The Secularist Critique

2003-12-10T00:53:00.000-04:00

Moving
I'm changing my blogging sofware due to the lack of reliability and sophistication on the part of blogger. All new posts will be done at my blog Noetica which also has most of my older stuff. I will keep this site up but not update it.

2003-12-08T00:21:00.000-04:00

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and striving after wind."

2003-12-01T15:12:00.000-04:00

Protestants and cult
I find it curious that CatholicPundits.com has a link to religion News Blog which is a blog run by Apologetics Index, a protestant counter-cult organization.

Now counter-cult organizations are generally secular bullies out to destroy and undermine any religious groups (usually newer ones) that appear odd to their sensibilities and even worse, groups that display cultic tendencies. Now the Catholic Church is definitely a cult, and most of the religious activities of men in history have been cultic, this is a core aspect of the religion phenomena. So, logically they could be attacking the Catholic Church as much as they go after new religious movements. I assume that they overlook it for now because it is old and established, and because under the influence of our secular culture, has unfortunately lost some of its cultic dimensions. But the point is that these groups exist to oppose any religions they think they can get away with (usually the NRM's), which is why it is odd for a Catholic to link to such an organization. Catholics believe in religious freedom, which means that when someone gets involved with some religion that we may personally find strange, we don't start talking about 'brainwashing' and hiring kidnappers to 'rescue' them.

What is even more interesting is that this particular organization is a protestant group that set t themselves against other religious groups other than themselves. This seems particularly revealing to me, because Protestantism is by nature, non-cultic. Protestantism is the rejection of cult, and so the reformation was actually the mother of Western secularism. So it does make some sense that protestants are involved in counter-cult activities.

2003-11-27T23:23:00.000-04:00

Immanence
The transcendence of God is strongly emphasized in Western theology, and although God's immanence is also affirmed it never seems to get much attention. The traditional formula is that God is present in all things by His power and causal activity, sustaining all things in existence. But is this really all that can be said about immanence? Surely, immanence should mean much more than that. One may deduce that God is present to things by causing them to be, but this deductive knowledge is far away from the more intuitive experiences that seem to be mediated by nature. It seems to me that too much emphasis on God's transcendence could make Him too aloof from creation, almost a deistic God that is just 'out there' not really having much to do with internal affairs. And to balance it out more would have to be said than just God is everywhere by virtue of causing them to be.

2003-11-25T13:52:00.000-04:00

The abuse of marriage
Marriage is an institution given legal status, recognition, and benefits because of the recognition that the humane creation of stable families is a basic foundation of a healthy society. Today, the people that have charge of the common good don't know or care about this relationship of marriage and family to the good of society. They are more concerned with placating the ideologies of politically correct bullies. Homosexuals have no right to marriage for the simple reason that they can not contribute to the benefit of society the way a heterosexual couple can, therefore they are not entitled to the benefits given to the married.

But many heterosexual couples also get married without the slightest intention of having a family. They often marry for convenience, to obtain the benefits of combining their incomes, of using each other's bodies for pleasure, and any other benefits that come from being recognized as married by the state. They take the benefits without giving back. These people also should have no right to marriage.

Gays and heterosexual couples that want to live together in utilitarian relationships, if they are to have any recognition at all, should be given a lower status in the hierarchy of legal recognition and benefits. To redefine marriage to accommodate these people is to drag down marriage to the level of these morally inferior relationships. Equality in this case would mean that the relationship of the heterosexual couple committed to family is on the same level as all sorts of sexually sordid relationships, which is a lie.

2003-11-23T15:25:00.000-04:00

The response from atheism.about.com
Ironically, the atheist section of about.com has done a critique of my "logic of homosexuality" post. I wonder if I can find a critique of theism at homosexuality.about.com

2003-11-21T13:42:00.000-04:00

Sex and love
A commentator on the "logic of homosexuality" post says:

Let me get this straight: You think that because gay sex produces no babies, that it is for no other purpose than "sensation"? And because it is based solely on "sensation" that it couldn't possibly have anything to do with love or commitment? What a load of bull. That logic also says that an infertile straight couple is not capable of love and/or commitment, or that a straight couple that enjoys anal sex is incapable of love and/or commitment.

This raises the question of how sex can relate to or express love. Its an excellent question, one that people immersed in our culture's sexual mores need to think about more deeply. People have a sense that sex can be or should be connected with love but their thinking is fuzzy on how exactly it works. Exactly what is the basis for sex becoming an objective expression of love?

I think the answer has two components. The material basis is the procreative nature of sex. The formal basis is the conscious decision to accept and affirm that procreative nature of sex by two people. Its primarily the procreative power of sex that enables a man and woman to be making love rather than performing meaningless sex. It is the creative power of sex through which the love of a man and woman multiply by being incarnated in children. As their family grows, love is multiplied; a community of persons develops which gives the couple the opportunity to continue deepening their love both to their children and to themselves through their children. As their family grows, the commitment and sacrifice does to, deepening and solidifying their love. This is real love, not ephemeral emotion, feeling, or lust. Objective, ethical, committed, sacrificial, selfless love.

Now if we subtract this reference to the procreative power of sex, is there any remainder left that is capable of objectively expressing love? No, because what is left is sensation. When two people are seeking nothing but the experience of their own subjective sensations to the explicit exclusion of the procreative aspect, that is just lust. Thus what could and should be a relationship of love becomes an instrumentalized relationship between two persons. Sodomy and all forms of contraceptive sex are basically reducible to the mutual satisfaction of private sensations. In this scenario it is not possible for the two persons to transcend themselves; they are locked in the prison of their own subjective experiences of sensation. Even though their bodies are close, they could not be any farther away from each other.

So are infertile people incapable of making love? Not necessarily. The essential thing on the part of the couple is the conscious affirmation of the procreative nature of sex. Some precision is required here. This does not mean that a couple has to desire to have a child every time they have sex, it doesn't mean that they must be fertile all the time, it simply means that they know and accept that sex is something that is procreative by nature. It is part of the nature of sex to be infertile sometimes, thus one can know it to be infertile while still making love, but one can't accept its procreative nature while acting to make what is fertile into something infertile, or by doing something sexual that is not even related to procreation in the first place, i.e. sodomy.

If you think there is a remainder in sex after the reference to procreation is subtracted that is capable of grounding love in an objective manner, than let me know.

2003-11-20T13:29:00.000-04:00

Intellect or will
Maggie at Magdalene is discussing the metaphysics of freedom and the relationship between will and intellect.

In scholasticism the latter took the form of questions like "does beatitude consist in the intellect or the will?" On this question Aquinas takes the side of intellect.

I tend to find that I come to different conclusions when approaching matters from an ethical standpoint. For example, it would seem that truth has more than just a cognitive function, it reaches out to the will, not just intellect. It poses questions to the will of man when he is standing on the precipice of choice. This can be seen by digging into the intuitions that live behind the notion of justice. To be just is to orient ourselves to the Logos in nature, to affirm the eternal in time, which ultimately means to love the Truth. We can not apprehend truth without apprehending it as residing or deriving from Truth, which we want to love.

If this is true, than intellect does not exist for its own sake, it exists for the sake of love; we know in order to love. So Aquinas is right that intellect is necessary for beatitude because we can not love what we do not know, and yet I can't help thinking that will (love) is the essence of beatitude, because it is for its own sake and not the sake of something else.

2003-11-17T14:25:00.000-04:00

The logic of homosexuality
As homosexuals continue to push for gay marriage, it always amuses me to hear homosexuals speaking the language of 'commitment', claiming that they can be just as faithful and committed to their partner as any heterosexual couple. Amusing because there is nothing in a homosexual relationship that can ground such a commitment. Promiscuity is an essential part of the logic of homosexuality, and in this context commitment and fidelity would be unnatural and counter-intuitive to being a homosexual.

Sodomy, having no purpose other than the subjective experience of pleasurable sensations and the indulgence of misguided erotic impulses and lust, has no need for commitment. Indeed, the gay that is most affirming of his identity as a homosexual can not accept such trappings of the hetero-world, for it would seek legitimacy for their life style from hetero standards. Much like feminists undermine feminism by aiming at male standards. Promiscuity is an intrinsic part of the homosexual lifestyle, for if sex is all about 'my sensations', than whatever serves to magnify and satisfy those sensations is good. Consequently, it is perfectly natural that the homosexual will have as many partners as possible to maximize the novelty and scope of sensations.

