The Suicide of the Human Mind

The Suicide of Thought

G. K. Chesterton ran the numbers on how the modern world has sought to dance with numerous partners–all of which have destroyed the dance itself.  There are hypotheses which end up destroying the very possibility of thought and reason.  Here is Chesterton’s list of rationalist suicides, destroying the very possibility of thought:

1.  Evolution

. . .  But if [evolution] means anything more, it mean that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a thing.  At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything.  This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.

2.  Skepticism.

Then there is the opposite attack on thought: that urged by Mr H. G. Wells when he insists that every separate thing is “unique”, and that there are no categories at all.  . . . Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected. . . . Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), “All chairs are quite different” he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms.  If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them “all chairs”. 

3. Relativism

Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test.  We often hear it said, for instance, “What is right in one age is wrong in another.”  . . . If the standard changes, how can there be any improvement, which implies a standard?  Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. 

4. Pragmatism

The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute.  But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute.  This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox.  Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first human needs is to something more than a pragmatist.

Conclusion:

The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things what make thought about the past or future simply impossible.  The theory of a complete change of standards in human history does not merely deprive us of the pleasure  of honouring our fathers; it deprives us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them.

[G. K. Chesterton, “The Suicide of Thought,”  Collected Works, Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 236ff.]

Propaganda Really Works–Sometimes

Smelling Rats

One of the signal attributes of the crusade by global warming apocalyptic warriors is its poor traction.  It is not for want of trying.  The media in general have jumped into the pot and used their respective megaphones.  Politicians have trumpeted the fearful cause from bully pulpits.  Schools have frightened young pupils to death in the attempt to raise a new generation of eco-warriors.  But the public remains spectacularly unmoved.  Why?  Are we all suicidal lemmings? 

More likely the public is smarter than our so-called betters.  A recent piece in the Washington Post gave five key reasons why the public remains unconvinced, if not downright sceptical, about global warming propaganda.

The Insiders: Five reasons voters don’t believe the White House about global warming

By Ed Rogers
May 8 at 9:55 am

The White House released a third iteration of the “U.S. National Climate Assessment,” claiming it is “the most comprehensive scientific assessment ever generated of climate change and its impacts across every region of America and major sectors of the U.S. economy.” The report emphasizes the need for “urgent action to combat the threats from climate change.” Well, here are five reasons voters don’t believe what the White House says on climate change:

1. Overreach. The White House doesn’t just want it both ways, it wants it every way. Increasingly, when there is a topical weather event, be it a warm typhoon in the Pacific or a cold snap in the United States, we hear it is caused by global warming.  But non-events, such as fewer tropical storms becoming hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico or the frustrating, inconvenient truth that there hasn’t been any warming in the past 15 years, are dismissed as meaningless because we are told you must evaluate climate change over the long term. On Tuesday, President Obama even took time to meet with local and national weather reporters as a way of emphasizing the effects of global warming on today’s weather. The left is inconsistent in its selection of what factors and events “prove” that manmade global warming is real.

2. Hypocrisy. Voters notice that the founding father of the global warming movement, Al Gore, has become fabulously wealthy by selling out to Middle Eastern oil and gas interests. Voters notice the mansions, private planes and the super-wealthy lifestyle.  And Gore is not the only global warming hypocrite. I would guess that after he leaves office, President Obama will never again fly on a commercial airline – and he will probably be traveling by Global Expresses, Gulfstreams and the occasional large Falcon, not even on the more modest, smaller private jets. Voters are on to the fact that the global warming crusaders want us to pay more and live with less — but, of course, the rules don’t apply to the politicians who want everybody else to sacrifice. Not to mention, the people who insult and belittle anyone who has a question about the “science” of manmade global warming are often the same people who categorically dismiss the scientific proof of the viability, safety and reliability of nuclear energy. I have a little test for the global warming crusaders: If you’re not for nuclear energy and against ice cream, your commitment to the cause is questionable.

3. The global warming cause fits too nicely with the president’s left-wing political agenda. The prescriptions for dealing with climate change are the same policy objectives the left has promoted for other reasons for at least the past 25 years. That is, redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, anti-growth, anti-development regulations, etc. Because they don’t have much support from voters, the left has to advance its cause through surreptitious maneuvering rather than forthright advocacy of its specific global warming policies. The left never answers the questions of who pays, how much and for what result.

4. A lack of faith in foreign cooperation. Absent any verifiable, enforceable global warming treaty, any unilateral moves by the United States would be pointless. After all, the left wants us to believe that global warming really is global and that fossil fuels burned in distant lands are every bit as harmful as they are when they are utilized here at home. I would love to see a poll that asks American voters if they think American tax dollars should be spent on global warming remedies in foreign lands. Of course, we all know the vast majority of Americans would say no.  Some say the United States should lead by example, but does anybody believe that if we affirmatively harm our own economy, others will somehow think that is a noble sacrifice and follow suit? The very notion is ridiculous.

5. This administration lacks credibility. For a long time, we have said in America, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we do X, Y or Z?”  Well, in the Obama era, that adage has morphed into, “If he couldn’t get a Web site right, how are we supposed to believe he knows how to control the climate?” Who really believes that a massive government tax and reordering of the economy in the name of stopping global warming or climate change or whatever will go as planned and the world’s thermostat will adjust to something the Democrats find more acceptable? Answer: Almost nobody. Voters don’t believe what the White House says on this issue in part because it has not been credible on so many other important issues. We’ve heard everything from “you can keep your health-care plan” to there is a “red line” in Syria. Why should anyone believe the White House now?

As I’ve said before, voters aren’t stupid. They know when they are not being leveled with. And all the bluster, intimidation and angry frothing won’t make their doubts go away or make the Obama administration any more believable.

