to make them so.

But the sad part of all this is that we have all come to accept Maori failure as a given. We accept the welfarism that is Maori TV and radio – propped up by the taxpayer. We accept that there are lesser standards and lesser expectations. We accept that Pita Sharples’ covert racism is a substitute for getting tough on gangs. And we’re not tough on gangs because, well, because so many of them are Maori. We still accept that Maori need to be patronised as some sort of cultural cringe: that a departmental waiata and a few Maori words of greeting somehow mean something.

Nothing has changed in a generation. In 1984, Koro Wetere launched the devolution of Maori funding and programmes – Maori Access and Mana schemes; institutionalised kohanga reo, kura kaupapa and wananga; special seats on everything from polytech councils to trades training bodies; separate PHOs and health organisations. But has it made a difference?

No. Twenty-five years of trying a different and distinct delivery system and the plight and position of Maori has not improved – relatively – against other ethnic groups. All that has happened is that under-performing departmental schemes have been replaced with under-performing Maori ones. There will be the odd exception, but they are genuinely odd.

This will not stop Sharples, Turia, Jackson et al continuing to preach that the only redemption for Maori is separate everything. But it must stop the rest of us. The tokenism, the dirty dollars, the let’s-look-the-other-way-because-it’s-cultural attitude must stop.

Quality, accountability, results. They are the only standards that matter irrespective of colour. Anything else will be inherently racist.

>Scholastic Myth Buster

>The Flat Earthers are Those Who Think They Existed

Remember when you were taught in school that people in Columbus’s time believed the earth was flat. Well, it was all a scholastic hoax. It turns out that nobody really did. Everyone in the Middle Ages knew that the earth was a globe. Oh, the lies we have been told.

In the piece below, Thomas E. Woods gives us the skinny.

The Flat Earth Myth
The real myth is the idea that anyone ever believed in a flat earth

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

In the course of promoting my new book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, I have made the point that major historians of science today no longer hold the simplistic position that “religion” has been nothing but an obstacle to “science.” This contention doubtless comes as a surprise to some people, since most of us have gone through life hearing and being taught that very idea.

The standard view was given its classical expression by Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) in his two-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Yet it is safe to say that scarcely any serious historian of science today views White’s work as anything but quaintly risible. (That doesn’t stop hostile e-mail correspondents even now from dutifully quoting him to me, as if the past century’s revolution in our understanding of the history of science had never occurred.) And while the claim of Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki that certain Christian theological ideas were indispensable to the rise of Western science (see, for instance, Jaki’s discussion of inertial motion and, indeed, his entire thesis in Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe) has not become the dominant view, the opposite position the one drilled into the heads of 99.9 percent of American students at all levels, from elementary school onward has for all intents and purposes been abandoned.

This just can’t be true, say my critics. After all, didn’t the Church teach that the world was flat?

Actually, no. Essentially no one during the Middle Ages believed the world was flat. Of the many myths about the Middle Ages this one is perhaps the most widespread, and yet at the same time the most roundly and authoritatively debunked.

In fact, the evidence is so overwhelming that refuting this myth is like refuting the idea that the moon is made of cheese.

The two figures routinely cited by the myth peddlers are Lactantius (c. 245–325) and the early sixth-century Greek traveler and geographer Cosmas Indicopleustes. Lactantius was actually a Christian heretic who argued that God positively willed evil and who held a Manichaean worldview that posited Christ and Satan as equal but opposed creations of the one God. He believed that the pagan philosophers had no good arguments in favor of the earth as a sphere, and that since the Bible took no position one way or the other the issue was unimportant. At least some of his contrarianism in positing a flat earth can be attributed to his misplaced enthusiasm as an ex-pagan to contradict everything the pagans said. But he was in no way representative of the early Christian thinkers and his ideas appear to have had no influence.

Cosmas constructed an elaborate if peculiar model of the physical universe that portrayed the earth as flat. And even he did not intend his model to be taken as a literal description of how the cosmos was actually ordered. He thought of the physical universe in terms of an analogue to its spiritual meaning, rather in the way that Dante, much more elegantly, would later attempt in literature.

Cosmas’ contemporary John Philoponus (490–570) sharply criticized his work. Whatever Cosmas’ intentions, his great emphasis on physical detail certainly lent the impression that he aimed to construct an actual model of the cosmos. John Philoponus adopted the view of St. Augustine before him (and the view that would be expressed by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas after him) that Christians should refrain from making statements about the physical world that were at odds with reason, since they would only bring their faith into contempt and disrepute.

Some scholars actually used to argue that the views of Cosmas Indicopleustes were responsible for the alleged edge-of-the-earth fears of fifteenth-century navigators, even though Cosmas was completely unknown in the fifteenth century. There were no Latin manuscripts of Cosmas in the Middle Ages at all. The first translation of his work into Latin was not undertaken until 1706. It is quite safe to say that Cosmas had absolutely no influence on anyone.

The fact is that the earth’s sphericity was attested to by the overwhelming consensus of European Christian thinkers; the idea of a flat earth, to the extent it was raised at all, was positively ridiculed.

Most encyclopedias and reference works have mercifully deleted references to the flat earth from their discussions of Columbus, though they occasionally pop up even now, long after there could be any excuse for continuing to believe it. Textbooks, on the other hand, have been notoriously slow to correct the error, with the result that elementary, middle, and high school students are still being told (to quote one fifth-grade text) that at the time of Columbus “[m]any Europeans still believed that the world was flat. Columbus, they thought, would fall off the earth.” A prominent college text explains that the earth’s sphericity, known to the ancient Greeks, was lost in the Middle Ages.

Even the occasional scholar of distinction can still be heard propagating the myth. John Huchra of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics is on record as saying that during the age of discovery “[s]ome thought the world might be flat and you could fall off the edge, but the explorers went out and found what was truly there.” Even the highly respected historian Daniel Boorstin repeated the myth in his 1983 book The Discoverers, arguing that from 300 A.D. through at least 1300, “Christian faith and dogma suppressed the useful image of the world that had been so slowly, so painfully, and so scrupulously drawn by ancient geographers.”

