Oct 03 2009

Knowing truth

Category: church,philosophy,religion — harmonicminer @ 10:06 am

I recently read an excellent book, which I’ll be discussing more in a subsequent post, titled Knowing Christ Today: Why we can trust spiritual knowledge, by Dallas Willard.

The book is about the idea that true knowledge is not bounded solely by the scientific method, and that we can know other things as surely as we know things from a scientific perspective.  It’s an excellent work, and it calls us to rethink the abdication by too many in the intelligentsia from claiming to “know” anything that matters with any high degree of confidence.  It is, in a sense, a book about authority.  Who has the right to say that they know a thing?  What does it mean to know a thing, and what responsibilities are incumbent on a person who knows?  Willard situates the idea of what it means to “know Christ” in the larger context of knowledge that is not merely “scientific.”

In some sense, the Protestant Reformation was partly about who has the right to claim to “know” something about God, and to act is if they have true knowledge of Him.  Yet this carried with it some problems of its own, as explained by Fr. Barron in this video.

h/t:  Francis Beckwith

Where does this leave us?  The Roman Catholic church was so certain of its authority to determine Truth that it had little qualm about executing heretics.  Even the Protestant John Calvin participated in such a thing.  It’s difficult to see how the claim to knowledge of God justified the murder of those who merely disagreed.  To extend Fr. Barron’s analogy, referees aren’t allowed to shoot players on whom they call a technical foul.

Roman Catholic abuses of power and improperly made claims of knowledge were part of the fuel for the Protestant Reformation.  However, when they’ve had too much political power, Protestants haven’t always done much better.  The Roman church has occasionally apologized for past excesses done in the name of its knowledge of God, but has perhaps not always grappled with the cognitive dissonance of claiming historical, apostolic authority, while simultaneously denying the rightness of some of its applications.   In the name of knowledge of God, Protestants have too often allowed themselves to be divided over matters that are not central to how we should live, and what the nature of our relationships to others should be.  Even larger issues like free will and predestination have little discernible impact on the day to day life of believers, who all live as if they have free will, but hope God has plans for them.

This history is part of what’s behind the fear of claims of spiritual knowledge.  People are, with some justification, a touch nervous about anyone who claims to really know God.   In the past, such people have sometimes been those who were willing to kill to enforce their perspective.  But, in modern times, other than the case of Islam, such fear is almost totally a smokescreen.

These days, most resistance to the idea that we can have true knowledge of God is from people who are afraid of the claims such knowledge will make on their lives.

If some things really are true, then we must live differently.

Sep 23 2009

The Next Great Awakening, Part 10: Your brain is not a computer, and your mind is not your brain

Category: philosophy,religion,science — harmonicminer @ 9:48 am

The previous post in this series is here.

In a very interesting interview on the unlikelihood that Sci-Fi style artificial intelligence (AI) is coming soon, or even possible, computer scientist Noel Sharkey says why he thinks that AI is a dangerous dream –

I’m an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to “believers” in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious. They say, “What else could there be? Do you think mind is supernatural?” But accepting mind as a physical entity does not tell us what kind of physical entity it is. It could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer.

Of course, materialists have a very hard time accepting that anything of non-material nature exists, anything that is not some mere arrangement of matter and energy, space and time.  What the materialist approach fails to explain is that this theory is itself a non-material thing.  What is the materialist nature of an idea?  Calling it a mere brain state, even a brain state that is shared by others, forces us into the notion that a “brain state” is about something.  Yet the materialists have mostly asserted that what we call consciousness is mere “noise in the system.”  How to account for “brain states” that are about other “brain states” which are attempts to account for the existence of other “brain states”?  One is tempted to take seriously the idea that maybe the minds of materialists are just “noise in the system.”

(Editorial comment in 2023:  For our purposes here, don’t confuse large language models like ChatGPT with actual AI in sense discussed above.  ChatGPT is not sentient, and will “tell” you so. No current AI whose existence is public is “sentient”, which begs the question of what is meant by the word “intelligence” in “artificial intelligence.”  This is probably because no one has any real concept of just what consciousness or sentience is, how it works, what produces it, etc.  Large language models, as neural-net systems that have been trained with enormous amounts of linguistic usage as data, boil down to the management of lists of billions of possible verbal formulations, and the assignment of probabilities to them.  Sentience is something quite a bit more mysterious than a large list with assigned probabilities.)