When every bit of climate data is cacophonously trumpeted as “proving” human-caused global warming the only thing the rises is not global temperatures, but scepticism.  We urge the apocalypticists to keep at it.  They are doing a wonderful job of convincing sane men of the contrary.

The Cause of our Generation; The Great Shame of our Age

The Apple Argument against Abortion

Peter Kreeft argues from a non-controversial premise to a controversial conclusion:

1. We Know What an Apple Is

Our first principle should be as undeniable as possible, for arguments usually go back to their first principles. If we find our first premise to be a stone wall that cannot be knocked down when we back up against it, our argument will be strong. Tradition states and common sense dictates our premise that we know what an apple is. Almost no one doubted this, until quite recently. Even now, only philosophers, scholars, “experts,” media mavens, professors, journalists, and mind-molders dare to claim that we do not know what an apple is.

2. We Really Know What an Apple Really Is

From the premise that “we know what an apple is,” I move to a second principle that is only an explication of the meaning of the first: that we really know what an apple really is. If this is denied, our first principle is refuted. It becomes, “We know, but not really, what an apple is, but not really.” Step 2 says only, “Let us not ‘nuance’ Step 1 out of existence!”

3. We Really Know What Some Things Really Are

From Step 2, I deduce the third principle, also as an immediate logical corollary, that we really know what some things (other things than apples) really are. This follows if we only add the minor premise that an apple is another thing.

This third principle, of course, is the repudiation of skepticism. The secret has been out since Socrates that skepticism is logically self-contradictory. To say “I do not know” is to say “I know I do not know.” Socrates’s wisdom was not skepticism. He was not the only man in the world who knew that he did not know. He had knowledge; he did not claim to have wisdom. He knew he was not wise. That is a wholly different affair and is not self-contradictory. All forms of skepticism are logically self-contradictory, nuance as we will.

All talk about rights, about right and wrong, about justice, presupposes this principle that we really know what some things really are. We cannot argue about anything at all—anything real, as distinct from arguing about arguing, and about words, and attitudes—unless we accept this principle. We can talk about feelings without it, but we cannot talk about justice. We can have a reign of feelings—or a reign of terror—without it, but we cannot have a reign of law.

4. We Know What Human Beings Are

Our fourth principle is that we know what we are. If we know what an apple is, surely we know what a human being is. For we aren’t apples; we don’t live as apples, we don’t feel what apples feel (if anything). We don’t experience the existence or growth or life of apples, yet we know what apples are. A fortiori, we know what we are, for we have “inside information,” privileged information, more and better information.
We obviously do not have total, or even adequate, knowledge of ourselves, or of apples, or (if we listen to Aquinas) of even a flea. There is obviously more mystery in a human than in an apple, but there is also more knowledge. I repeat this point because I know it is often not understood: To claim that “we know what we are” is not to claim that we know all that we are, or even that we know adequately or completely or with full understanding anything at all of what we are. We are a living mystery, but we also know much of this mystery. Knowledge and mystery are no more incompatible than eating and hungering for more.

5. We Have Human Rights Because We Are Human

The fifth principle is the indispensable, common-sensical basis for human rights: We have human rights because we are human beings.

We have not yet said what human beings are (e.g., do we have souls?), or what human rights are (e.g., do we have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?), only the simple point that we have whatever human rights we have because we are whatever it is that makes us human.

This certainly sounds innocent enough, but it implies a general principle. Let’s call that our sixth principle.

6. Morality Is Based on Metaphysics

Metaphysics means simply philosophizing about reality. The sixth principle means that rights depend on reality, and our knowledge of rights depends on our knowledge of reality.

By this point in our argument, some are probably feeling impatient. These impatient ones are common-sensical people, uncorrupted by the chattering classes. They will say, “Of course. We know all this. Get on with it. Get to the controversial stuff.” Ah, but I suspect we began with the controversial stuff. For not all are impatient; others are uneasy. “Too simplistic,” “not nuanced,” “a complex issue”—do these phrases leap to mind as shields to protect you from the spear that you know is coming at the end of the argument?

The principle that morality depends on metaphysics means that rights depend on reality, or what is right depends on what is. Even if you say you are skeptical of metaphysics, we all do use the principle in moral or legal arguments. For instance, in the current debate about “animal rights,” some of us think that animals do have rights and some of us think they don’t, but we all agree that if they do have rights, they have animal rights, not human rights or plant rights, because they are animals, not humans or plants. For instance, a dog doesn’t have the right to vote, as humans do, because dogs are not rational, as humans are. But a dog probably does have a right not to be tortured. Why? Because of what a dog is, and because we really know a little bit about what a dog really is: We really know that a dog feels pain and a tree doesn’t. Dogs have feelings, unlike trees, and dogs don’t have reason, like humans; that’s why it’s wrong to break a limb off a dog but it’s not wrong to break a limb off a tree, and that’s also why dogs don’t have the right to vote but humans do.

7. Moral Arguments Presuppose Metaphysical Principles

The main reason people deny that morality must (or even can) be based on metaphysics is that they say we don’t really know what reality is, we only have opinions. They point out, correctly, that we are less agreed about morality than science or everyday practical facts. We don’t differ about whether the sun is a planet or whether we need to eat to live, but we do differ about things like abortion, capital punishment, and animal rights.

But the very fact that we argue about it—a fact the skeptic points to as a reason for skepticism—is a refutation of skepticism. We don’t argue about how we feel, about subjective things. You never hear an argument like this: “I feel great.” “No, I feel terrible.”

For instance, both pro-lifers and pro-choicers usually agree that it’s wrong to kill innocent persons against their will and it’s not wrong to kill parts of persons, like cancer cells. And both the proponents and opponents of capital punishment usually agree that human life is of great value; that’s why the proponent wants to protect the life of the innocent by executing murderers and why the opponent wants to protect the life even of the murderer. They radically disagree about how to apply the principle that human life is valuable, but they both assume and appeal to that same principle.