Andrew Dickson White, the fallen guru of the warfare-between-religion-and-science crowd, lent what prestige he had to the ludicrous falling-off-the-edge theory, which had no basis in fact whatsoever:

Many a bold navigator [wrote White], who was quite ready to brave pirates and tempests, trembled at the thought of tumbling with his ship into one of the openings into hell which a widespread belief placed in the Atlantic at some unknown distance from Europe. This terror among sailors was one of the main obstacles in the great voyage of Columbus.

David Lindberg, who is among the most accomplished modern historians of science, corrects the record:

In the usual story, theoretical dogma regarding a flat earth had to be overcome by empirical evidence for its sphericity. The truth is that the sphericity of the earth was a central feature of theoretical dogma as it came down to the Middle Ages, so central that no amount of contrary theoretical or empirical argumentation could conceivably have dislodged it.

European monarchs’ initial hesitation to support Columbus’s proposed expedition had nothing to do with the idea that the world was flat and Columbus might fall off the edge. It was precisely the accuracy of their knowledge of the earth that made them skeptical: they correctly concluded that Columbus had drastically underestimated the size of the earth, and that therefore he and his men would starve to death before they made it to the Indies. (Thankfully for them, of course, the Americas, which no one knew about, fortuitously appeared in between.)

The natural follow-up question to all this involves how the myth got started in the first place. It is only natural to look for its origins in the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, since a contempt for the medieval world could be found in both (though particularly in the latter). Yet the myth cannot be traced to either of these periods. Historian W.E.H. Lecky, a well-known nineteenth-century critic of the Catholic Church, was able as late as 1867 to discuss the views of Cosmas Indicopleustes without extrapolating from them to the idea that the Church fathers were flat earthers. The main criticism of men like Lecky and Charles Kingsley was that medieval scholasticism had been too much in thrall to the ideas of Aristotle. They couldn’t very well accuse churchmen of being flat earthers, therefore, since Aristotle’s position was that the earth was round.

The origins and story of the myth can be found in a useful little book (exclusive of notes and index, it is only 77 pages long) by Jeffrey Burton Russell called Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York: Praeger, 1991).

Russell identifies several versions of the myth. The most absurd, since it shows no acquaintance with ancient Greek knowledge at all, contends that no one believed the earth was spherical until the age of discovery proved it. Another version admits that the Greeks knew of the earth’s shape but alleges that this knowledge was lost, or perhaps deliberately suppressed during–you guessed it–the ignorant Middle Ages. Still another version has it that practically everyone, throughout all of history, believed that the earth was flat, with the exception of a few brilliant minds here and there like Aristotle and Ptolemy.

By Boorstin’s time, says Russell, the myth “had been so firmly established that it was easier to lie back and believe it: easier not to check the sources; easier to fit the consensus; easier to fit the preconceived worldview; easier to avoid the discipline needed in order to dislodge a firmly held error.” When Andrew Dickson White repeated the myth in the late nineteenth century, he based his position (as we can see in his notes) not on the original sources, of which he was largely ignorant, but on secondary sources that peddled the myth themselves.

Russell identifies two nineteenth-century villains as the primary sources of the myth: the American writer Washington Irving and (more significant) the French historian and polemicist Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787–1848). Irving’s semi-historical, semi-fictional writing often blurred the distinction between fact and fiction, a distinction that was likewise unclear to his readers. Determined to portray Columbus as a romantic hero, Irving included in his History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) a fictional account of a council that allegedly lectured Columbus with the theories of Lactantius. The heroic Columbus, of course, resolutely resisted this attempt to persuade him of all this medieval foolishness.

As for Letronne, he received much of his academic training from men who propagated the standard Enlightenment canard about the ignorance of the Middle Ages. Although he conceded that a few theologians knew the earth was a sphere, Letronne put forth the idea that the vast bulk were foolish believers in a flat earth. The idea of the flat earth, he said, was the dominant one in Europe until the time of Columbus.

Uncritical acceptance of the myth was too tempting for many scholars, since it fit in so well with the caricature of Christianity they were already inclined to draw. “If Christians had for centuries insisted that the earth was flat against clear and available evidence,” explains Russell, “they must be not only enemies of scientific truth, but contemptible and pitiful enemies.”

The crime of the alleged believers in a flat earth was that they adopted a position on a matter of fact that was entirely contrary to the available evidence. Could not the same criticism be aimed at those who have argued, against all the textual evidence to the contrary, that Christians believed in a flat earth?

July 13, 2005

Professor Thomas E. Woods, Jr. holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Columbia. His books include the New York Times (and LRC) bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.

Also, the following quotation by Fred Sanders is relevant:

A little exposure to actual medieval thought, through primary text rather than commentary, blows the flat earth myth away. On page 1 of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (that is, in the first article of the first question of the first part), he casually mentions the round earth on the way to proving something doctrinal: “the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e., abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself.” Thomas died in 1274. Dante’s whole Divine Comedy only works with a round earth; Dante died in 1320.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

>Scholastic Mythbusters, Part IV

>Concluding Reflections

For the past two hundred years or so the Western world has taken great pride in science and the scientific method. The scientific method has become a propaganda front for empiricist rationalism. It propounds the neutrality and objectivity of human reason. It boasts of the autonomous ability of the mind of man to determine truth for itself, without precommitments or prejudice. It proclaims that the facts, are the facts, are the facts. The facts have a brute quality. In the end the facts or the data are asserted to speak through all errors, false ideas, and distorted views.

This breathtaking arrogance has led us into a state where the liberal academic complex plays tricks on itself. It has led to academia easily getting sucked in to myths which it then busily cloaks with claims about evidence and proof. The proof or the evidence turns out to be little more than selective fitting up to adorn the case.

When it comes to all human activity, and especially research and scholarship, objectivity requires that at all times the scholar remains self-conscious of his assumptions, precommitments and prejudices. He must be overt about his “conditioning” or his starting points and his biases as he researches, studies, and draws conclusions. This is the paradox of objectivity. In order to achieve true objectivity, the knower must be self-conscious—that is, he must be conscious and overt about his subjective state before he can achieve reasonable objectivity. In arguing his case, he must be transparent to others about his precommitments and prejudices. You first have to know yourself, before you can know anything else.