What can be said then, about those homosexuals that speak of fidelity and life-long commitment to one partner? Two homosexuals can of course commit to each other for life if they have the ability to do it, but it's not logical or necessary. It has nothing to do with the egoism and sexual hedonism that is homosexuality. And one would think that a true homosexual would oppose all such talk of commitment as nonsense.

This being the case, why are the homosexuals pushing gay marriage so much? It could only be that they can not stand having something around that smacks of moral superiority. They will apparently stop at nothing short of leveling all forms of meaningful sexuality. So it appears that those generous and liberal powers that be will eventually grant their wish of redefining marriage to mean any form of cohabitation between two 'partners' for the sake of experiencing sensations. Sorry, but marriage will never mean that, the reality will never change despite the manipulations of the sodomy-loving-sophists.

2003-11-13T15:29:00.000-04:00

Some good, substantial, thoughtful posts at Magdalene

2003-11-13T00:26:00.000-04:00

Getting beyond materialism
Imagine a man sitting at a desk looking at a tree. He is writing down on a piece of paper a description of the tree; its characteristics, shape, attributes, etc. He may hear birds singing in the branches and smell the odor of cut grass, and note these as well on the paper. This is empirical experience, the man is using his senses to gather information and record it on his paper. We are all familiar with this form of experience, and it is the kind of experience that science is based on.

Now imagine the same man at the desk with a fresh piece of paper in front of him. Now instead of looking at the tree he is looking at his idea of trees, and writing down the description of that idea. Just as he wrote down the attributes and characteristics of the tree outside, with its branches and leaves, he is now writing down a description of the tree inside, i.e. in his consciousness, noting its peculiar features and characteristics. He may be noticing its universality in contrast to the individual tree outside the window, or he could be writing down how his idea seems to transcend certain limitations of the tree outside such as not occupying space and time, or not being subject to change. We are perhaps less familiar with this form of experience, but it is exactly the same as empirical experience in one very important way; it is giving the man information and knowledge just as looking at the tree with his eyes gave him information and knowledge, the only difference is the manner in which the facts derive. Both forms of experience are giving the man facts, which he can write down on a piece of paper, and if you put both his papers side by side, you would have two written documents identical in the sense that they are both equally a description of facts. And they are equally a description of facts despite the fact that one was derived with his senses and the other was not. One was empirical, the other was not.

This would seem to make knowledge something that is applicable to the sense-world, but not bound to it, for the man thinking about his idea acquired real data about something without using his senses. Furthermore, the man through his introspection was gaining real knowledge of something that was not an object of sensation, his object was a feature of mind, and the fact he was obtaining was not related to sense. So we can see that already at the most basic level of our being in the world there is a duality; a duality of experience, and consequently a duality of facts and knowledge. Our everyday language testifies to this duality. We have had to use terms like ‘mind’ and ‘mental’, ‘thought’ and ‘ideas’ that contrast with ‘sensation’ and similar terms denoting empirical experience. This language demonstrates that this duality is a natural feature of the world from the moment we are ‘thrown’ into it and start to become aware of the stream of experience. There is an inwardness and an outwardness, each with its own distinctive qualities, each capable of being an object of the intellect, which does not discriminate between the two.

There can not be any begging of the question at this point since we have not made any interpretations of experience, but are merely highlighting certain basic facts of experience. To say that the object of reflective experience is ‘mental’ is simply to give a term to something that is clearly not empirical in nature, not begging the question. That is the purpose of language, to give us terms to denote differences in quality, differences in our experience of reality. Materialists and scientists use and accept this language because they have to admit the difference in quality between the two forms of experience. Nor are we making any ontological conclusions about this difference in experience but only drawing attention to it. Thus to deny anything at this point would have to take the form of a denial of facts.

Materialism states that all of reality is matter. So what is matter? I think the most that can be said of matter from the standpoint of experience is that matter is that which we sense or measure, measurement being an extension of sensation in a way, and always derivative of sensation. The specific qualities that make up the objects of sensation and the models that scientists can deduce from these sensations determine the boundaries of what matter is. Thus matter may be said to be that which is extended (Descartes), or that which has mass and takes up space (dictionary?), but however it is defined we know that the boundaries of our notion of matter is delimited by the experience of sensation. Without sensation we would have no notion of matter and so the phenomena being described the writer looking at the tree is ultimately the foundation of the idea of matter. From these facts of experience several conclusions can now be reasonably made.

1. Empiricism is wrong. If by ‘empiricism’ is meant that all experience is sense experience or the memory of sense impressions, than it is false because it fails to take into account reflective experience.

2. Materialism is wrong. For materialism states that everything is of the stuff of matter, i.e. like the stuff we sense. But obviously there is a reality, i.e. reflective experience that is not the stuff of sensation, therefore materialism is false.

3. Science can not, in principle, establish materialism or disprove dualism because science is based on empirical experience. Thus science simply does not deal with forms of experience that are not empirical, i.e. reflective experience.

4. Science knows nothing about the person, but only about person’s bodies. Only philosophy through reflective experience can understand the nature of the person.

5. Terms such as ‘immaterial’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘supernatural’, are at least partially based on concrete human experience, i.e. reflective experience and the philosophical knowledge of the person. Just as ‘matter’ is based on sense experience, ‘immaterial’ is based on consciousness and reflective experience.

6. The ‘view’ that reality consists of at least a dualism and is richer and more sophisticated than being comprised simply of matter is natural, reasonable, and rooted in concrete experience and facts.

A person committed to materialism could object that even though there is this duality in our experience and knowledge, nevertheless it may be ultimately caused by physical causes. What we call ‘mental’ activity and consciousness could be an epiphenomena of the brain. Anyone can make up hypothesis about things, but without grounds for them they are completely useless. I could say that the planet is resting on the back of a giant cosmic turtle, but unless I had some good reason for saying it the statement is nonsense and deserves to be ignored. So are there grounds for asserting that mind is caused by matter? A hypothesis must have some congruity with the experience it is meant to explain, but the duality of our experience rules out any kind of reductive hypotheses. There is nothing in experience to base this hypothesis; mind and matter are irreducible experiences. Thus if it were the case that mind was caused by matter, we would have no way of knowing it, which is to say that the hypothesis deserves to be cut up with Occam’s razor and thrown into the garbage with the cosmic turtle. However, from the side of consciousness we may see why this irreducibility exists in our experience. From the view point of reason, mind and its actions seem not just different but above matter in that they transcend the abilities and characteristics of matter. Thus the material realm of experience has nothing to leverage an account of consciousness because consciousness is ontologically above it.

Any unbiased person that takes the evidence of experience at face value will not be a materialist. Thus a scientist or philosopher that comes across consciousness and interiority and declares it to be reducible to matter is just spouting dogmas. What else can you call something that seems to have no rational justification? The minority of philosophers still hanging on to materialism are reduced to saying that maybe one day in the future there will be a conceptual breakthrough that will give us the ability to reduce mind to matter. The obvious question is why be a materialist at all? What is the basis? What is the explanation for holding on to materialism despite the fact that the facts are against it? If the philosophy of mind does not warrant materialism, than what is the basis for it? It should be apparent by now that we are encountering something here that is more dogmatic than any religion.

2003-11-12T00:11:00.000-04:00

Getting beyond the proportionalist debate
An example of the fallacy below can be seen in the debate between proportionalists and the traditional moralists. The latter accuse proportionalists of condoning the doing of evil to achieve good. The proportionalists accuse the traditional ethicists of 'physicalism' or labeling acts as intrinsically evil out of all context with the relevant intention. Both these accusations are invalid because they assume their own respective principles to condemn the others conclusions which derive from other principles. Neither camp seem to realize that they are defining the basis of morally good and evil acts in a completely different manner. The proportionalists are not for doing evil to achieve good and the traditional moralists are not physicalists. Again, the first principles must be refuted or the conclusions must be taken down on their own ground.