8. Might Making Right

All these examples so far are controversial. How to apply moral principles to these issues is controversial. What is not controversial, I hope, is the principle itself that human rights are possessed by human beings because of what they are, because of their being—and not because some other human beings have the power to enforce their will. That would be, literally, “might makes right.” Instead of putting might into the hands of right, that would be pinning the label of “right” on the face of might: justifying force instead of fortifying justice. But that is the only alternative, no matter what the political power structure, no matter who or how many hold the power, whether a single tyrant, or an aristocracy, or a majority of the freely voting public, or the vague sentiment of what Rousseau called “the general will.” The political form does not change the principle. A constitutional monarchy, in which the king and the people are subject to the same law, is a rule of law, not of power; a lawless democracy, in which the will of the majority is unchecked, is a rule of power, not of law.

9. Either All Have Rights or Only Some Have Rights

The reason all human beings have human rights is that all human beings are human. Only two philosophies of human rights are logically possible. Either all human beings have rights, or only some human beings have rights. There is no third possibility. But the reason for believing either one of these two possibilities is even more important than which one you believe.

Suppose you believe that all human beings have rights. Do you believe that all human beings have rights because they are human beings? Do you dare to do metaphysics? Are human rights “inalienable” because they are inherent in human nature, in the human essence, in the human being, in what humans, in fact, are? Or do you believe that all human beings have rights because some human beings say so—because some human wills have declared that all human beings have rights? If it’s the first reason, you are secure against tyranny and usurpation of rights. If it’s the second reason, you are not. For human nature doesn’t change, but human wills do. The same human wills that say today that all humans have rights may well say tomorrow that only some have rights.

10. Why Abortion Is Wrong

Some people want to be killed. I won’t address the morality of voluntary euthanasia here. But clearly, involuntary euthanasia is wrong; clearly, there is a difference between imposing power on another and freely making a contract with another. The contract may still be a bad one, a contract to do a wrong thing, and the mere fact that the parties to the contract entered it freely does not automatically justify doing the thing they contract to do. But harming or killing another against his will, not by free contract, is clearly wrong; if that isn’t wrong, what is?

But that’s what abortion is. Mother Teresa argued, simply, “If abortion is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” The fetus doesn’t want to be killed; it seeks to escape. Did you dare to watch The Silent Scream? Did the media dare to allow it to be shown? No, they will censor nothing except the most common operation in America.

11. The Argument From the Nonexistence of Nonpersons

Are persons a subclass of humans, or are humans a subclass of persons? The issue of distinguishing humans and persons comes up only for two reasons: the possibility that there are nonhuman persons, like extraterrestrials, elves, angels, gods, God, or the Persons of the Trinity, or the possibility that there are some nonpersonal humans, unpersons, humans without rights.

Traditional common sense and morality say all humans are persons and have rights. Modern moral relativism says that only some humans are persons, for only those who are given rights by others (i.e., those in power) have rights. Thus, if we have power, we can “depersonalize” any group we want: blacks, slaves, Jews, political enemies, liberals, fundamentalists—or unborn babies.

A common way to state this philosophy is the claim that membership in a biological species confers no rights. I have heard it argued that we do not treat any other species in the traditional way—that is, we do not assign equal rights to all mice. Some we kill (those that get into our houses and prove to be pests); others we take good care of and preserve (those that we find useful in laboratory experiments or those we adopt as pets); still others we simply ignore (mice in the wild). The argument concludes that therefore, it is only sentiment or tradition (the two are often confused, as if nothing rational could be passed down by tradition) that assigns rights to all members of our own species.

12. Three Pro-Life Premises and Three Pro-Choice Alternatives

We have been assuming three premises, and they are the three fundamental assumptions of the pro-life argument. Any one of them can be denied. To be pro-choice, you must deny at least one of them, because taken together they logically entail the pro-life conclusion. But there are three different kinds of pro-choice positions, depending on which of the three pro-life premises is denied.

The first premise is scientific, the second is moral, and the third is legal. The scientific premise is that the life of the individual member of every animal species begins at conception. (This truism was taught by all biology textbooks before Roe and by none after Roe; yet Roe did not discover or appeal to any new scientific discoveries.) In other words, all humans are human, whether embryonic, fetal, infantile, young, mature, old, or dying.

The moral premise is that all humans have the right to life because all humans are human. It is a deduction from the most obvious of all moral rules, the Golden Rule, or justice, or equality. If you would not be killed, do not kill. It’s just not just, not fair. All humans have the human essence and, therefore, are essentially equal.
The legal premise is that the law must protect the most basic human rights. If all humans are human, and if all humans have a right to life, and if the law must protect human rights, then the law must protect the right to life of all humans.

If all three premises are true, the pro-life conclusion follows. From the pro-life point of view, there are only three reasons for being pro-choice: scientific ignorance—appalling ignorance of a scientific fact so basic that nearly everyone in the world knows it; moral ignorance—appalling ignorance of the most basic of all moral rules; or legal ignorance—appalling ignorance of one of the most basic of all the functions of law. But there are significant differences among these different kinds of ignorance.

Scientific ignorance, if it is not ignoring, or deliberate denial or dishonesty, is perhaps pitiable but not morally blame-worthy. You don’t have to be wicked to be stupid. If you believe an unborn baby is only “potential life” or a “group of cells,” then you do not believe you are killing a human being when you abort and might have no qualms of conscience about it. (But why, then, do most mothers who abort feel such terrible pangs of conscience, often for a lifetime?)