It is this prevailing lack of honesty and integrity about the “knower” that has distorted so much of what is “known”. It is what has seduced much of the liberal academic complex into believing myths. Michael Polanyi has argued that much of modern science is nothing more than intuition and guesswork. He believes that this is not a bad thing—in fact, it is inevitable. But the intuition and guesswork takes place within a context, an intellectual and scientific tradition which all scientists are taught as an apprentice learns from a master craftsman—and about which they must remain self-conscious at all times. Once they have mastered the tradition, they guess, then they test and examine—and that leads to advances in knowledge.

But this in turn leads to significant and irreversible changes in theory and conclusions. Today’s scientists think very differently about matter and the structure of the material world than they did one hundred years ago. The facts are not quite what they seemed—it turns out. There is nothing wrong with this: it only becomes destructive or harmful when scholars turn a particular set of framed data into an undoubted infallible orthodoxy.

It is not by chance that the examples of myths provided in our earlier posts all revolved around a recasting of history. The study of the past is one of those disciplines which is particularly susceptible to revision (“revisionism” was coined to describe the outcome of changing a “narrative” about the past) and to framing. Because all historical study is selective in its data mining and is concerned to produce a narrative or account or story, the risks of getting it wrong are considerable. When brute objectivity is assumed from the outset, the risks rise exponentially.

It is not by accident that the most persistent and powerful myth of our age—the cosmogony of evolutionism—is an attempt to construct a narrative about the past. Data is mined to construct and reconstruct the pattern. Polanyi describes how scientists must make value judgments every day.

The scientist in pursuit of research has incessantly to make decisions whether to take a new instrument reading or some other new sense impression as signifying a new fact, or to regard it merely as a new indication of an old fact—or else to reject it as having no significance at all. These decisions are guided by the premisses of science and more particularly by the current surmises of the time, but ultimately there always enters an element of personal judgement. Michael Polanyi, Science Faith and Society (London: University of Chicago, 1946), p. 90.

In contrast to the hard sciences, of which Polanyi is speaking, the influences of premisses, surmises, and value judgements are far greater when one is attempting to create and “prove” a naturalistic cosmogony because, after all, one was not there at the time. The evolutionist cosmogony, potent myth and narrative that it is, derives its potency from sources other than the data, which, in the very nature of the case are racked to ruin with surmises and value judgements and fitting.

Nor is it an accident that another powerful emerging mythical narrative is anthropogenic global warming. If narratives of historical cosmogony are necessarily thick with surmises and suppositions, prognostications of the future must be equally so.

Yet, in time, we believe both the myth of the evolutionist cosmogony and of anthropogenic global warming will be exposed and exploded for what they are: falsehoods. But whilst the hubris of Western rationalism retains its grip, the myths will endure and remain powerful conditioners of our times.

>Scholastic Mythbusters III

>The Dead Sea Scrolls

We have been discussing the prevalence of myth in modern scholarship. While it is not always the case, there have been notable examples of prejudice and cant in the Academy—often lasting generations—where prevailing views alone are heard on a particular topic and all contrary hypotheses are rejected out of hand, if not ridiculed.

So strong can be the hold of the dominant view that anyone who has the temerity to express a different view, or to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, risks being cast into outer academic darkness. Yet, in time, many of these “orthodox” views are shown to be false and, to employ the euphemism, prejudicial to the truth.

We have argued that the implicit arrogance of rationalism lends itself to such errors and to a kind of naïve credulity. The belief in the autonomy and ultimate veracity of the human mind predisposes the academic elite to an underlying arrogance, which all to often becomes overwhelming.

It is ironic that modern Athens betrays on every hand this worst form of blindness. Ironic, because modern Athens boasts of its enlightened character. Its much vaunted “scientific method”, its scholarship, its institutions of research, its mass media promulgating knowledge far and wide, its halls of learning, its publicly funded education system, its technological prowess—all play a part in reassuring us that modern man is truly advanced, enlightened, and wise. The modern Athenian citizen has banished all superstition and ignorance from the playground. Or, so the mantra runs.

The honest broker or the properly wise commences with a frank disclosure of his fundamental and guiding assumptions. He puts them out there for all to see. He discloses his prejudices and his pre-commitments from the outset. He is rigorously self-conscious of them. Of course, this procedure—the only one which avoids the trap of invincible moral culpable ignorance—would force a great deal of humility into academic and learned debates. That’s partly why it is avoided like the plague. Declaring one’s pre-commitments from the beginning forces everyone to face up to the fundamental circularity of all knowledge—which, to the modern rationalist, is a deep, if not fatal, embarrassment.

The dishonest broker will not acknowledge his pre-commitments. Rather, he appeals to the neutrality and objectivity of the facts, of the data, and of his “seeing things as they really are”. His claim to authority is based upon the “evidence”. He presents himself as dispassionate, detached, objective. For him, knowledge is not circular because he, the investigator, has not intruded himself onto the facts. He is not part of the factual landscae. His pre-commitments have not informed him throughout. His net has not determined from the outset what fish he will catch. The dishonest broker, by denying the circularity of all knowledge, including his own, ends up being little more than a propagandist.

We have given some examples of how scholarship over many years has perpetrated myths as undoubted fact. The first example was the prevailing myth about the sour bitterness of the Puritans and their rejection of music, gaiety, and the arts. So deep, extensive, and pervasive has been this myth that the adjectives “puritan” and “puritanical” have entered the lexicon, meaning an attitude of bigotry and intolerance. Yet, this slander has now been exploded as a myth. In this case, Voltaire has been proven right: the discipline of history is a cheap trick played upon the dead.

A second example is the overwhelming and near universal rejection of the historicity of the Old Testament and in its place the Academy has insisted that Manetho’s chronology of ancient Egypt is the true and accurate historical record. This has controlled (and distorted) the study of the ancient near east for hundreds of years. Opposing views were simply not heard, let alone tolerated.

Now, however, some within the Academy have started to question the prevailing scholastic myth—and the edifice is starting to crumble. When one considers all the errors and distortions built into Manetho’s scheme, it is a marvel that it was taken so seriously by such experts for so long.