In his book, The Spiritual Brain, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard adduces the evidence for a non-material mind that is related to but independent of the physical brain.

In the book, Beauregard makes short work of claims of a “God gene” or a “God spot” in the brain, something that would provide a false sense of transcendental experience that could be falsely attributed to God by the gullible.   He asks some very interesting questions about the placebo effect, and what that effect suggests about the relationships of mind, brain and body.  His discussion of the small but persistently measurable PSI effect is very interesting, and refreshing to read from a scientist.   Especially interesting is the discussion about the implications of psycho-therapeutic models that involve teaching people to think different ways, essentially using “mind” to affect “brain,” producing measurable physical effects by changing ideas held by a person.   Beauregard’s work in using functional MRI to study the brains of meditating Carmelite nuns is very interesting, and well worth reading.

You may have the impression that someday science will explain the mind in physical terms.  This is certainly the notion that materialist neuroscientists would like to create in the public mind, yet another form of promissory materialism.

The problem, of course, is that a promise of future theoretical success is a non-material idea flowing from a non-material motivation to defend a non-material perspective about the nature of things.  It seems an impossible task.

Think of it as analogous to trying to write an essay on the topic, “Why there is no such thing as an essay.”  (Coming up next:  “Why there is no such thing as a question….  or an answer.”)

The amazing thing about the human mind is not that it has a non-material aspect.   It is that it has a physical aspect.   After all, the human mind is an echo or image of the non-material Mind behind everything.   Of course it has a non-material aspect.  The amazing thing is that the Creator made a unique integration of mind, brain and body, one that seems to have been designed specifically to allow free moral choice in a physical universe that is of non-physical origin, one characterized as much by quantum uncertainty, which makes free will possible, as by obvious cause and effect relationships.

The next post in this series is here.

Sep 16 2009

Genes are destiny

Category: philosophy,religion,science — harmonicminer @ 8:58 am

Jun 13 2009

The Spiritual Poverty of Socialism? Part 3

Category: philosophy,socialism,theology,Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 9:18 am

The previous post in this series is here.

Socialism, for its very existence, depends on powers of the state to make people do things they would not otherwise do (not merely to make them refrain from doing things that harm or threaten specific individuals), in order to achieve goals (outcomes) that seem good to the socialist.  In this sense, all socialists are statists.

I realize that the definition I gave of “socialism” in the previous post is not the textbook one.  That’s because it is not an ideological definition from the point of view of economic or political theory.  It is an operational one, since no significant strand of socialism avoids the attempt to disconnect outcomes for individuals from the efforts made BY those individuals, and to do so with money and other resources taken in the form of taxes, fees, restrictions, regulations, and sometimes outright confiscation, by the state.  Some will cavil that “socialism” requires “state ownership of the means of production.”  See the previous post in the series for discussion about why that is not a useful standard.

On the continuum of socialism (as operationally defined above), nearly every government/economic system has *some* element of socialism/statism.   The very nature of government involves some degree of collective action towards common goals, which will dilute the effect of any given individual’s participation on the outcome for that individual.  It is a matter of degree, and context.

Let’s start with the easy, noncontroversial stuff.  Public funding of roads is socialist.  So are government funded militaries, court systems, police and fire fighting agencies, schools, etc.   While extreme free market fans may theorize otherwise, these are things which are commonly conceived to be the province of government, even though government may execute them via private parties.  That is, governments usually hire private contractors to build roads (though cities often have a “roads department” for minor repairs).  On the other hand, judges, police, and fire fighters are usually government employees.  Oddly, K-12 teachers are either public employees in publicly funded schools, or private employees in privately funded schools, while college and university professors may be employed by private or public institutions, and the private ones often receive a good deal of government money, at least in the form of student financial aid.