Most pro-choice arguments, during the first two decades after Roe, disputed the scientific premise of the pro-life argument. It might be that this was almost always dishonest rather than honest ignorance, but perhaps not, and at least it didn’t directly deny the essential second premise, the moral principle. But pro-choice arguments today increasingly do.

Perhaps pro-choicers perceive that they have no choice but to do this, for they have no other recourse if they are to argue at all. Scientific facts are just too clear to deny, and it makes no legal sense to deny the legal principle, for if the law is not supposed to defend the right to life, what is it supposed to do? So they have to deny the moral principle that leads to the pro-life conclusion. This, I suspect, is a vast and major sea change.

The camel has gotten not just his nose, but his torso under the tent. I think most people refuse to think or argue about abortion because they see that the only way to remain pro-choice is to abort their reason first. Or, since many pro-choicers insist that abortion is about sex, not about babies, the only way to justify their scorn of virginity is a scorn of intellectual virginity. The only way to justify their loss of moral innocence is to lose their intellectual innocence.

If the above paragraph offends you, I challenge you to calmly and honestly ask your own conscience and reason whether, where, and why it is false.

13. The Argument from Skepticism

The most likely response to this will be the charge of dogmatism. How dare I pontificate with infallible certainty, and call all who disagree either mentally or morally challenged! All right, here is an argument even for the metaphysical skeptic, who would not even agree with my very first and simplest premise, that we really do know what some things really are, such as what an apple is. (It’s only after you are pinned against the wall and have to justify something like abortion that you become a skeptic and deny such a self-evident principle.)

Roe used such skepticism to justify a pro-choice position. Since we don’t know when human life begins, the argument went, we cannot impose restrictions. (Why it is more restrictive to give life than to take it, I cannot figure out.) So here is my refutation of Roe on its own premises, its skeptical premises: Suppose that not a single principle of this essay is true, beginning with the first one. Suppose that we do not even know what an apple is. Even then abortion is unjustifiable.

Let’s assume not a dogmatic skepticism (which is self-contradictory) but a skeptical skepticism. Let us also assume that we do not know whether a fetus is a person or not. In objective fact, of course, either it is or it isn’t (unless the Court has revoked the Law of Noncontradiction while we were on vacation), but in our subjective minds, we may not know what the fetus is in objective fact. We do know, however, that either it is or isn’t by formal logic alone.

A second thing we know by formal logic alone is that either we do or do not know what a fetus is. Either there is “out there,” in objective fact, independent of our minds, a human life, or there is not; and either there is knowledge in our minds of this objective fact, or there is not.

So, there are four possibilities:

1. The fetus is a person, and we know that; The fetus is a person, but we don’t know that; The fetus isn’t a person, but we don’t know that;
2. The fetus isn’t a person, and we know that. What is abortion in each of these four cases?

In Case 1, where the fetus is a person and you know that, abortion is murder. First-degree murder, in fact. You deliberately kill an innocent human being.

In Case 2, where the fetus is a person and you don’t know that, abortion is manslaughter. It’s like driving over a man-shaped overcoat in the street at night or shooting toxic chemicals into a building that you’re not sure is fully evacuated. You’re not sure there is a person there, but you’re not sure there isn’t either, and it just so happens that there is a person there, and you kill him. You cannot plead ignorance. True, you didn’t know there was a person there, but you didn’t know there wasn’t either, so your act was literally the height of irresponsibility. This is the act Roe allowed.

In Case 3, the fetus isn’t a person, but you don’t know that. So abortion is just as irresponsible as it is in the previous case. You ran over the overcoat or fumigated the building without knowing that there were no persons there. You were lucky; there weren’t. But you didn’t care; you didn’t take care; you were just as irresponsible. You cannot legally be charged with manslaughter, since no man was slaughtered, but you can and should be charged with criminal negligence.

Only in Case 4 is abortion a reasonable, permissible, and responsible choice. But note: What makes Case 4 permissible is not merely the fact that the fetus is not a person but also your knowledge that it is not, your overcoming of skepticism. So skepticism counts not for abortion but against it. Only if you are not a skeptic, only if you are a dogmatist, only if you are certain that there is no person in the fetus, no man in the coat, or no person in the building, may you abort, drive, or fumigate.

This undercuts even our weakest, least honest escape: to pretend that we don’t even know what an apple is, just so we have an excuse for pleading that we don’t know what an abortion is.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor.

Peter Kreeft ends with this postscript:

I hope a reader can show me where I’ve gone astray in the sequence of 13 steps that constitute this argument. I honestly wish a pro-choicer would someday show me one argument that proved that fetuses are not persons. It would save me and other pro-lifers enormous grief, time, effort, worry, prayers, and money. But until that time, I will keep arguing, because it’s what I do as a philosopher. It is my weak and wimpy version of a mother’s shouting that something terrible is happening: Babies are being slaughtered. I will do this because, as Edmund Burke declared, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” 

Hollow Men

Blind Faith and Vicious Circles

Myopic new atheism reasons something like this:  science and Unbelief is reasonable because it is evidence based, which then becomes subject to human reason.  Religion has no evidence, and employs no reason.  Believing something for which there is no evidence is childish at best, madly delusional at worst. 

Poor old Sam Harris jumps into the trap showing that he has not considered the fatal weakness of his own position:

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification.  When their beliefs are extremely common we call them “religious”; otherwise, they are likely to be called “mad”, “psychotic”, or “delusional”.  [Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2004), p. 72.]

Hold on a minute there, Sam.  Just a mild challenge: without presupposing the authority of reason, and without employing it, please establish and warrant its authority and veracity.  You cannot?  No.  So your arguments are merrily swirling around in a vicious circle?  Now, let’s just revisit the meaning of “mad”, “psychotic” and “delusional” again, shall we.
 