A further example of scholastic mythmaking comes from a more narrow area of study. It has to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were first discovered (in the modern era) in 1947. The initial discovery was augmented by additional finds over a number of subsequent years. For over 50 years it was asserted that these scrolls were produced by a Jewish sectarian community, the Essenes, living at Qumran on the Dead Sea during the time of the incarnation of Christ our Lord.

This has now finally been demonstrated to have been an egregious error. Not only did the Essenes not produce the scrolls, they had nothing to do with them, and, to add insult to injury, there is no evidence of an Essene community ever having been at Qumran. But for 50 years the error held sway amongst scholars, governments, universities, journals and media. But it held sway in a particular manner: this was not a consensus forged through irenic and open-minded research. Rather it was perpetrated through power politics within the Academy. People that dared to question or expose the prejudice were vilified and their careers jeopardized.

The Scrolls themselves were an amazing archaeological find. They have the potential to shed much light on Judaism during the intertestamental period (300BC to 70AD)–a period when much of Judaica was destroyed and subsequently lost to history. But they have been pushed into a backwater for over fifty years through scholastic prejudice.

Fifty years of error in a supposedly enlightened world! Reputations and careers were made by promulgating the error. Careers were ruined by those with the temerity to question the then current orthodoxy. There is no doubt that the reigning mode of Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship for over half a century was flat out dishonest and culpably ignorant.

How did this happen in such an enlightened, modern age? In a truly remarkable book, Norman Golb, of the University of Chicago, documents a lifetime of fighting the Academy’s orthodoxy and the personal and professional cost of doing so. (Norman Golb, Who Wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret of Qumran. [London: BCA, 1995]) He shows how the myth was initially promulgated, took hold, then suppressed contrary views. It occurred very simply. Here are the steps:

1. Initial scroll research asserted the Essence theory without a full disclosure of the fundamental assumptions lying behind the theory which undergirded it. (In this particular case, the assumptions were speculative, baseless, and until recently, never been examined, verified or tested.)
2. Academics began promulgating the theory as established fact—based on the “evidence”. Evidence was “manufactured” to fit the theory. Contrary theories or interpretations were never allowed to intrude.
3. Those who questioned the theory were personally attacked and ridiculed as fantasizing ignoramuses. They were excluded from access to the Scrolls for research purposes.
4. A wilful sociology of ignorance took over. The more the error was stated, the more widely it was promulgated, the more believable it became. Credulity runs in packs. Repetition means truth. Mantras have huge influence in a culture dominated by culpable ignorance.
5. As data or evidence was subsequently found that did not fit with the Essene theory, it was explained away (“the evidence was alleged to have been forged”, etc).

The theory has recently collapsed and has been shown up for the folly that it was from the beginning. So, we had a grand conspiracy—but one where the culpable perpetrators allowed themselves to be duped and then defended their duplicity. Remember these were the best and brightest in their respective fields.
They turned out to be nothing more than propagandists. This arose because they suppressed their starting assumptions.

Now, of course, if they had been honest from the beginning and disclosed them, their initial findings on the origin and provenance of the Scrolls would have been far more tentative, less sensational, more humble, and much more quickly revised and corrected. The circularity would have been evident from the beginning, and therefore much more quickly scrutinized (and in this case, rejected).

A church caretaker once noticed the preacher had left his sermon notes on the pulpit. Scrawled in the margin at one place in the manuscript was the notation: “Weak point—speak more loudly.” The prevailing modern blindness which refuses to accept the circularity of all knowledge and hides fundamental pre-commitments and assumptions has fallen into the same deceit: the modern world thinks that by repeating something loudly and often, it establishes its veracity. Truth becomes a matter of shouting down the opposition. Truth becomes politicized. Truth becomes propaganda.

So, for over fifty years the scrolls were said to have been written by the sect of the Essenes. This is now shown up to patently false. Now scholars have to work out who actually did write them and where they came from. Hopefully, with the blinkers off we will come to understand a whole lot more of the intellectual, cultural and religious world in which our Lord ministered than ever before.

The final nail in the coffin came when archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (that is, “official” scholars) committed to doing comprehensive archaeological work at the site. The dig took place over ten years. Recently they have reported and concluded that there never was an Essene community at Qumran. In a summary of their findings, the New York Times reported in 2006:

New archaeological evidence is raising more questions about the conventional interpretation linking the desolate ruins of an ancient settlement known as Qumran with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were found in nearby caves in one of the sensational discoveries of the last century.
After early excavations at the site, on a promontory above the western shore of the Dead Sea, scholars concluded that members of a strict Jewish sect, the Essenes, had lived there in a monastery and presumably wrote the scrolls in the first centuries B.C. and A.D.

Many of the texts describe religious practices and doctrine in ancient Israel. But two Israeli archaeologists who have excavated the site on and off for more than 10 years now assert that Qumran had nothing to do with the Essenes or a monastery or the scrolls. It had been a pottery factory.

The archaeologists, Yizhak Magen and Yuval Peleg of the Israel Antiquities Authority, reported in a book and a related magazine article that their extensive excavations turned up pottery kilns, whole vessels, production rejects and thousands of clay fragments. Derelict water reservoirs held thick deposits of fine potters’ clay. . . .

Norman Golb, a professor of Near Eastern languages and civilization at the University of Chicago who is a longtime critic of the Essene link, said he was impressed by the new findings and the pottery-factory interpretation. “Magen’s a very seasoned archaeologist and scholar, and many of his views are cogent,” Dr. Golb said in a telephone interview. “A pottery factory? That could well be the case.”

Dr. Golb said that, of course, Qumran could have been both a monastery and a pottery factory. Yet, he added: “There is not an iota of evidence that it was a monastery. We have come to see it as a secular site, not one of pronounced religious orientation.” For years, Dr. Golb has argued that the multiplicity of Jewish religious ideas and practices recorded in the scrolls made it unlikely that they were the work of a single sect like the Essenes. He noted that few of the texts dealt with specific Essene traditions. Not one, he said, espoused celibacy, which the sect practiced.
The scrolls in the caves were probably written by many different groups, Dr. Golb surmised, and were removed from Jerusalem libraries by refugees in the Roman war. Fleeing to the east, the refugees may well have deposited the scrolls for safekeeping in the many caves near Qumran.