What’s characteristic about all of these services (with the possible exception of schools) is that virtually everyone uses them at one time or another, in one way or another, and they are services that no individual COULD provide privately.  That is, no one could afford to build a road from New York to Los Angeles.  Who could afford to maintain their own private police force, court and prison system, just in case they needed it, or keep a fire department standing by locally, just in case?  Maybe Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, but that’s about it.  And, in any case, no one would want ANY private person to have judicial powers, the complete panoply of police powers, etc.  Nor would we want any private person, no matter how wealthy, to be able to decide just where roads would be built.

So, the defining characteristics of “socialist” policies and programs that virtually everyone will accept are:

1)  They provide services that virtually no person could supply for themselves.

And,

2)  They provide services that would require a person to have so much personal power that we would not trust anyone to possess it.

Note that libertarians, radical free market believers, etc., may even complain about these.  But in general, most people who are suspicious of “socialism” — being suspicious of the statism in requires — will not complain too much about about these kinds of things.  Call it “socialism lite.”

These are areas where reasonable people can disagree.  How much should the state be involved in providing utilities?  How much should the state be involved in determining which cars are safe to drive?  What levels of risk are acceptable?  Any brief review of history of such things will reveal that various attitudes have existed, though the trend towards more and more statism in these areas is clear.  In any case, these are essentially pragmatic matters.  What will work best?  What will cost the public least, for the most benefit?

It is certainly not a “spiritual challenge” to seek or accept clean water delivered by a publicly owned utility with state supervision and management.

But, as we will see, greater levels of socialism/statism are clearly dangerous to the spritual health of the person, particularly those that intrude into matters that individuals ARE competent to deal with themselves, and which do not require the exercise of great personal power on the part of the individual.

That will be the topic of the next post in this series.

May 03 2009

Faith only in uncertainty

Category: philosophy,science,theology,Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 4:48 pm

In this skeptical world, it seems everyone wants evidence of everything. Fortunately, there are two central facts that intrude:

1) Almost nothing really important can be proved in the way skeptics demand.  They can’t even prove that they exist, that there is such a thing as “thought,” or “personality,” or “identity,” or “love,” or even “memory.”  Radical skepticism allows only for electro-chemical states in the brain that don’t mean anything in particular except to other electro-chemical states in other brains…  if there are really other electro-chemical states.  What’s really funny is their touching faith that the universe can be apprehended by “logic” (who revealed THAT to them?), and that the universe somehow developed, all on it’s own, minor extrusions with electro-chemical brain states capable of acting as disinterested observers and evaluators of fact.  How did THAT work, again?

2)  Even radical skeptics believe that there is some level of evidence that a person should be willing to accept for the facts of history, human psychology, cultural development, scientific knowability of the universe, ethical presuppositions for humans, etc.  Without some willingness to accept different kinds of evidence for different kinds of propositions and assertions about the nature of reality, there is no hope of considering both science and history to be sources of “knowledge.”   And a corollary: nearly every kind of really important information or concept is “inferential,” meaning we can’t know everything about it, and we only know it because of a confluence of evidence that points to it, but doesn’t (and can’t) directly prove it in the deductive way that simple mathematical propositions can sometimes be proved (actually, less often than many people think —  ask a math geek to explain “decidability” to you sometime).

If a person is willing to accept the notion that we all make decisions based on incomplete information, that the most important decisions of our lives are based not on deductive calculation but on inferential response to incomplete evidence (what career to pursue, who to marry, who to trust, how to raise our kids, what matters more than what, what’s right and what’s wrong), then the grounds for radical skepticism are removed, about God, about a Creator who IS Intelligence and so made a Creation that includes the possibility (inevitability?) of it, and who might make provision for His creatures to know something about Him and His plans for them (special and general revelation).  If radical skepticism is no longer a rational response (and it isn’t to anything that really matters), then we’re left with sifting evidence, considering what we know and don’t know (or can‘t know), and casting our net very wide for many different kinds of information, to see if, taken together, they point to anything, if there is anything we can infer.