Or consider this example of arrogant, haughty foolishness:

The theist argument that science and reason are also based on faith is specious.  Faith is belief in the absence of supportive evidence.  Science is belief in the presence of supportive evidence.  And reason is just the procedure by which humans ensure that their conclusions are consistent with the theory that produced them and with the data that test these conclusions.  [Victor Stenger, The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (New York: Prometheus Books, 2009), p.15.]

The vicious circle remains firmly in place, despite Mr Stenger’s willing blindness.  Supportive evidence.  Why is the evidence supportive?  What evidence persuades you that it is authoritative?  More evidence.  But more evidence is equally subject to your sensory observations, non?  Without appealing either to your sensory observations, or to reason, establish the credibility and trustworthiness of both.  Since there is nothing outside of man to which you can appeal, or upon which you can presuppose the authority and trustworthiness of either evidence or reason, you are lost in the depths of darkness from the get-go.  Where we come from we call that wilful ignorance.

Immanuel Kant has been hailed as the one who provided Western philosophy with its own archimedean point. It is said he established the veracity of reason and made room for faith.  He did neither, but when you are clutching at straws, anything will do.  Kant had been disturbed by Hume’s scepticism.  He wanted to escape Hume’s scepticism over human observation (and, by implication reason).  He did neither.  He made it worse. 

Kant knew that Hume was right.  If you base knowledge upon human observation, presupposing the autonomy of man, you are on a hiding to nothing.  He grasped the nettle.  Let’s not worry about whether there really is a world “out there”.  Let’s just celebrate the fact that our senses tell us there is something out there and go with that. 

We no longer need wonder whether our visual images match some objective external world, or whether induction and causation apply to objects outside our minds.  All we really care about, Kant triumphantly claimed, is the world of ideas within our skulls.  That’s all we can know anyway.  There’s no long a question of whether our sense are reliable, of whether our ideas accurately match the world. [ Mitch Stokes, A Shot of Faith to the Head (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012), p. 35.]

We can never know things as they really are, according to Kant.  We can only know as our senses and minds project upon reality.  We can only know things as they seem to be.  Hume’s sceptical doubt became turbo-charged by Kant.

Chaps like Harris, Stenger, Dawkins et al.  parade around trumpeting reason, rationality, evidence, science even as they hide the dirty secrets of Hume and Kant away in the cupboard.  They collectively ignore them–because they have no answer to give.  The trumpeting of their autonomous “evidence” based “reason” is hollow to say the least.  

Fly, You Fools!

 Unbelief’s Dirty Little Secrets

The Bible says that the fool is one who denies God’s existence: “the fool says in his heart, ‘there is no God’.”  (Psalm 14:1).  At first glance this statement on its own does not allow us to declare with certainty that all Unbelievers are therefore fools.  To draw that conclusion would entail us falling into the fourth form logical fallacy of affirming the consequent.  The subsequent declarations in Psalm 14, however, put the matter beyond dispute: all Unbelievers are indeed fools.

1 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
    They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds,
    there is none who does good.

² The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man,
    to see if there are any who understand,
    who seek after God.

³ They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
    there is none who does good,
    not even one. (Psalm 14: 1-3)

On the other hand, Unbelief confronts us with an array of arguments to the opposite: it is the Believer who is foolish and ignorant. Is Belief and Unbelief destined, then, to pass like ships in the night.  Not really.  Unbelief at its most honest candidly acknowledges its own foolishness.
 

Take, for example, the knowledge which comes to us from our senses.  Can we have any knowledge apart from our senses?  Many rationalists would say not.  Yet knowledge and truth from our senses can never be verified by Unbelief, because “proving up” such empirical knowledge relies upon–you guessed it–the senses.  The circle is vicious.  The Unbeliever can never step outside his sense perception to prove the truth of what he is sensing.  We simply cannot step outside our senses to compare the visual images behind our eyes with the objects “out there”.  As Mitch Stokes puts it, “We can’t even check to see whether there is and ‘out there’ out there, to see whether there’s an external world.”  We cannot provide “evidence” for the existence of the external world without employing the very senses we are supposedly attempting to authenticate.  The circle is very tight and incredibly vicious.  Many Unbelievers prefer not to think about it.  It becomes a guilty secret, locked away in the family cupboard, that nobody talks about in polite society lest Unbelief has to face up to how foolish it really is. 

Stokes goes on to cite the enfant terrible of Unbelief:

David Hume–one of the towering inspirations of contemporary atheism–conceded that we really have no good reason to believe that the world outside of us resembles the perceptual images inside us.  Perhaps there isn’t an “external” world; it’s hard to say.  This, he said, is the “whimsical condition of mankind”.  [Believers might rather, more accurately say “the foolish condition of mankind”.]  And the twentieth-century American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine said that the Humean condition is simply the human condition.  Our senses–like us–are destined to remain within the boundary of our skin.  Their limitations are ours. 

This goes for all the ways we form beliefs, for all our cognitive faculties, whether memory, introspection, or even reason itself.  We can never step outside these belief-forming mechanisms to independently verify (sic) their reliability.  [Mitch Stokes, A Shot of Faith to the Head (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012), p. 21.]

These limitations are the condition of being a finite creature.  Unbelief means these limitations operate as a vicious circle.  Jean Paul Sartre once observed that unless a fact or point of data or a value has an infinite reference point, it has no meaning.  Hume had already proven that it also has no verification.  Unbelief is foolishness itself.  Or, as Paul puts it, Unbelief professes to be wise, but becomes progressively foolish.  Paul knew his Psalms. 

But Hume was even more destructive of his own.  Stokes goes on:

Speaking of reason itself, Hume has a magnificent argument for what he considers, because of his evidentialism, the flimsiness of inferences we might attempt to make about the surrounding world. It’s one of the best arguments in all of philosophy. 