The new research appears to support this view. As Dr. Magen noted, Qumran in those days was at a major crossroads of traffic to and from Jerusalem and along the Dead Sea. Similar scrolls have been found at Masada, the site south of Qumran of the suicidal hold-out against the Romans.
Dr. Magen also cited documents showing that refugees in another revolt against the Romans in the next century had fled to the same caves. He said they were “the last spot they could hide the scrolls before descending to the shore” of the Dead Sea.

The full preliminary report of the archaeologists can be downloaded here.

The upshot is that now almost every book on New Testament and intertestamental history is out of date and requires significant revision. This is irritating in its own right. But at least another scholastic myth has been exploded. However, if Golb is correct and the scrolls represent part of the (Sadduccean controlled) Temple Library, spirited out of Jerusalem and hidden in the caves to protect them from the Roman siege, they will contribute a great deal to our understanding of those times.

While the particular field of Qumranology may be somewhat esoteric and specialised the case serves to illustrate how the Academy can get things very wrong for a long, long time. We believe this dysfunctional situation is becoming more and more prevalent as rationalism takes hold. The more autonomous rationalism holds sway in the Academy the greater the likelihood of myth and superstition becoming regnant in the liberal-academic complex.

>Scholastic Mythbusters, Part II

>The Fetish of Egyptian Chronology

Much of what passes for thorough and objective scholarship in our post-Christian world is nothing less than determined ignorance. The study of the ancient world is an example. It has been afflicted with a raw prejudice against the Bible and its historical accounts. However, even a superficial comparison of ancient historical documents shows immediately that the biblical historical records of events in the Ancient Near East are far fuller, and more detailed, precise, and voluminous than the records of surrounding nations.

But scholarship and the liberal academic complex have steadfastly refused to treat the biblical historical documents as genuine historical accounts. For the past three hundred years they have overwhelmingly viewed them as works of religious propaganda. The biblical records lack objectivity, we are told. They have been written, edited, redacted, and reconstructed by people with axes to grind. Consequently everything in the Bible must be second guessed.

The fact that the historical records of the Scriptures are so full and detailed is taken as an evidence that they are not genuine historical accounts. If they were, well, they would be as patchy and difficult as other non-biblical historical documents of the period. The fact that they are so clear and full is an evidence of their being edited, massaged, re-worked, and altered—for religious purposes. The argument is viciously circular.

The liberal academic complex has proceeded by asserting its own rationalistic autonomy over the biblical documents. The result has been a prevailing antipathy and blind prejudice against the historicity of the Bible for over two hundred years. As scholar after scholar after scholar has repeated the same views and expresses the same cant, over time it has become an undoubted orthodoxy. Yet the foundations of this so-called orthodoxy are worse than the Great Grimpen Mire.

One of the most persistent myths of the Academy has been to elevate the chronology of Egypt to a status of near infallibility, to which all other histories and chronologies, including the biblical chronology, must conform. The chronological structure of Egypt has been used to “rework” the histories of all other ancient near eastern peoples, such that if they do not “fit” or “agree” or “conform” to the Egyptian schema, the records are erroneous or wrong. The status of Egyptian chronology as the fundamental history has functioned like the myth of the flat earth.

This would not be such a problem if the Egyptian chronology were well founded. However, the Egyptian chronology that is widely accepted as academic orthodoxy is based upon the writings of Manetho, a Graeco-Egyptian priest of the second century BC. He presented an Egyptian history back to its beginnings, using the dates and reigns of successive Pharaoh’s and their dynasties in Egypt. Manetho’s chronology is the spine upon which virtually all scholarship of the ancient near east has been built for the past two hundred years. However, whilst a “complete” chronological record, with its successive dynasties, is convenient for scholars and thereby likely to prejudice them in its favour, it is of little use if the chronology itself is wrong, or is in places a fabrication.

The first issue is to reckon with is the tendency in the ancient world to produce chronological schemas for reasons of propaganda. Clearly Manetho sought to establish the prime antiquity of ancient Egypt, over against the rival (Antiochene or Syrian) claims of his day. This was important because longevity and antiquity in the ancient world established primacy, and Manetho was interested in establishing the primacy of the Ptolemaic dynasty. The chronology was used to support its imperial claims. James Jordan has argued that,

This is not just an ancient phenomenon. Not too long ago, German historians were diligently falsifying and inventing history in order to prove the seniority and superiority of the Aryan race. The rulers of England have often supported the absurd notion that the English and Saxon races are descended from the “lost tribes of Israel.” Today, the Israeli claim to the land of Palestine is grounded in events 2000 years old.

When the Greek politician Solon visited Egypt in the 6th century BC, he was chided as a citizen of such a youthful culture, and was told that Egyptian history ran back 8000 years. Herodotus was told a century later that Egyptian history ran back 11,340 years before his time.

The Babylonian priest Berossus presents us a dynasty of 86 kings who reigned for no less than 33,091 years. His contemporary, Manetho, produced a similar claim regarding the earliest, divine rulers of Egypt. Manetho expert W. G. Waddell suggests that “the works of Manetho and Berossus may be interpreted as an expression of the rivalry of the two kings, Ptolemy and Antiochus, each seeking to proclaim the great antiquity of his land.” [Loeb edition: Manetho, p.x]

Everyone admits that these are fictional exaggerations, but when it comes to Manetho’s dynasties, the admission is not so forthcoming. The reason for this blindness is not hard to discern. It lies in the presuppositional hostility of secular scholarship for the Bible. If Manetho cannot be trusted, scholarship must rely much more heavily on the Bible, and that is not regarded as acceptable. . . .