2003-11-10T15:44:00.000-04:00

A common fallacy
I can see on this blog and lots of other places and other contexts a common problem in how various parties argue with each other. This occurs all the time even among scholarly arguments among professionals. It happens when group 1 has a set of conclusions B that derive from a set of principles A, and group 2 has a set of conclusions Y that derive from a set of principles X. What happens is that group 1 and group 2 derides and dismiss each other (or accuse each other of being irrational) on the basis of differing conclusions B and Y. The problem with this is that even though B and Y may be contradictory, they may be perfectly legitimate based on their own principles A and X. It is not legit, however, to dismiss conclusions Y on the basis of principles A or to dismiss conclusions B on the basis of principles X.

The only valid way to proceed is for group 1 to either refute conclusions Y using groups 2's own principles X or to refute principles X. Likewise, group 2 may only refute conclusions B by either assuming group 1's principles A or refuting principles A. In other words, group1 must refute group 2 on their own ground or show that their ground is faulty. Most of the time group 1 and group 2 are not even aware of the set of principles A and X.

2003-11-08T16:12:00.000-04:00

Introduction to the refutation of materialism
Since Raisin Lord and other atheist fundamentalists continue to seem shocked and awed at the prospect that secularism or materialism lacks any foundation, and even more shocked at the proposition that the religious view of the world does have foundation; I will try to write in a systematic fashion what some of those grounds are.

An important point, prior to embarking on the grounds of a religious outlook, is that I don't have the slightest interest in proving the existence of God, or demonstrating beyond a shadow of doubt the existence of supernatural beings, etc. As an atheist I knew on the IRC for many years used to say, proof is for math. God is not a geometry problem to be solved; He is not a problem at all. Thus to stoop to the rationalists level of the discourse of 'proof' and 'evidence' is to already have implicitly rejected the possibility of God.

I would go so far as to say that if God were to be proven, it would not be God. If God could be comprehended, what you comprehend would not be God. It would be something on the same level as you, something occupying the same ontological level in the hierarchy of being. More probably it would be something lower than you (but I am probably already vexing the atheists with my audacity in speaking about higher and lower things; its not PC to state that things are greater or less).

No, my project is not so ambitious as to prove anything, I am merely interested in showing that various positions that are commonly thought to be part of a religious outlook are in fact reasonable. Personally I believe some of the conclusions I will come to are demonstrated pretty conclusively, but I won't insist on it; the conclusions will have served their purpose simply by showing that such conclusions are natural and reasonable conclusions to come to given the nature of the experience being appealed to.

Ironically, while this makes it less ambitious for me, it makes it all the more ambitious for the atheists in attempting to refute it; for its easy to show that an arguments doesn't 'prove' something, compared with proving that an argument is not even reasonable. The burden of proof is on the atheists to show that my reflections are not even rational.

At any rate, God will not even enter the picture for a while, we will start at the beginning; with human experience and the refutation of materialism.

2003-11-07T12:04:00.000-04:00

other secular critiques
Some good posts criticizing secularism and its champions can be found at Jottings from Tertius. For example, Tertius takes issue with materialist evangelists like Dawkins.

2003-11-03T15:52:00.000-04:00

Should Catholic philosophers be Thomists?
Bill Cork at ut unum sint mentions a debate about whether or not the Church has its own philosophy. It doesn't suprise me that John Knasis was arguing for thomism as the church's philosophy; I've had him for a few classes at UST and he is a champion of scholastic rationalism in many forms, including being a radical a posteriorist. UST is a very thomistically oriented school, and there is pervasive attitude that 'Thomism' is superior to anything and so one should adher to its formulas. This attitude of taking things on authority is the death of philosophy.

It created a straight-jacket for my mind that made it difficult to really do any truly creative philosophical thinking. My liberation came from various sources and influencecs. One of which was reading Cardinal Ratzinger's "Introduction to Christianity". Ratzinger, who is more of an Augustinian than Thomist, spoke of some philosophical matters in a language that was powerful, stimulating, and definitely not Thomist. It opened my mind to the power of language and the power of looking at matters in categories unfettered by authority. That was the beginning of the end of me being a naive Thomist (or Thomist of any kind).

2003-10-31T11:42:00.000-04:00

The need for a secularist critique
Bill Cork at ut unum sint says:

A few years ago Peter Kreeft wrote a provocative book: Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996). He aruged that the "fundamental fissure" today — a Grand Canyon — is "between secularists who acknowledge no law above human desire and all the religions of the world." He called for "ecumenical jihad," a "World War of Religion," against secularism. He called for Christians to link arms with Muslims and Jews wherever possible in this struggle.

He then says "Yet Kreeft's argument leaves me a bit cold, too--Christianity is more than moralism; we have a message to preach which is not simply a legislative program". He goes on to state what he sees as a better way using St. Francis as an example.

I think Bill is overlooking something very important here. Of course Christianity is more than moralism and we have more to preach than that. But Kreeft's proposal is very important. We do have a common enemy to fight, an enemy that threatens all religions, not just Christianity. Secularism is destroying man's religious consciousness and replacing it with a new 'secular' mythology that makes nihilism the omnipresent context of man's life from origin to death. When inhuman mythologies replace the genuine religious consciousness, man becomes incapable of religion and consequently authentic religion dies.

When this consciousness is lost or suppressed, will it matter that Christianity is more than moralism? Theological differences are entirely irrelevant in the face of an enemy that seeks to swallow up 'religiosity' itself. To my eyes, this is one of the most important issues of our times, what is at stake here is the identity and definition of man. Thus it is in every religion's self-interest to come together to address what is a philosophical and not a theological problem. When men can understand again that they are religious beings, only then will the specific theological differences among religions become a real issue.

This requires a project that will involve a critique of secular culture and ideologies to show their utter lack of foundation; and by bold philosophical explorations of the basis in human experience and history for a religious outlook. Only then will man regain the memory of what he truly is.

2003-10-30T16:34:00.000-04:00

Liturgical thought experiment
Imagine that the Tridentine rite was restored to official status in the Roman Rite. This means that the secularist liturgists who were once in charge of the Novus Ordo, now have the Tridentine in their hands. Is it reasonable to conclude that the Tridentine as it exists in the mind of many traditionalists and as celebrated by good and knowledgeable priests would retain its reverence and beauty? Would it not in fact become an ugly wasteland in a similar fashion that the Novus Ordo celebration has become a wasteland? Would the liturgists who have not spared the Novus Ordo, spare the Tridentine? Would the liturgists who don't care about law or norms or rubrics, suddenly take heart with the Tridentine in their hands? I don't think so.

Shouldn't this illustrate that what is wrong with the liturgy today is not primarily what rite is used, but whether or not the rite is in the hands of heretics and secularists? Shouldn't we point our fingers more at the liturgists than at what missal is used? Of course the Tridentine is beautiful in the hands of people who understand liturgy, but it need not be in their hands just as the Novus Ordo need not be in the hands of people that obviously don't understand liturgy.

It is wrong to blame all the nonsense that goes on in liturgy since VII on the Novus Ordo itself; it is obviously caused by people who are hostile to Catholic liturgy. Of course, the Novus Ordo missal can be criticized like any missal, and individual prayers can be judged in relation to other prayers, but this not a question of orthodoxy or heresy. The heterodoxy that is glaringly obvious to any Catholic that cares, occurs in the sacramental and symbolic level of the liturgy. It could be said that it is not so much the form, but the matter of the liturgy that is sick.

In fact, the majority of the most repulsive elements of today's secular celebrations occur despite a relative or even strict conformity to the missal itself. This means that the celebrant can stick more or less to the literal format of the mass and it can still exude a secular spirit and message. Does this mean that the mass itself is corrupt? No, it means that liturgy is corrupt at the incarnational level, the symbolic level that communicates and mediates the spiritual content of human person's participation.

Jeff at el camino real says "Furthermore, the Novus Ordo Missae is still on trial. It isn't working." I think that is entirely unfair. It totally misses the distinction between the mass itself and the way in which it is being interpreted and implemented by religion hating buffoons. The reality is that the new mass has barely even been tried yet.

2003-10-27T16:38:00.000-04:00

Society for Catholic Anachronisms
That is what I call the 'traditionalists' that other Catholic bloggers refer to as the 'lidless eye brigade'. The title is supposed to bring to mind the people that get together to dress up as knights and squires and re-enact medieval battles and such. The reason I think of them as anachronists is not because I think tradition is anachronistic, but because they wrongly identify non-essentials as essential; consequently they end up absolutizing certain stylistic or periodic elements of Catholicism captured from a specific period in time, say the 50's.