Hume recognized that we all expect, for example, the sun to rise tomorrow.  he then asked what only a philsopher or child could ask: Why do we expect this?  The answer is, because the sun has always risen.  But Hume notices that this would only count as a good reason if we knew that the future will resemble the past. . . . (T)he argument or reason for believing that the sun will rise tomorrow must be something like this: the sun has always risen in the past, and because the future will resemble the past, the sun will rise tomorrow.  . . .

Hume followed his evidentialism where it inevitably led: he concluded that we’re irrational in believing that the future will resemble the past.  After all, we have no non-circular argument for it; there’s no evidence to support it. And once this belief goes, so must our belief that the sun will rise tomorrow–and for any other belief about things in the world we have yet to see.  (Ibid., p. 21f)

Can anyone actually live like this?  No.  Herein, then, is the foolishness of Unbelief: it cannot deal with the world as it really is; it cannot known for certain what the world is like; its irrationalisms constantly bubble up like Rotorua mud pools.  But Unbelief ignores its irrationality because it has to.  “Our instincts are just too strong for philosophy to overcome.  We’re irrational, but it keeps us alive.  A world of whimsy.”  (Ibid., p. 23). 

Now Hume attempted to escape this dilemma by agreeing that senses lead one into a vicious irrational circle from which there is no escape.  But reason, not human experience, that’s another matter.  Not at all.  It’s just that every bolt hole that Unbelief scurries into has the same dilemmas, the same paradoxes, the same irrationality.  How does one verify one’s reasoning?  By reason.  The Humean paradox remains.  Unbelief is riddled, shot out of the skies with the scepticism that always attends the finite creature basing all upon the foundation of himself. 

    The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
    They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds,
    there is none who does good. (Psalm 14:1)

Gadflies Wanted

Climate science needs gadflies

Matt Ridley
Author of The Rational Optimist
(This article was published on Matt Ridley’s blog; it was also published in the Wall Street Journal.)

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is the third in the series on confirmation bias.
I argued last week that the way to combat confirmation bias-the tendency to behave like a defense attorney rather than a judge when assessing a theory in science-is to avoid monopoly. So long as there are competing scientific centers, some will prick the bubbles of theory reinforcement in which other scientists live.

For constructive critics, this is the problem with modern climate science. They don’t think it’s a conspiracy theory, but a monopoly that clings to one hypothesis (that carbon dioxide will cause dangerous global warming) and brooks less and less dissent. Again and again, climate skeptics are told they should respect the consensus, an admonition wholly against the tradition of science.

Last month saw two media announcements of preliminary new papers on climate.

Unbelief Under Threat

Shout Loudly

We live in an era when Unbelief is vehemently opposed to the Christian faith.  Yet never have the claims of Unbelief (secularist, rationalist, materialist, evolutionist) been so vacuous, so self-defeating, so stupid.  This is more than a state of being “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  It is a fury borne out of the frustration of a vacuous soul.

Modern Unbelief is premised upon an angry prejudice against the Living God.  In the early centuries of the Enlightenment there was a characteristic smugness,  hubris, and disdain of religion in general, but of Christianity in particular.  Christians were nothing more than ignorant, superstitious dolts.  As Unbelief went along its not-so-merry way its foundations began to crumble.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Too Many Hypocrites in the Halls of Reason

The Odd Delusion
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, July 12, 2011

This is why I could never become an atheist or part of the skeptic community. Too many factions, divisions, snarls, petty fights, and so on. Worshipping the goddess Reason, they descend into frenzies of irrationality at the slightest provocation. I am tempted to say of them what Chesterton once observed about the enlightened ones at the French Revolution. They worshipped at the altar of the goddess Reason, when that was the deity who had smiled upon them least.

>The End of State Education, Part #5

>Resistance is Futile

The litany of the forces arrayed against quality state education systems is long. We believe these forces make state education’s decline inevitable. Without a thoroughgoing reformation of the fundaments of Western society itself, resistance is futile. The Borg is here.

We know that in New Zealand roughly one third of all graduates from state schools are functionally illiterate and innumerate. They cannot read supermarket shelf labels. Nor can they compare prices. We also know that on any given school day one tenth of pupils will be absent, without a conscientious reason. Truancy is systemic.

Recently we sought to interview potential candidates for a teaching position in our Christian school. These candidates were committed Christians; they were currently studying at a teacher training institution; they were zealous for their prospective careers–but were unable to write a sentence that was grammatically or syntactically correct. Apparently they had never learned after thirteen years of state schooling what a full-stop was, or how one was to begin a sentence. They had all graduated with “flying colours” from NCEA levels 11 through 13 in English! Sadly they were unemployable in our school.

These folk were neither functionally illiterate nor innumerate–but they were incompetent in even the rudiments of language and maths. This, of course, meant that their ability to think, reason, encapsulate, describe, argue, and comprehend was severely curtailed. We guess that this cohort would represent another third of graduates from state schools.

Those who think that starting a new state funded programme (for example, Early Childhood Education), or shrinking classroom sizes, or raising teacher salaries, or introducing national testing will turn the tide are naive. They have not reckoned with the tsunami of the secular forces arrayed against state schools. It is bigger by far than any ten metre wall of water racing into Sendai.

Let’s name two of these secular forces. The first is statism–which arguably is the established religion of our day. By this we mean that for many the state or the government is the ultimate reality and force. Name any social, political, material, economic or cultural problem and within a nano-second the conversation will have become political–by which we mean that “the government needs to do something, or this, or that” will have been introduced into the conversation. Functionally our society looks to government as its god.

The spin-off effect upon state education is direct. The state’s “long term” solution to any problem is to attempt to use its schools to change human nature and action to solve society’s perceived problems. Government as redeemer translates into schools as agents of socialisation and state propaganda, not education. This is a weight which schools simply cannot bear. They both stop educating and fail miserably in socialisation.