We shall let W. G. Waddell, the editor of Manetho, have the last word: “But there were many errors in Manetho’s work from the very beginning: all are not due to the perversions of scribes and revisers. Many of the lengths of reigns have been found impossible: in some cases the names and sequence of kings as given by Manetho have proved untenable in the light of monumental evidence. If one may depend upon the extracts preserved in Josephus, Manetho’s work was not an authentic history of Egypt, exact in its details, as the Chaldaica of Berossus was, at least for later times. Manetho introduced into an already corrupted series of dynastic lists a number of popular traditions written in the characteristic Egyptian style. No genuine historical sense had been developed among the Egyptians, although Manetho’s work does illustrate the influence of Greek culture upon an Egyptian priest.” [Loeb edition, Manetho, pp.xxv-xxvi]

In other words, Manetho’s chronology is likely to be notoriously unreliable, particularly with its claims to ancient lineage. Yet scholarship has insisted on using it as the chronology to which all other histories of the Ancient Near East must conform.

Secondly, the histories of all other nations in the Ancient Near East are required to conform to the accredited Egyptian history. Thus, in the case of Israelite history, the standard method of the Academy is to date the Exodus by attempting to fit it into the accepted orthodoxy Egyptian chronology. And guess what–there is nothing in the standard Egyptian chronology that would be consistent with the events of the Exodus (devastating plagues, a slave people leaving, the Egyptian army and its Pharaoh being destroyed) occuring at the time they were supposed to have happened. However, since the Manetho chronology is sacrosanct amongst scholars, they have concluded that the biblical account is wrong, fanciful, mythical, and the work of religious propaganda.

Moreover, the imposition of the Manetho chronology upon all other histories of the region has meant that the dating of events in ancient Greece, Mynos, and Syria is problematic. Recorded events in those other civilisations, such as natural catastrophes (earthquakes, tidal waves, and famines) are compared with the Egyptian chronology and history, and the dating of these events is skewed (usually placed far back in time and made much older than the actual events themselves).

Thirdly, the Manetho chronological schema, in seeking to “prove” the ancient lineage of Egyptian, Ptolemaic civilisation, overlooks the fact that royal lines often bestow multiple names and titles on their kings. For Manetho, each name or title usually meant a distinct person, successively reigning. English history gives apt examples. The Prince of Wales often becomes the king of England. Prince Charles will become King Charles. But for Manetho, in arranging his chronology, this would represent two different people, two different reigns, and possibly in different dynasties. In English history we have two James: the Sixth (of Scotland) and the First (of England). For Manetho, these would be two different Pharaohs.

It was common in the ancient world to endow multiple names and titles on royal persons. It is not uncommon in the modern world. For example, in the case of Swedish royalty, the name of a particular Swedish sovereign could be:

Carl-Gustaf Bernadotte
Crown prince Carl-Gustaf
Duke of Jamtland
King of Sweden
Carl XVIth Gustaf
King Carl-Gustaf
Holder of the Serafim Order
Chief of State
(Lennart Moller, The Exodus Case: A Scientific Examination of the Exodus Story, and a Deep Look into the Red Sea. [ Copenhagen: Scandinavia Publishing House, 2000], p. 78)

If Manetho’s method had been employed, each of these would have become separate persons, part of a long dynasty, or possibly in different dynasties. This has led to the insertion of hundreds of years into the orthodoxy Egyptian history which are mythical. They never existed.

This orthodoxy was initially unable to be challenged from within. It was a severe career-limiting move. The first challenges in recent times have come from outside the liberal academic complex, from non-specialists who came to the problem with more open minds. The first of these was Immanuel Velikovsky, whose book Ages in Chaos (London: Sidwick and Jackson Ltd, 1952) was a reconstruction of ancient history from Exodus to King Akhnaton. He discussed documentary Egyptian evidence of a time of plagues, death, devastation, and a slave people in ancient Egypt from the Egyptian records themselves (but of course, according to the conventional academic prejudice, far earlier than the time of the Exodus.) He also drew amazing parallels between the Tel-el-Amarna correspondence between Egypt and Syria and northern Israel and the biblical accounts in the time of Elijah and Elisha–yet according to the conventional prejudice, the el-Amarna correspondence was centuries earlier.

The issue was taken up later by another non-specialist–Donavan A Courville in The Exodus Problem and Its Ramifications. (Loma Linda, CA: Challenge Books, 1971) However, these were not credited within the Academy–and were consigned to the realm of idiosyncracy. Thousands of accredited and professional scholars could not be wrong.

In recent years, however, some scholars from within the Academy have begun to revolt. It has been lead by Peter James (Peter James, I. J. Thorpe, Nikos Kokkinos, Robert Morkot and John Frankish, Centuries of Darkness: A Challenge to the Conventional Chronology of Old World Archaeology. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991)

The publisher’s blurb had this to say:

The Old World has confronted archaeologists with many riddles, perhaps the most tantalising of which is the Dark Age, an economic and cultural recession so devastating it lasted for 400 years from 1200 to 800 BC. Or did it? The dates for the Near East and Mediterranean are derived from the highly regarded chronology of ancient Egypt, but could not that itself have been miscalculated? This is the pioneering theory proposed by Peter James in an intricate piece of scholarly detective work.

Deciphering the clues from papyri and pottery, he and his team of experts search layer by layer through the excavated treasures of a vast area from Spain to Iran and from Denmark to Sudan, until they reach Egypt, the root of the labrinthine riddle. It is here that they unearth 250 years of ‘ghost history’. Once these are eliminated, fresh perspective is thrown not only on the reality of the Dark Age, but also on the Trojan War, the foundation of Rome, the origin of the Greek alphabet and the Golden Age of King Solomon. Centuries of Darkness is a masterpiece of archaeological reasoning which will revolutionise our view of the ancient world.

But the Academy fights on. The issue here is, assuming the fundamental truth of the Biblical historical records (which we do) why is it that for two centuries scholars have insisted on their unreliability and cling to the authority of Manetho, building up fantastical histories in a completely circular fashion?

The reason is that the more anti-Christian rationalist scholars assert their objectivity and independence, the more they are made subject to fables, myths, and wishful thinking. Man remains a creature: weak, limited, conditioned, derived, and dependant. This includes his rational faculties and abilities. The more he asserts his autonomous independence, the more he becomes unconscious of (or refuses to acknowledge) his limited and finite and conditioned capacities. That, in turn, produces prejudiced and perverted thinking in virtually every area of life. This is why the Bible declares that the Unbeliever is blind.