So you end up with these groups like FSSP and SPPX that, like the societies for creative anachronisms, get together and dress up in their pre-conciliar garbs and their tonsures and pretend that its 1952. They celebrate all the sacraments according to pre-concilliar rites and can not tolerate any kind of change whatsoever. They have absolutized the Tridentine mass, heap suspicion on the new rite, view the Tridentine in competition to the new rite, think that liturgical renewal consists in going back to pre-conciliar forms, and are just generally narrow minded.

And it doesn't matter if its the official schismatic anachronists like the SSPX or the groups within the Church like FSSP; they are all of the same family. I have no doubt in my mind that there are schismatic and heretical tendencies in the FSSP and others that are canonically part of the Church. After reading certain essays by Fr. Chad Ripperger, a teacher at an FSSP seminary, I think there is plenty of reason to suspect these groups. We don't need their mentality in the Church.

Truly, this spirit that animates the 'trads' is infected with rationalism. The symptoms are seen in their complete aversion to any change and development in the Church. Since they are unable to see how change and development can be orthodox they take refuge in older forms and past periods that they consider 'safe'. They cling to a dead and static past that brings stability and certainty to their minds, allowing them to analyze frozen papal statement and past documents and history to the point that feel that they understand everything it is to be 'Catholic'. But this supposed certainty comes at the price of killing a living thing; the Church, a living developing entity that must always frustrate the rationalist's temptations to comprehend.

The Church is a diving thing, it is grounded in God; and is called by Christians 'the body of Christ'. Unless man can in fact comprehend God, it would stand to reason that we will never be able to comprehend the full reality of what the Church is, where it's going, etc. Men are limited beings with limited reason, and we often mistakenly reduce orthodoxy to what we understand it to be. But Orthodoxy, in itself, is beyond any one persons understanding; it is so rich, so deep, so expansive that only God alone is the infallible judge of what is orthodox; and even when the pope participates in this infallibility, he only sees a sliver of the truth.

Rationalism in religion is a perennial temptation to be resisted, we must be satisfied to understand what we can of the Truth, and constantly remember that Truth is always more then we see of it; this means that we can not be satisfied with what we can see of the vision, but must always be open minded and broaden our understanding. Especially in religion, where we are dealing with the fundamental Mystery; we must resist to urge to kill the living mystery for the sake of a false and illusionary security.

2003-10-24T16:02:00.000-03:00

Thomist Rationalism
Among Thomists there is a camp that seem obsessed with proving that all our knowledge of God comes from deduction. Technically the term is 'a posteriori' meaning something like 'after the fact'? The term is used in opposition to 'a priori' meaning prior to the fact? Whatever the Latin meaning of the terms, they are used in the context of our natural knowledge of God -- including the proof of the existence of God-- to mean that we reason to this knowledge, the knowledge is a result of an inference, its not just there in our minds, prior to any argument or discursive reasoning. This camp of Thomists may be called 'A posteriori Thomists'.

I consider this obsession with emptying the person of all experience of God that is not the result of argument to be quite distasteful and an ugly example of scholastic rationalism. Why is it so important that we should not have a natural experience or knowledge of God prior to deductive reasoning? Is it supposed to be somehow unorthodox to say that man is in contact with God and that he can be aware of it?

Personally I find it incredible that we should not have any sort of apriori knowledge of God, and it may even be that the proofs for the existence of God presuppose this apriori knowledge.

2003-10-19T22:20:00.000-03:00

Further Reflections on Rationalism
Rationalism is an attempt to view man as God. Rationalism would create a world in which man was the sole creator, omniscient, and omnipotent. Creator by surrounding himself with things that he has made, omniscient by defining knowledge in terms of things he has made or will make, and omnipotent by being the lords of this little man-made world; producing it, manipulating it, and understanding it to his own satisfaction.

Thus by technology men can create an illusionary world where they are the gods; and deny reality to all that does not fit that narrow world. There is no necessity to such a use of technology, but why have ideologies like materialism and atheism wedded themselves to the scientific project when science is really an ideologically neutral project?

Is it because they are so weak as philosophies that they need to leech off the authority and success of science to give them seeming legitimacy? Perhaps, seduced again by power, those were the ideologies required for fostering the illusion of creator-man.

2003-05-04T23:35:00.000-03:00

Atheist ethics
Why do atheists bother trying to explicate a sytem of ethics? It always ends up as some sort of utilitarianism or game theory type thing that has nothing to do with real moral intuition or experience. For any ethics to be worthwhile, it must explain the idea of justice, which does not lend itself to calculations of consequences. The sense that a certain action may be unfair or unjust does not change by multiplying good consequences ad infinitum. An ethics that tries to account for justice in a serious fashion will get into metaphysics in a way that is anathema to atheists view of things. The metaphysical foundation for justice leads ethics in the direction of objective truth which is not supposed to have anything to do with morality. And then how does one account for truth and it's relation to morality without it drifting into the realm of the spiritual and trans-material? The atheist must resist the passage from truth to Truth, from mind to Mind, conscience to Creator. And so we have game theories and consequentialism which just ignore justice altogether, the dogma of materialism must be protected, reality is to be denied.

2003-05-03T23:40:00.000-03:00

God or god?
Why do many web atheists refuse to use the upper case 'G' when spelling God? Isn't it grammatically incorrect to use lower case when spelling the word God? One has to wonder what the big deal is, what would motivate a person to go out of his/her way to go against grammatical convention when it comes to the 'God' word? Don't they know that the upper and lower case 'g' carries no implications as to your position on the existence of the being the word refers to? Are atheists so insecure that they fear other atheists might think them weak for capitalizing a word? Or perhaps it is meant as a petty insult, but to whom, God? God is not supposed to exist so maybe to religious people? This would make more sense, but it indicates that there is much more going on here then simple neutral and objective reason. Most non-religious people have no urge to break grammatical convention. These people do not simply disbelieve in God, they hate religion so desperately as to resort to pathetically juvenile tactics like refusing an upper case 'g' when referring to God. These kinds of atheists would make a fascinating psychological study.

2003-05-02T23:00:00.000-03:00

Another secular blog
More musing about science and religion at Jeff Muller's jblog. Typical confusion between how science deals with reality vs. how religion deals with it. Science is not an alternative view of the world in opposition to religion, they both complement each other. It's pure ignorance to think that religion is nothing more then a pre-scientific explanation of the world that is now replaced by science. It's apples and oranges.

2003-03-05T18:08:00.000-04:00

Truth is Beauty and Beauty Truth
If we ponder the way people actually make important, life-changing, existential decisions, embracing a religion for example, it usually comes about in a way much different then certain rationalists would expect, or wish. Deduction, abstract reasoning, and explicit logic rarely have much to do with it. A person doesn't need a geometry like proof to orient his life in a certain direction, nor is his decision necessarily irrational for lack of such a proof. People don't act that way. The reality seems to be connected with the traditional equating of truth, beauty and goodness. If it's true that truth, beauty, and goodness are one, then we have an approach to truth that is not mere 'proof' or deduction. Beauty, and goodness are both legitimate ways to truth.

I believe this is really how people make such important decisions in their life. A person witnesses the beauty of a man sacrificing himself, or the goodness of an act of profound self-giving. These are experiences of the Real, they resonate deep inside the person's heart (the heart has reasons that reason knows not--pascal?). This is a much more real and profound experience of truth, and it's far from the cold impersonal thing we call deduction. A man may have a friend who is a Christian, whom he has a deep respect and trust for. He witnesses this friend sacrifice his life for another, he is hit hard by the goodness, the beauty and the truth of selfless charity. He doesn't deduce anything at all, he isn't performing syllogisms in his head, he is simply struck by an experience of Realness, and he knows that it is connected to Christianity. Thus if he makes any deductions at all, it is simply that there is Realness in Christianity and that there is truth there. What would be irrational about this man now becoming a Christian because of the witness of his friend?