The second secular force also has religious roots. When the West turned away from the Living God philosophical scepticism was the inevitable long term outcome. Knowledge lost its point of integration and so fractured into thousands of pieces. Three hundred years of post-Enlightenment maturation has allowed scepticism to reap a prodigious harvest. Unbelief now understands that it can no longer talk about culture, but only multi-cultural reality. It can no longer speak of truth, but only perspectives. Rather than knowledge, it is reduced to telling stories about the world. It can no longer speak intelligibly about mankind; rather, more “accurately” only an emerging life-form. Correspondence between what we think we know and the actual world is in itself impossible. Truth is prejudice. Knowledge is opinion. Any claims for either beyond this is nothing more than adding ignorance and stubbornness and arrogance to the mix.

The end result of scepticism is pluralism. You can have as many truths as there are people or opinions. This drive to pluriformity is relentless. We have now been gravely informed by Stephen Hawking that we must no longer speak of a universe, but multiverses.

Scepticism means that education is impossible in the sense of a teacher imparting actual truth and knowledge to students. This is why state school systems are failing–and will continue to do so. In a philosophically sceptical world to attempt to teach someone can never rise beyond being an act of arrogant, presumptuous intellectual imperialism.

The only course–and this is now the current paradigm in education–is constructivism. This refers to education being made subservient to pedagogy, and a particular kind of pedagogy at that. It is a way of “teaching” where the “teacher” becomes merely a facilitator, enabling the pupil to construct their own meaning, truth, and perspectives. In this sceptical world-view–which now dominates the West–to impart knowledge is to impose and enslave; it is to do serious damage to the pupil. It impedes true enlightenment which is self-discovery and individual perspectival sovereignty. The only recourse of state education systems is to affirm everything, which is to deny nothing.

Above all, the child must be affirmed, rather than taught.

Making children feel good about themselves has been on of the main objectives of US schools during the past three decades. By the time they are seven or eight years of age, American children have internalised the prevailing psychobabble and can proclaim the importance of avoiding negative emotions and of high self-esteem. Yet this has had not perceptible impact on their school performance.
Robert Whelan, ed, The Corruption of the Curriculum, p. 9

Maybe not, but the child will be well on the way to constructing their own private curriculum–and that is the whole point in a culture which is both democratic and Unbelieving. Scepticism can only mean self-discovery–whatever that might mean–not conformity to an authoritative Truth.

Western state schools cannot do aught, but fail. http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1903386594&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Alex Standish, who has taught both in the UK and the US,  has provided a case study using geography as a subject to illustrate how scepticism has not only destroyed the subject, but has reduced it to incoherence. In his essay, “Geography Used to Be About Maps”, he shows how the modern UK curriculum now specifies that geography is about teaching students self-awareness.

[The curriculum’s] emphasis upon the personal ethics of pupils is apparent in its specifications of content document: “Candidates should be encouraged to examine their own values as they analyse the values of others and to become aware of the power relations implicit in any situation and the conflicts and inequalities which may arise.”
Whelan, ed., op cit., p. 34. Emphasis, ours.

Yes, geography used to be about maps. Now it is about self-examination. Scepticism’s fruit.

Standish goes on:

In post-structuralism, truth is replaced by truths and knowledge by knowledges. Thus, much of our present inherited knowledge is dismissed as only one perspective: that of a Western, white, male, middle-class elite. If knowledge can no longer be abstracted from the particular social context in which it arose, it cannot be separated from the prejudices or values of the individual who constructed it.
Ibid., p.42

Scepticism has silenced the teacher. He dare not speak or teach, lest he impose his prejudices and values upon students. Rather, he must facilitate a student’s self-discovery of his own values and the values of his peers.

Every subject is being inundated by the sceptical tsunami. Even science. A UK recent report entitled, “Science Education in State Schools” produced, in part, to understand why science as a subject has declined in “popularity” in state schools called for a radical re-write of the science curriculum. The subject must be made explicitly to engage with the “enthusiasms and concerns” of students. Here is the clanger: “science education can only succeed when students believe that the science they are being taught is of personal worth to themselves.” (Whelan, op cit., p.120) Personalised curricula, self-discovery, values education, constructivism . . . scepticism.

“State education” is now an irrecoverable oxymoron.

>The End of Education, Part #2

>Truth As Endless Circles

State education systems are generally failing throughout the West. This is certainly true in New Zealand where we are told that one in three graduates from the system emerge functionally illiterate and innumerate. They cannot read the labels on goods in supermarkets; nor do they understand prices. One prosaic anecdote illustrates the problem: this from The Veteran who blogs at No Minister.

Had occasion today to drop by the supermarket to replenish the beer frig. I drink Carlsberg and they were offering 12 packs at $18.99. Stacked right beside them were 24 packs of the same brand at $58.

Asked one of the staff standing close by how this could be so. He confirmed the $58 price tag was correct. Said to him that I didn’t think they would be selling too many of these. His response … “I wouldn’t want you to bet on that because you would lose”.

Can Western state education systems be fixed? Are they redeemable? The prognosis is not good. It is impossible to reform or change in a vacuum. The pagan religious and philosophical foundations are now so overwhelmingly powerful and pervasive in the West that they are not only tearing down the old state education system, they are also making its reform impossible. It is hard to see that there can be any substantial reformation, without a societal rejection of the foundations upon which state education is built.

In the first of this series, we argued that state education is failing because the curriculum has become politicised. This we see as inevitable because in the West the prerogatives of the Living God have been replaced by the state. Overwhelmingly our society looks to the government to providential provider, lawgiver, teacher, redeemer, deliverer and saviour. To answer these calls and in a vain attempt to meet these expectations the state turns to its education system as one of its primary means of achieving its messianic aims. Schools will produce the New Model Man and act as the primary socialisation agent. Education in the truth is replaced by imperatives of socialisation.