As we argued in our first post, there is little doubt that one of the reasons the Puritans are hated and ridiculed to this day is due to their faith in the Living God. Whole worlds of myth and untruths have been built up around them by scholars who are willingly conforming to the prejudices of their day. They want the myths to be true. The need the myths to be true.

A similar phenomenon has occurred with respect to ancient history. Since the Scriptures from the outset are assumed not to be true, something else must be. The mind of autonomous man is more fundamental than the Word of God. Scholarship quickly descends into mythmaking, but with a breathtaking insistence upon their impartiality and detachment at the same time! The reality is that if two hundred years of “experts” had taken the time and care to examine their initial assumptions and pre-commitments to the Manetho chronology, as well as their prejudice against the Old Testament, and candidly put these on display for debate and critique, this would never have happened.

All the while the emperor has had no clothes. When scholars turn away from self-conscious dependance upon the Living God, He gives them over to fables and lies.

>Scholastic Mythbusters, Part I

>Those Killjoy Puritans

One of the more pernicious myths of our age is that knowledge, particularly “modern” knowledge, is objective. The terms “rational”, “scientific”, “factual”, “objective” and “truth” are used as virtual equivalents. If something is said to be scientific, it is thereby considered necessarily factual, rational, and true. If it is rational, it must be scientific—and so forth.

This state of affairs rests on a stinking morass of decomposing assumptions. But because the grass appears green over the detritus, both the unthinking masses and the professional academics think all is well in the garden. Until, of course, a renegade starts to poke around and discovers the mess underneath.

We can add one more attribute to that which is factual, rational, scientific, and true. In our modern Age, repetition equates to truth. This is why urban legends and conspiracy theories are so persistent. Something incessantly repeated must be credible. After all, we live in the age of Enlightenment.

What this has produced in our modern Age is breathtaking arrogance amongst academics and professional scholars, on the one hand, and a tendency to be fooled or duped, on the other. The more our Age has asserted the primacy of reason, science, facts and truth, the more gullible and ignorant it has become.

Philosophers such as Polanyi and Popper have pointed out that the more truly rational and objective scientists are, the more they are sceptical, doubtful, and questioning. As the quality of scientists and academics declines, assumptions are, well, assumed—unconsciously, and without question. They are treated as beyond doubt, particularly if one wants to get a job in academia and have the respect of colleagues.

In this series of posts we will provide some examples of persistent errors, in unrelated fields, held intact as being true, objective, etc. by scholars and professional academics for years—yet which finally are demonstrated to be just plain wrong. They all beg the question of how scholarship could have failed so dismally, for so long.

Firstly, in the field of music. Percy Scholes, in his delightful and exhaustively researched volume, The Puritans and Music (Oxford: University Press, 1934, reprinted 1969), exposes the prevailing academic prejudice that the Puritans were killjoys who hated and suppressed music, fine clothes, fashion, art, drama, dancing, and opera. He reviews the copious works, all of which make the allegation, and most of which rely upon one another for authority and support (that is, they cite each other as authorities on the subject) on both sides of the Atlantic. For example, consider the following typical assertion:

The Pilgrims or Puritans . . . would have deemed concerts a very heterodox thing. . . . At the very start both Pilgrims and Puritans, although differing on many points of doctrine, united in a distrust of music. . . . The Pilgrims would have abolished it all but for the fact that the ancients enjoyed psalm singing in their religious services. (L C Elson, History of American Music—1915).

To this day, the myth remains powerful.

But it is a myth. Scholes demonstrates that if one lays prejudice and ideological (and probably religious) cant aside and actually studies the period and the historical evidence available from the time, the myth explodes and the Puritans emerge as a music loving, fun loving, boisterous and vibrant people. Scholes writes:

It has been my experience, during the months of study which the book has necessarily entailed, to find that every charge against the Puritans of freakishness or crankiness, when one looks into it, turns out to be empty. The Puritans were, it now seems clear to me, just normal English people of the period, of a particular religious trend of thought. (p.115)

We will cite but two instances. Firstly Oliver Cromwell was actually a great lover of music—Scholes goes so far as to call him an undoubted, genuine connoisseur. At the marriage of two of his daughters (which occurred at the same time) the feasting, the musical performance, and the festive dancing went on to five o’clock in the morning. (Needless to say, Cromwell was a Puritan of Puritans.)

And what of the dark clothes in which modern representations of Puritans are incessantly portrayed? That too is myth. It appears to have arisen because scholars assumed that that is what Puritans ought to have been like. It amounts to a kind of academic and scholarly ad hominem. But the facts are very different. Scholes (p. 105) cites authorities describing the Puritan Vice Chancellor of Oxford (a university which formally had supported the Stuart monarchy.)

The Puritan Vice-Chancellor’s dress he (Anthony Wood, 1659) described in detail, and very fine he must have looked walking down the High with his “hair powdred, cambric band with large costly band-strings, velvet jacket, breeches set round at knee with ribbons pointed, and Spanish leather boots with cambric tops.”

This was John Owen, DD, the Independent divine, one of the two or three most eminent Puritan preachers and most learned Puritan authors of the seventeenth century, Cromwell’s chaplain in Ireland, the preacher of the sermon to Parliament the day after the execution of the King, of the thanksgiving sermon for the victory of Worcester, and of Ireton’s funeral sermon. . . . A Puritan of the Puritans, a man of saintly life, who on the Restoration sacrificed all his career rather than conform against his conscience—and by the way, a flute player!

Well, the evidence uncovered by Scholes is voluminous and both exposes the myth for what it is, and explodes it. But the question is begged: How could so many scholars be fooled for so long? We suspect that in our rationalistic Age it occurs because they believe their own press. They all too often assume scholarly objectivity and proceed blithely to assert as fact what is mere supposition. Self-criticism has waned. Consequently, ignorance has risen.

The Enlightenment, with its deifying of human reason, in its belief that the fruit or produce of human reason was in actuality the voice of god, leads to credulity, error, myth, and ignorance. Post modernism has had a salutary effect in that it has exposed the objective rationalism of the modern world to ridicule—which is appropriate. Just as Elijah, the prophet of the Living God, lampooned and mocked the idols of his day, post modernism has lifted its voice up to mock the hubris of modern rationalism.