Of course, this isn't limited to Christianity, experiences of Realness can be found in many religions. The point is, that the nature of rationality, of man, is far broader then the crude and narrow definitions of the rationalists. Deduction plays a small role in actually choosing the way we live our lives, persons live for truth, and truth is inseperably connected with beauty and goodness, and all three of these aspects of the Real are directly experienced by the whole man, not by mere abstract thought.

2003-02-26T23:41:00.000-04:00

The myth of secularism
Here is another interesting article, Exposing the myth of secularism, by John Gray. The author discusses the more dehumanizing secular myths that have replaced religious myth and compares the religious repression of secular cultures with the victorian repression of sex. A sample:

"It is this painful cognitive dissonance that accounts for the peculiar rancour and intolerance of many secular thinkers. Unable to account for the irrepressible vitality of religion, they can react only with puritanical horror and stigmatise it as irrational. Yet the truth is that if religion is irrational, so is the human animal. As the behaviour of humanists shows, this is never more so than when it imagines itself to be ruled by reason."

I would take issue on one point with the author, who says "liberal humanism has taken Christianity's unhappiest myth - the separation of humans from the rest of the natural world - and stripped it of the transcendental content that gave it meaning". It is not Christianity that has seperated man from the natural world, but science. For nature is significant to man in the same proportion that science is not. Scientific materialism has alienated us from nature by reducing nature's significance to mere capability for being measured and quantified. Secular culture looks to nature for power and nothing more, whereas nature's true significance lies precisely in it's non-quantifiable aspect. Christianity is in full harmony with the most ancient and primitive religious attitudes towards nature, affirming it's sacramental nature.

2003-02-26T03:20:00.000-04:00

Minds and Reeds
Why do some have this need to compare the mind to a product of our own making. First the mind was supposed to be like a machine, now it's supposed to be like a computer, and tomorrow? Isn't there something backward about trying to model the mind after a product of it's own creation? Doesn't the fact that mind invented machines and computers make it superior to those things that it has made? Pascal had said that man is the weakest of all beings, a reed shaking in the wind, and yet we transcend the whole universe because we can know it. The mind is not made in the image of its own artifacts, but makes them according to its privileged participation in Art.

2003-02-25T02:58:00.000-04:00

Augustine & Aquinas on Truth
However much Aquinas tried to appear to be following the authority of Augustine, it is evident that when on the subject of truth, Aquinas quite radically turns Augustine’s account upside down, and I don’t think this is a good thing. Truth for Augustine, is transcendent. It has divine characteristics that are plain for all who have eyes to see to see it. Whereas man is temporal, truth is eternal. The mind of man is always changing, but truth is immutable. In its light we judge, but it is never judged. In a word, it is ‘above’ man, it is transcendent.

Aquinas turns this all around. In a way, Aquinas takes all of those characteristics which were attributed to the divine, and makes them attributes of man. For Aquinas, who follows Aristotle closely in this matter, the basic principle is that ‘whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver’. For Augustine, truth is regarded more as something public that is perceived by all, but owned by no one. It is like the sun, which illuminates everything. Aquinas has quite a different perspective, viewing truth as a sort of assimilation of created material being into our own soul in an immaterial mode. Therefore, the above mentioned characteristics of truth, are not perceptions of the divine mode, but are merely aspects of its human mode of existing, not because humans are eternal and immutable, but because our mind is not completely immersed into matter, and consequently can receive material being in a non-material way. Since matter is what individuates things, to be able to consider something in a way that is independent from its material conditions, this is what gives truth its characteristics of universality, immutability and so on. To be able to consider things apart from matter, is to consider them in a way free from the restrictions of matter, and therefore free from the limitations of time and change and individuality. In other words, what were divine characteristics for Augustine, are merely accidents of truth’s mode of being in our soul.

To my mind, this is a degradation of truth. It destroys a natural, intuitive, powerful, and relatively clear way to God. Perhaps we can attempt to question this theory from the viewpoint of ethics. The intuition that there are absolutes in ethics is based on these characteristics of truth. The natural and eternal law is based on these characteristics of truth. The inviolability of the human person is based on these characteristics of truth. Now when we understand the essence of personhood and the respect that it imposes on us, are we to suppose that those absolute aspects of the nature of personhood are merely accidents of our knowledge of it? Sure, if in some separate argument we were able to deduce that God exists and that all essences exists in a truly eternal and immutable and absolute mode in God, then this could ground our belief in the absolute inviolability of the human person and we could truly say that abortion was always and everywhere wrong. But is this actually how we establish and perceive moral absolutes? These absolutes are given immediately in our intuition of meaning. We perceive these absolutes as things that really are absolute. As far as I can tell, the theory of knowledge proposed by Aquinas would entail that our immediate and natural beliefs concerning the moral law would be an illusion. This would destroy our ability to know directly the natural and eternal law of God except by a few people who were able to reason out some separate argument establishing eternal ideas in God. This doesn’t ring true. The basic precepts of natural law are intuited directly by all men in all different cultures, they are not the distant conclusions of many previous philosophical arguments about God.

2003-02-22T03:17:00.000-04:00

Six Step Program for Secularists
A Saintly Salmagundi posted a link to an interesting article, Kicking the Secularist Habit.

2003-02-21T15:25:00.000-04:00

Artificial Intelligence?
"In contrast with our intellect, computers double their performance every 18 months," says Hawking. "So the danger is real that they could develop intelligence and take over the world."
I'm always amused by statements like these, taken from a recent article from zdnews.com, here is another:
'According to Joy, current advances in molecular electronics mean that by the year 2030, "we are likely to be able to build machines in quantity a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today", and imbue them with human-level intelligence. '

In the book "The Everlasting Man", Chesterton pokes fun at evolutionists who try to cover up the multitudes of philosophical absurdities associated with their theories, with the idea of a huge passing of time. As if any insult to logic could be made more palatable by the passage of a few billion years. I am reminded of this every time I read this kind of nonsense by scientists. Only here they are not invoking a quantity of time, but a quantity of 'performance', of calculation or clock cycles. But the idea is just as absurd. If we just increase the power and speed of our computers, maybe human-like intelligence will just pop up and emerge. Just as Chesterston's evolutionists used the idea of a large passage of time as a smokescreen to smooth the rough edges of their theories, our scientists are using the concept of power, speed, and performance to obscure the glaring differences between intelligence and what computers do.
Computers simply manipulate ones and zeroes in a sequential order that is explicitly given to them. We could say that this manipulation of ones and zeroes are 'calculations' as long as we keep in mind that true calculation is something that only persons do. One wonders why it is necessary to de-mystify computers to people who should know better, but the heart of what a computer does at its most discreet level, is simply check to see if something is on or off. The real power of these machines are they that they can perform an incredible number of these instructions incredibly quickly. This is where they surpass the human intellect. Any calculator can perform its calculations much faster than any person. But that is the extent of it! We could add the speed and power of these computers a zillion times and intelligence will never emerge from it, because no matter how fast or how many calculations per nanosecond, its still made up of discreet steps of 'is this on or off'. Sheer multiplication of these discreet steps into a smaller interval of time is not going to give a machine intelligence.

What is so crude about Hawking and others ideas, is that it assumes that human intelligence is just a calculator. These scientists think that the only thing that separates our minds from these machines, is speed and power, i.e. the number of calculations done in any given period of time, so that if we can just make our computers fast enough, or powerful enough, or give them more memory, or whatever else kind of quantification they can think of that falls under the category of 'performance', they will become intelligent like us. This kind of crass materialism is laughably naive.
The essence of intelligence is not 'performance', it is not calculation (and strictly speaking computers don't even calculate in the human sense). True, because we are intelligent, we can make calculations, but that is not the true heart of intelligence. The essence of intelligence is more to be found in a kind of perception. Without this perception, there are no calculations, no logic. This can be seen by starting with calculation itself and working backword. A syllogism for example, consists of propositions which are themselves made up of terms which have definitions. Discursive reasoning is the process of unfolding the logical content of those terms in logically consistent ways. Where do the definition of these terms come from?If we had no way to percieve these forms, there would not be any reasoning, no calculation. Consequently, this intellectual perception is more the essence of intelligence then mere calculation, on the ground that calculation depends on this perception for its very existence. Personally, I have come to define intelligence this way. Intelligence is the perception of the logos which permeates all things, that which makes visible to our mind the noumenal world in which all empirical reality participates. It is the laying bare the relation of all material things to a higher ideal order, and ultimately to the Mind which alone is creative. If our senses give us 'data', our knowledge is 'meta-data'. It is only after our soul is in possession of a 'form', that logic begins to unfold and unpack the eidetic content, making possible 'calulation'.