As long as the state is regarded by the overwhelming majority of people as having the honour and functions of a secular deity the politicisation of state schools will not abate.

A second reason why the failing state education system appears irredeemable is that there is no longer any societal conviction as to what is truth. Now this has been a long time coming, but it is the inevitable outcome when two conditions emerge: firstly, a denial of the Living God; and, secondly, democratic political systems. Put those two things together and eventually scepticism wins.

The Enlightenment saw the first serious philosophical rejection of the Christian faith. Within a generation Hume was propounding scepticism–the notion that, in the end, we cannot know anything for sure. Kant, arguably the most significant of all European philosophers, professed himself deeply troubled by Hume’s scepticism. To avoid the inevitable progeny of atheism–that one can not be certain of anything–Kant agreed with Hume that whilst we cannot know anything as it really is, man can impute or insert meaning into his existence.

Two streams flowed down from Kantianism. The first was authoritarian, centralised statism where the assertion of truth rested with the dictatorial state. Propositions were true because the state said they were. This option flowered under Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler. Under this post-Kantian option truth is true because the government says it is. State school systems thrived because the state defined the truth and could adopt an authoritative curriculum.

The second Kantian stream is one we are more familiar with in the West. Truth is democratised. If man does not receive the truth, but exports it and imparts it to reality, it follows that we can no longer speak of absolute truth in a democratic society, but only opinions and perspectives and framing and narratives and discourse. The upshot is that there is no authoritative tradition to pass on to the next generation any longer. There is no settled truth about anything; therefore, there can be no settled truth tradition to impart. Therefore, there is nothing authoritative to teach. There is only a cluster of perspectives to describe.

According to Professor Furedi,

. . . contemporary pedagogy has lost faith in the importance of knowledge and the search for the truth. Increasingly educators insist that there is no such things as the truth and children are instructed that there are no right or wrong answers. (Robert Whelan ed., The Corruption of the Curriculum, p.7)

Hume would have agreed. Hume has (temporarily) won the religious and philosophical war in the West. His seed is now fully sprouted up in the state education system. Turn away from the Living God and truth which holds man to account and upon which he can build his life dies culturally and institutionally.

When truth becomes nothing more than a discovery and description of multiple “discourses”, the impact upon state education systems in time becomes pervasive. It affects everything in the school.

The relativistic turn in pedagogy . . . has profound implications for the way that the curriculum is perceived. If the meaning of the truth and the status of knowledge are negotiable, then so is the curriculum. . . . More importantly, the diminished status assigned to knowledge has encouraged a relativistic orientation towards standards. That is why officials have been so pragmatic about the way they wheel and deal about the content of school subjects.
Ibid., p. 7f.

Does this sound familiar? It is increasingly the norm through all state education systems in the West. It is not without significance that the “new” curriculum adopted by the Ministry of Education in New Zealand is nothing of the sort. It is a listing of broad subject heads, about which motherhood-and-apple-pie statements are made. The implication: each school, teacher, and pupil will make it up as they go along. We kid you not. The new, enhanced, super-dooper state curriculum, with which all state schools and state teachers have to comply, is a mere fifty pages long. Yes, you read that right. Fifty pages only. For everything. For thirteen long years of state education. This means the de-facto state curriculum is really a wax nose to be bent, shaped, and moulded by schools into multi-perspectival irrelevance and confusion. It has become a pedagogical Balel.

The NZ state Curriculum document boasts a motif of the nautilus sea shell. Lest any miss the point, the preface to the Curriculum explains its meaning and significance:

Since it first appeared on the cover of The New Zealand Curriculum Framework in 1993, the nautilus has become a familiar symbol for the New Zealand Curriculum. It reappears in this curriculum with a new look.

In real life, the nautilus is a marine animal with a spiral shell. The shell has as many as thirty chambers lined with nacre (mother-of-pearl). The nautilus creates a new chamber as it outgrows each existing one, the successive chambers forming what is known as a logarithmic spiral.

This kind of spiral appears elsewhere in nature, for example, in sunflower and cauliflower heads, cyclones, and spiral galaxies. Physician, writer, and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94)
saw the spiral shell of the nautilus as a symbol of intellectual and spiritual growth. He suggested that people outgrew their protective shells and discarded them as they became no longer necessary: “One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”

It is as a metaphor for growth that the nautilus is used as a symbol for the New Zealand Curriculum.

Note how this metaphor fits perfectly into the dominant meta-narrative of relativism. Did you learn a bit of grammar in primary school? Soon you will discard it as no longer necessary as you grow and develop on your personal journey.

Actually, as so often happens in God’s world, using the nautilus as the motif and metaphor for state education is profoundly ironic. The real (hidden) message is that the state education system produces people who go around in circles in a system that is forever turning, turning, turning.

With respect to standards we note that a lot of the resistance to the New Zealand government’s attempt to introduce knowledge standards into primary schools comes from schools, principals, and teachers who reject the whole notion on the grounds that there are no standards to begin with. They have a point, sadly.

Another disastrous, but perfectly consistent trend in state schools is the “personalisation” of education.

The recent announcement that delivery of education will become more personalised represents the logical outcome of this trend. Personalised learning displaces the idea that there is a coherent body of knowledge that need to be assimilated in favour of the principle of teaching what works for the individual. Ibid. p.8)

Truth and knowledge is replaced by an endless perspectival particulates. The only criterion for choice is “if it works for you . . . .” This is to say that “state education” is now an oxymoron.

Can it be reformed? Is reclamation even a possibility? We do not believe so. As long as Unbelief remains regnant in the culture, scepticism will invariably dominate democratic state education systems. Truth can be nothing more than “as you like it”.