But, in the end, post modernism cannot carry the day, for it too is just another idol. It leaves us with a nuclear winter where academics live in holes and shelters, but few things grow.

In our next post, we will take up another modern example of rationalistic myths—this one drawn from the field of ancient Egyptian chronology.

>Myth and Superstition on the Rise

>A Man Has Got to Know His Limitations

Absolute brute objectivity is a myth as far as man is concerned. Absolute rationality is an idealistic abstraction. It does not exist. Objectivity and rationality are always to be written in lower case: it is a necessary and inevitable consequence of being a creature, not the Creator.

Only the Living and Eternal God is absolutely and infinitely objective and rational. Infinite objectivity and rationality arise from God being omniscient—of His infinite knowledge of all things, including His knowledge of Himself. Being a creature, our knowledge is conditioned firstly by our constitution—by the way we are made. It is also conditioned by our finite limitations. Our knowledge, being limited, can never be absolutely objective nor rational. It will always be constrained and limited by what we do not know—and we do not know what it is we don’t know.

As Job said so eloquently, when we know all that we can know of God, we have merely touched the hem of His garment, the word we hear, although true, is limited and faint. None can understand His mighty thunder. (Job 26: 14)

Human rationality and objectivity, then, is a function of conforming our truth to the Truth which God has revealed to us. As we do this, we become more reasoned, more objective, more truthful.

But mankind has a third impediment. To these limitations of being, shared with all creatures, even the angels, we must add the corruption of sin. Since the Fall, objectivity and rationality are not only limited, but they are distorted by our sinful prejudices and predispositions. The Scripture characterises the Unbeliever as blind and deaf. All the thoughts and intentions of his heart are only evil continually. He pathologically resists God at every point and seeks to exclude Him from the universe. This is such a massive distortion of the truth, such a colossal deceit, that every thought of man is twisted and distorted in some degree by this Great Lie. As Jeremiah observed: “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

The Enlightenment promoted the myth of pure Reason—of definitive rationality as the handmaiden of Truth. Yet even a brief reading of the philosophers and men of letters of the Enlightenment quickly shows them to be people of enormous prejudice, reflecting the preconditioning of their time. Who can forget, for example, Rousseau’s myth of the Noble Savage. Or the appeal to the Laws of Nature and Reason to justify the Reign of Terror in France. Their much vaunted rationalism can be seen now as little more than propaganda and its apologia.

The sad reality is that every fallen Athenian culture regards as rational that which is merely widely held. The more widespread a prejudice is, the more reasoned and rational it seems to be. Each age in Athens succeeds the former, looks back and with contempt or with condescension on the ages which have gone before, and dismisses them as ignorant, prejudiced and irrational. Why? They had to be ignorant, because they believed in slavery. Or, because they were prejudiced because they thought the earth was flat, or the sun revolved around the earth. Or, they were irrational because they thought that white races were superior–and so forth.

But it turns out each of these former ages firmly believed that their positions were based on reason—profoundly so. They believed they were acting rationally—emphatically so. Just as the philosophes of the Enlightenment so believed, yet espoused so many things no longer given even a moment’s credence today.

This leads to the promulgation of Tertullian’s Law of Athenian rationality: in Athens, authoritative rationality is a function of social currency. In other words, the more widely held a belief, the more rational it appears.

Now, modern Athenians will be quick to claim that a belief can only achieve widespread currency if it is rational in the first place. They see this as the Great Contribution of the Enlightenment to human civilisation. Autonomous man, supposedly freed by the Enlightenment from cant, prejudice, and superstition, now is able to think truthfully, according to the facts—just the fact, baby. Thus, in such a climate, only those beliefs which are already rationally grounded, can and will win widespread currency.

Clearly, modern Athenians have not read much of the Enlightenment, otherwise they would never make such specious claims.

But consider the logical fallacy involved in this particular piece of irrational legerdemain.

If a belief is rationally grounded and proven, it will achieve widespread currency.
Therefore, all beliefs which are widely held today must be rational and proven.

The fallacy of affirming the consequent—a prime example of which is displayed above—is as irrational today as it always was.

If one were to take any dogma which has achieved widespread acceptance and currency in our day and question it, two things would almost certainly follow. Firstly, the questioner would be assailed as ignorant, irrational, unreasonable, primitive, etc. etc. Secondly, no-one would even bother to discuss the rational foundation of the popular dogma in defending it. The presumed rationality of modern dogma is beyond question, simply because it is widely held. There are some things too obvious even to bother to defend.

For example, consider the nature and tenor of the outcry if we were to make the following propositions in the public square:

The Lord created the heavens and the earth in the space of six days, by the Word of His mouth, out of nothing.

Life begins at conception: the fertilized egg is a human being.

There is but one God and the Lord Jesus Christ is His Messiah. All other religions, including secular humanism, are idolatrous and untrue.

Government enforced redistribution of private property is theft.

Of course the outcry and scandal would be prodigious. But the tenor of the objection is what interests us. Modern Athens sees such propositions as inherently ridiculous, stupid, foolish—irrational. Why? Because the opposing propositions are rationally grounded, and comprehensively argued? Not at all. They just appear more rational, by virtue of their being widely held.

Increasingly, Athenian society is becoming superstitious. It is dominated by ideas and beliefs that have little, if any, genuine rational foundation, but are believed beyond doubt, nonetheless. The ultimate proof of these propositions is a democratic one. “Everyone believes in x; no-one any longer believes y. Therefore x must be reasonable and true”

An indication of the just how superstitious and unreasoned modern society has become is provided by the febrile insistence that “the vast majority is senior and responsible scientists believe that earth’s climate is getting warmer.” The polling booth has replaced reason and truth. In such a climate, to prove your case you have to have the numbers. If you have the numbers, the rationality of the case is thereby most certainly demonstrated.

Of course this is completely contrary to the logic of scientific discovery. In principle, all it takes is one accurate contrary observation to call into question an entire edifice of universally believed theories.

Ironically, it is precisely the insistence by modern Athens that autonomous Man has achieved absolute rationality and objectivity, that seduces him so crucially to the willing acceptance of superstition and myth.