Until computers have this intuition, can perceive this meta-data, they can not be considered intelligent. Until computers can develop concepts and language to communicate them, they can not be considered intelligent. They never will be considered intelligent because this kind of perception does not originate in the sensible-material order. The senses, and their material basis, constitute the 'data'. Knowledge is meta-data, and so its origin is above the material basis of sensation.

It is this real essence of intelligence that the materialist hates, the undeniable spirituality of knowledge. Some materialists will stop at nothing to obscure its real nature.
So, in this repsect, the entire field of 'artificial intelligence' is and always will be a total failure, because computers never have had any real semblance to intelligence, and never will. The most powerful computers we can build, will never be anything more than a glorified calculator. So, let the machines double in performance every year, they will always be infinitely incapable of things that my two year old finds routine.

2003-02-21T04:11:00.000-04:00

Secularist Critique Exhausts Atheists
It seems I have officially tired blog land's resident atheists out. What is hilarious is that they are complaining about 'true believer syndrom' and how you can't argue with a person of 'faith' and just how futile trying to reason with a religious believer etc, even though I never once used religion, revelation, or faith as a part of any argument. It seems that the real problem is that they can't deal with true reason. It's just as well, I don't have all the time in the world to deal with philosophical children.

2003-02-19T18:26:00.000-04:00

Materialism Not Science
This article on materialism written by a materialist, admits that the history of materialism is based on assumption. He says:

Yet neither Lucretius, d'Holbach, nor Buechner claimed that materialist philosophy was an empirical science. They all realized it rested on assumptions that were ultimately metascientific

And then, instead of giving us the metascientific justification for those assumptions, he just completely contradicts himself by trying to ground it back in science, saying:

So materialism has always inferred its theories from the best empirical evidence at hand and has as a result always had its metascientific hypotheses scientifically confirmed

Metascientific hypotheses scientifically confirmed. Yeah that makes sense. Also, how exactly does one infer from the fact of material existence, that all reality is reducable to matter? Shouldn't we be expecting the justification of metascientific assumptions using some form of metascientific evidence? This article just confirms what I have been saying, that there is no reason for materialism, just pure assumption.

2003-02-19T01:51:00.000-04:00

Occam's not-so-sharp razor
Occam's razor is so overrated. First of all, it's not some absolute self-evident first principle of reason that must be slavishly adhered to in any and everything. Second, it's too general to really have any meaning in the context of an argument. Third, while it may be a good guide in some circumstances, there are plenty of exceptions, too many for it to really have any power in an argument. Fourth, it's just way too easy for anyone to use it for their own purpose, both sides of an argument could think of countless ways to use it for their own ends. For these and similar reasons I propose that it be put to rest forever as an instrument of debate.

2003-02-18T21:11:00.000-04:00

True Humanism
Secular humanism is a contradiction in terms. Secularism is a philosophy that denigrates and dehumanizes man. Shouldn't a true humanism recognize the dignity, uniqueness and superiority of man? Yet secularism and its other resident isms reduce man to blind, dumb, impersonal matter. Rationalism constricts man's field of knowledge to those things only which man can wrap his finite mind around, thus excluding any pointers of transcendence and therefore mystery. Scientism absolutizes the scientific method, empiricism identifies knowledge with observation and both consequently narrow man's domain of perception, intellectual or otherwise. Materialism and all its myths degrade man by denying his transcendence over matter, reduces all of reality into a dull one dimensional pool of blind matter, atheism denies the intrinsic relation of human beings with the infinite and personal ground of all things. The end result of this family of liars is a truly meaningless, purposelss, drab, ugly world where man is related to nothing but what is inferior to him, an existence that must necessarily lead to what the existentialists called nausea, anxiety, and of course raises the question of suicide. This is most definitely not humanism.

A real humanism would aknowledge man as a being that can not be explained by, or reduced to forces that are inferior to himself. It would relate man vertically with the only real power that can produce an intelligent person. It would recognize that the actual nature of reason and intelligence is much broader then what is dreamt of in rationalism's philosophy. It would not make any a-priori exlusions of trasncedence and mystery, or forms of experience not reducable to sensation. In short, it would affirm man as man, as he is in truth. The real humanism must be a theistic humanism, not a secular humanism.

2003-02-15T17:10:00.000-04:00

Qualia and Dogma
Unscrewing the inscrutable posted a link to a Scientific American article, Demon-Haunted Brain that nicely demonstrates the dogmatic materialism of the scientific community. Predictably, the 'evidence' is more examples of manipulating the brain to see what happens in a person's consciousness. Now it obviously doesn't occur to them that this is only 'evidence' to those that already assume that all reality can be explained materially. If I were a materialist, I might take this article to be evidence in support of my philosophy, but to anyone that is not a materialist, there is nothing evidential about it. In fact, it's neither a scientific or a philosophical argument at all, but more like a vague affirmation of materialist belief indirectly related to some science experiments.

The author of the article admits that we experience a mind/body duality, remarking that mind aspect of experience is given the technical name 'qualia' by philosophers to distinguish it from empirical experience. Of course, he assumes that qualia is caused by nuerons. But this brings us to the whole problem of trying to investigate a dimension of experience that can not, by definition, be investigated empirically. Here is the contradiction. We have two aspects of experience which is undeniable (and in fact, admitted by our author), an empirical experience through sensation, and a non-empirical experience which philosophers call qualia the subjective, reflective consciousness that we all have. The empirical is by definition not qualia, and qualia is by definition not empirical. These are mutually exclusive forms of experience. So the contradiction is that the materialist wants to explain qualia, and he does so by appealling to observation! How exactly do you explain what is by definition unobservable, by observation? Observation belongs in the realm of the empirical, so how could you possibly know anything about qualia from observation? It's like trying to see the stars by sticking your head into the sand. Materialists apparently think that by sticking their heads into sand they can get special evidence of what stars are like. Any appeal to observation (such as consequnces of brain manipulation on consciousness) immediately falls under this contradiction as soon as these observations are appealed to as an explanation of mind, or evidence that mind is brain. They show nothing more then mutual interaction and dependancies (who denies that?). This is why science, in principle, can not tell us much of anything useful about the nature of mind. Qualia, not being part of empirical experience, can not be part of science.

Whenever someone tells us that such and such a phenemena in the brain is 'the mind at work' they are not giving us any evidence that the mind is the brain, they are simply saying that it is, it's an assumption. They have every right to believe what they do, but just saying that it is so is not evidence. This article does not present one shred of evidence that the brain can explain religion or anything else that belongs to the life of the mind, but it is a nice summary of one man's beliefs.

2003-02-13T16:44:00.000-04:00

The Tragedy of Materialism
What a tragedy that reason itself has come to be identified with empirical observation. The victim of materialist dogma can only look with suspicion at his own consciousness, forced to discount the authority of his own interior experience. He is only free to examine reality in terms of his observations of sensible things, the realm of non-empirical experience is forbidden territory. They don't seem to realize that they have given up that which is most certain for that which is the least certain. It doesn't occur to them that all the things that they know with absolute certitude are not derived from their empirical observations, but through the transparency of their own consciousness. They don't grasp the fact that consciousness is the palace of reason, and that she can not be identified with either observation or reflection, but can work with both to discover their nature.

So even though the only thing we can know about our mind and consciousness from the outside is it's interaction with the body, our materialists refuse to enter in to thier own palace to examine the nature of consciousness the only way it can be examined, through self-reflection. They are not allowed to look through the magisterial eyes of thier own minds, because that wouldn't fit into their narrow conceptions of what it means to be rational, they must cling to their little world of observation. And so consciousness must be explained away by their silly reductionist theories. What an emasculation of knowledge, of reality, of their own selves.

The biggest tragedy of this empiricism/materialism is that in reducing knowledge to observation they will never understand themselves or other human beings, or reality. Their over confidence in their own answers guarantees their own perpetual ignorance.

2003-02-12T02:19:00.000-04:00

Challenging Materialism
Seeing then that materialism is a philosophical issue and not a scientific one, the whole question comes down to what does our experience actually tell us about reality? The first thing to note is that our experience of reality is already a duality, becuase it is divided between empirical experience and consciousness. Hence from the very beginnning of conscious experience, materialism has no leg to stand on, because reality already presents itself to us from the start as a two-fold reality. Not only can science say nothing about the human conscious mind, it can not in principle ever say anything about the mind, for the simple reason that science is limited to the empirical domain of experience, while experience itself goes beyond the empirical and extends to consciousness. We know empirically through our senses, we know consciousness through reflection. Therefore, science is not the grand-unifying-all-powerful-theory-of-everything that it is worshiped as. Since the most interesting things about being a person are found in this interior dimension, all accounts of man that start from the outside and refuse to go in, fall way short of explaining our uniqueness.

Now any person capable of reflection can see that in comparing the nature of consciousness with that of our empirical experience, the two dimensions of reality are not reducable to each other. They are completely different. Materialism is false, not only because there is no reason in our experience to think that all of reality is matter (consciousness refutes it), but our knowledge of mind (consciousness) is of something that transcends matter. Hence it can be reasonably deduced that mind survives death becuase it is of a different and higher nature then matter.

In conclusion, materialism is refuted by the very existence of a single human person. It ought to be liberating to know that reality is much richer then that dark, cold, impersonal sea of matter that materialists believe in without one iota of evidence.

2003-02-10T19:51:00.000-04:00

The Massive Faith of Secularism
Materialism, naturalism, whatever one calls it it has become one of the cornerstones of secular culture and the implicit ideology of science. But are there good grounds for having such an ideology? Is there evidence for it? Surely something that is so much assumed at every corner should be beyond doubt? We are told that consciousness will some day be explained by neurobiology, that the mind is just the brain, that we can explain every dimension of ourselves through evolution from impersonal forces, that religion is caused by the brain, etc. One could multiply examples of this assumption ad nauseum.

Now science could not possibly establish the idea that all of reality is matter or reducable to it, it's just not a testible verifiable proposition. Science assumes that there is indeed a material world that it can investigate, but making pronouncements about the condition of all reality is not something science does. The scientific enterprise doesn't need to assume anything more then that matter does exist. This must mean that materialism is a philosophical idea and any truth to it must be argued for philosophically. So, where is the evidence?

Perhaps I'm not looking in the right places, but I don't see even the barest hint of an attempt at establishing this philosophical corner stone of modern thinking. It is apparently just one big whopping assumption that secularism takes for granted. In fact, I don't recall bumping into any real philosophical arguments for materialism from the history of philosophy. Sure, there are some materialistic assertions from some greek philosophers, but what about some reasons? From Lucretius to Hobbes it seems to be nothing more then mere assumption. The only actual argument I have come across for materialism comes from a comment by Aristotle talking about some philosopher who thought that the mind must be made up of all things because it can know all things.

But in the absence of any foundation for materialism or any reason why it should be preferred to a non-monist conception of reality, the only conclusion to be made is that secularism rests on one giant leap of faith.

2003-02-09T00:57:00.000-04:00

Scientism
Human knowledge did not begin with the advent of modern science. Hence man's knowledge domain is much broader and extends farther then just science. Those that deny this belong to the camp of scientism. Knowledge and the way we get to it can not be limited to science and the particular methods that have been evolved for science for the simple reason that human experience is not just empirical experience. Not only is experience more then empirical experience, but even considering empirical experience there is more then one way of approaching or thinking about the phenomena presented to us through the senses. Science and it's methods are very powerful in their own field, but they represent a very narrow approach to reality. Scientism absolutizes the sciences and their methods, making them the sole criterea for all knowledge. 'Unscientific' has come to mean irrational to all those under sway of scientism. They imagine that the scientific method is the first principle of human thought and so can 'judge but is not judged'.

The fact is that the power of the human mind to know has nothing to do with the empirical controls and measures devised by science for its own little branch of the woods. It lies in the ability to intuit forms and patterns and meaning reflected from our experience of the world, and to deduce other things from those intuitions. Those deductions are reasonable if they abide by the laws of logic, not necessarily when they are testable, or verifiable in a scientific sense. The meta-foundations of reason are not reducable to the empirical domain. In fact, science, religion, and philosophy all derive their legitimacy from a single shared source, the intuition of Being.

2003-02-07T04:12:00.000-04:00

Science not significant

Science is very useful, no doubt about that. But the questions that are really significant for man, the existential questions like what is the good life, how should I live my life, is there an ultimate purpose to my existence, and others that effect the core of our being and determine ultimately how we live our lives, when it comes to these kinds of questions, science is quite impotent. When we are in the grip of an existential crisis, we hardly could care about the details of how the physical world works. We seek out this kind of knowledge of physical causes for the sake of technology, that is, convenience and domination and mastery of nature. Chemistry and physics are little help when faced with the anxiety of death. The proximate natural causes of the world don't tell us what we would really like to know about the more ultimate causes of life. When it really comes down to the important things, science is utterly insignificant.

The secularism of our culture downplays these real human issues by discouraging reflection. The wheels of capitalist wealth require that we are in a continual and perpetual state of titillation and lust, always being impelled to consume, to satisfy our appetites. We are surrounded by gadgets and toys and noise and distractions that we can throw ourselves into, myriads of diversions to keep us from such unpleasant questions. But even worse, insignificant science has become a new religion and scientists are its priests. It is amazing the utterly disproportionate adoration that is shown to science by many today. Science is treated as an oracle that will tell us all, it's the new philosopher's stone that will give us mastery over life and death. It's the latest incarnation of a story that is as old as humanity, the omnipresent temptation to 'be like God'. Whether it's magic or gnosticism or technology, man constructs a temple to himself through power and control and manipulation, weaving a palace where man can pretend that he is the king of the universe. In such an idolitrous atmososphere, it's difficult to see science in it's proper place, that of a very useful but utterly insignificant discipline.

2003-02-06T03:43:00.000-04:00

It's OK to believe

What is the nature of faith or belief? Upon reflection, it seems that faith is a kind of knowledge, and even probably the most common form of knowledge, making up the majority of all that we claim to know. The essence of belief, seems to be that it depends on authority, not on personal vision. Hence, when a friend goes to India and tells you that there are tigers there, you will have no problem believing it if you trust your friend. In this instance, the friend is an authority because he was there and because you trust him. Now when I ask you if there are tigers in India and how do you know, you respond "becuase my friend was there and he told me". This is considered a knowledge by authority and there isn't a shred of 'evidence' for it. You were not the one in India, you didn't see the tigers, nor could your friend prove to you that the tigers are there.

If it's true, as some claim, that one ought not to believe anything without evidence or proof, well probably about 90% of your knowledge would have to go out the window becuase most knowledge is of this kind. How much of the scientific picture of the world have you figured out yourself? Do you really understand Einstein's equations for relativity? Authority is where most of our knowledge comes from. Hence, a religious person doesn't need any syllogism or proof, he doesn't need any evidence at all, all he needs is a good reason to trust someone or something as an authority and that is good enough.

2003-02-05T04:08:00.000-04:00

God and meaning

What does God have to do with our finding meaning in life? Why does it seem common sense for some to think that denying God entails condemning the life man to meaningless? I think it's becuase meaning is associated with truth. Truth is one of the highest values for man, we don't want to live a lie, but to make our lives meaningful my living in harmony and affirmation of truth and justice. Our lives our not meaningful when we simply know truth, as if merely memorizing a bunch of facts could satisfy our longing for a meaningful life, but by a much more fundamental orientation of our whole being to truth which only comes through action. In other words, meaning is a function of a virtuous life, the good life. Morality is essentially affirming or negating the truth through our actions, thus orientating ourselves, taking a stand towards truth.

Since truth is essentially the ideal structure of the world, to affirm it is to be in harmony with the creative mind that grounds the whole cosmos. When some people question the necessity of God for making life meaningful, they do still rightfully find things that are meaningful in it, even while negating the need for God. But I think they do not realize the connection between meaning and truth, and truth and God. If they did, they would realize that to deny God, is to damn any meaningful life for man, but they do sense that it is meaningful, and so ought to follow it to its ultimate ground.

2003-02-03T18:07:00.000-04:00

What can we know about a first cause?

In speculating about the nature of the first cause of traditonal arguments for the existence of God, there is not a whole lot of positive knowledge we can have of this being, which is not suprising considering the gap that exists between ourselves and God. But there are a few things that can be deduced by denying in the infinite being, what we know to be limitations of finite creatures. raving atheist claims that:

"Being first or being infinite doesn’t imply being omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent or, for that matter, even conscious."

But these characteristics do follow for an infinite being. Omnipotent means not having any weakness, omniscient that there is no ignorance, omnibenevolent no malice, and conscious implies intelligence. Whatever we know to be a limitation of being, must be denied of an infinite being by definition. Ignorance is a limitation of knowledge, hence an infinite being does not lack any knowledge. Mutability, change, dependency, potentiality, compositeness, all these things that are part of the fabric of finitude do not exist in the infinite being, that is why the first and infinite being is immutable, simple, omniscient, omnipotent, etc. Power and perfection is equated with being, therefore that which simply is, is power and perfection itself. Since the infinite is the plenitude of being, we also know that whatever it creates must in some way be similar to it becuase the infinite already contains every perfection within itself. Everything that is created must then pre-exist in a way within the infinite being and share in it's perfection. For the same reason that every created being must in some way be like the infinite, every created being must also be very different and inferior to it. There can only be one first being, hence there will always be an infinite distance between the finite and infinite. Intelligence too, is a perfections and therefore consciousness can not be denied in an infinite being.

This is mostly a negative knowledge. We can deny what we know to be limitations or characteristics of finitude and affirm in the infinite being those things that are perfections in an analogous way. But in no case is God, or an infinite being the direct object of our understanding (and how could it be?).

Of course, there are apparent contradictions and problems that arise when we try to dig deeper into things, like how do we reconcile omniscience with free choice? Instead of acting like the narrow minded rationalists and deny everything that we can't personally wrap our mind around with perfect understanding (which would not even be possible with things that transcend us), we ought to have the humility to acknowledge the boundaries of our reason. In the case of the free will/omniscience or other similar issues they will probably never be completely solved, but so what. The fact that we do not understand something doesn't negate the fact that it is. We know that the infinite being is omniscient and we also know that human beings have free will, we should just leave it at that.

2003-02-02T20:29:00.000-04:00

Psychological proof that atheists are in denial?

Atheists never cease to remind us, practically every other sentence, how rational and logical they are. This is, of course, contrasted with religious persons who they characterize as irrational fools, continuing to believe in outlandish stories that are supposedly on the same level as the tooth fairy. But is this is an accurate depiction of religious person's beliefs? Are they really so childish and irrational as the atheists claim they are? The existence and nature of God, the nature of the soul, life-after-death, and other similar topics have been an intrinsic part of philosophy in the West since it's recorded beginnings. The same can be said of the history of ideas all around the world. That these topics are taken quite seriously by many of the world's greatest minds, seems to cast great suspicion on anyone that would treat these things as so evidently irrational and childish. I fail to see how some things that are so obviously rational as to endure for thousands of years of debate, could possibly be compared by anyone to tooth fairies. Unless, that is, they are living in denial.

You don't often hear atheists saying something like, "you know, belief in God is a venerable, sophisticated and very reasonable belief, but I think there are also some good reasons for disbelief and so I disagree with the theists and here is why". No, it's almost always "what a bunch of fools, they are so obviously irrational and stupid, not like us we are so very logical". One has to question why that is. It seems to me that whenever a person or group is running from reality, they always tend to make outrageous claims like that. It's like the Orthodox claiming that the Catholics are entirely heretical and have no similarities whatsoever with themselves. When you commit to trying to justifying an untruth, you have to live in an illusionary world and run farther and farther from reality. It certainly seems like this is going on when atheists take such a ridiculous stance towards those that differ from their views. Are atheists really so insecure in their wold view that they need to continually convince themselves that they are the most reasonable people in the universe and everyone else are irrational children? Show me an atheist that can affirm a person's belief in God as a legitimate possibility, and you will have found an atheist that is secure enough in his own convictions that he has no need to pretend that all other views are irrational fairy tales.

Religious and theistic beliefs have been a part of humanity for as long as there has been human beings, hence these beliefs are the norm, they are the ordinary. Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence right? So I expect to see extraordinary evidence whenever an atheists makes the extraordinary claim that my beliefs are on the same level as the tooth fairy.

2003-01-31T17:48:00.000-04:00

Some clarification of what anti-secular means to me. There are two completely opposed modes of being in the world, we could call one the religious mode, and the other the secular mode. Each has its own philosophy and ideology that provide the most foundational contexts for behavior and outlook etc. In some societies today, and especially the one I live in (America), the secular mode is the dominant one. The fact that I oppose this secular mode of being in favor of the religious one, does not commit me in any way to the particular details of any specific religion or theology, though I do indeed practice a specific religion. I don't have to defend or agree with every detail of every theology and religion out there in order to be in favor of a religious mode of living in the world. What I am affirming is a world view that tends to have certain characteristics in common at a very general level. While I might think that one religion is superior to another, the very fact that person is religious in any way is a huge improvement to the secular outlook of life. In the same way a person can be for science in general, without having to adhere to any specific scientist's particular theories about something. I don't see anything incoherent about this.

2003-01-31T17:32:00.000-04:00

Raving Atheist has thankfully rooted the 'first cause' argument back in its historical setting from Aquinas and justifies the premise that 'everything has a cause' as being a fair reading of the statement that nothing is the efficient cause of itself. Not every philosopher accepts this interpretation, only the sloppy ones, because 'everything has a cause' is in no way the same as saying 'nothing is the efficient cause of itself'. For Aquinas, an efficient cause is something that bestows existence on something else. Aquinas takes it to be obvious that in the world, things come into existence that did not exist before and these new existences are caused by something other than themselves because self-caused existence is contradictory. So it is not literally everything that requires a cause, but the observed coming into being of things in the world, or in the case of the other arguments, motion that requires a mover, becoming requires an agent, etc. etc. So we have two principles. 1. Every beginning of existence requires a cause. 2. Nothing is self-caused. Aquinas then reasons that in order to account for actual existence, there must be a cause of existence which is not itself being caused to exist by something else. Where is the contradiction? If there is a being that is the uncaused cause of existence, it neither contradicts the first principle because it did not begin to exist, nor does it contradict the second principle because it's not caused at all, let alone self-caused.

You may seek to deny that such a being exists, but there is nothing contradictory about it or the argument.

2003-01-30T14:10:00.000-04:00

Diana Hsieh is another philosopher propogating the straw man premise 'everything must have a cause'. She says:

'The Cosmological Argument attempts to prove God's existence by arguing: "Everything has a cause. And so every cause must itself have a cause. Since we cannot have an infinite chain of causes, there must therefore be a First Cause, something that was not itself caused by anything else. God is that First Cause." The most obvious problem with this argument is that it is self-contradictory. First, it says that everything must have a cause. Everything. Then, it says that there must be something (God) that does not have cause. The premise contradicts the conclusion.'

Again, it would be good if atheists actually consulted the actual historical sources for these arguments instead of making them up so that they are conveniently contradictory. I'm starting to think though, that it's not really about truth, but creating a nice little self-affirming bubble to live in, one where they can go on believing that belief in God is analogous to santa clause blah blah blah.

2003-01-29T19:00:00.000-04:00

The raving atheist, commenting on a traditional argument for God, says:

'The question "who made God?" is, in fact, part of the traditional atheistic refutation of the "first cause" proof of the almighty. That argument states that God must exist because everything, including the universe, must have a cause. The Squad's answer -- that "nobody" made God - simply contradicts the premise of the argument, i.e., that everything must have a cause. So asking "who made God?" points up this particular logical deficiency.'

Apparently, atheists don't actually read the arguments, they just make up fictitious premises that are easy for them to refute. The amazing thing is that ever since Bertrand Russel goofed up the argument, publishers like prometheus press have been continuing the error. Now that's professional competency! I challenge anyone to show any historical 'first cause' argument that contains the premise 'everything must have a cause'. Good luck.