This is the point where just a tiny amount of faith is enough, enough to take that first step.  What is that first step?  Believing that there may be something to find, so that you don’t stop looking.  From that tiny opening, God works, in tiny steps, piece by piece, helping you build your faith a mite at a time, so that as you grow in faith and understanding (and make no mistake, genuine progress in either causes the other to grow), you find more and more ways that seemingly tiny bits of life and information fit together, and all reveal the glory of God.

There are, of course, secular zealots who hate the very idea of God. But the tide of history, contrary to their opinions, is against them, and the greatest minds of history have disagreed with them. What we need now is an infusion of courage in believers, so that they will not only stand their ground, but advance, the only rational response to the complexity of being a human being in this created order:

When that great saint Thomas More, Chancellor of England, was on trial for his life for daring to defy Henry VIII, one of his prosecutors asked him if it did not worry him that he was standing out against all the bishops of England.He replied: ‘My lord, for one bishop of your opinion, I have a hundred saints of mine.’

Now, I think of that exchange and of his bravery in proclaiming his faith. Our bishops and theologians, frightened as they have been by the pounding of secularist guns, need that kind of bravery more than ever.

Sadly, they have all but accepted that only stupid people actually believe in Christianity, and that the few intelligent people left in the churches are there only for the music or believe it all in some symbolic or contorted way which, when examined, turns out not to be belief after all.

As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite is the case and that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational.

Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.

The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story.

It takes faith to overcome doubt, do the right thing, and live the right way, but not blind faith.

The only blind faith on offer is the type it takes to believe in materialist atheism, which is not scientific in the slightest, since it takes a most unscientific position about where science came from.

Mar 03 2009

Job Security for Philosophers: Theists must stay in the closet

Category: higher education,philosophy,theology — harmonicminer @ 10:19 am

At the link, a very interesting description of a debate between a theist philosopher and an atheist philosopher, which sounds very interesting in its own terms, and this revealing confession.

I was at the talk. It was packed with professional philosophers and graduate students in philosophy, most of whom sided with Dennett. I wrote live comments on the debate/session. I prefer to remain anonymous for various reasons, in particular because I am inclined towards Plantinga’s position over Dennett’s and were this to become well-known it could damage or destroy my career in analytic philosophy. This is something I prefer not to put my family through. I almost didn’t publish these comments at all, but as far as I could tell, this would be the only public record of the discussion.

Friends, if you can identify me, I request that you keep my identity secret. I am sharing my thoughts as a service to the philosophical community and all those who have an interest in such debates. But I prefer not to suffer at the hands of my ardently secular colleagues. This is not to say that all secular analytic philosophers are this way; they most certainly are not. But enough of them are that I cannot risk being known publicly.

But wait! I thought the Left was all about tolerance. And DIVERSITY!

SURE it is.

Here’s the link to the exchange between Plantinga and Dennett.

Disclaimer:  while I’m obviously a theist, I don’t find so called “theistic evolution” to be a particularly convincing perspective, nor the attempts to rename it but not change the underlying concept.

But the “live blog” of the Plantinga/Dennett debate is very interesting.

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Nov 23 2008

Orthodoxy

Category: philosophy,theology — harmonicminer @ 6:35 pm

I’ve been rereading things I didn’t understand as well as I should have, the first time around.  And, I’ve been reading things I hadn’t read before, but should have.

One of those is “Orthodoxy“, by G.K. Chesterton.

Here is a recent appreciation of Chesterton.

I’ll be posting more on this in the “Next Great Awakening” series. 

But I’m still reading.

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Oct 22 2008

Not new, but probably true

Category: freedom,philosophy,politics — harmonicminer @ 9:39 am

I was reminded of this at azusapacificalumni.com

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of Athenian Republic some 2000 years earlier: “A democracy is always temporary in nature: it simply cannot exist as a pemanent form of government.”
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.”

Continue reading “Not new, but probably true”

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Oct 20 2008

Evangelicals, politics and society: what the Left wishes was true, but isn’t

Category: election 2008,left,philosophy,politics,right,theology — harmonicminer @ 2:17 pm

J. Daryl Charles, author of “Between Pacifism and Jihad“, comments on an example of journalistic wish-fulfillment in which David D. Kirkpatrick prays earnestly for the “crack-up of Evangelical politics”. Well, to be fair, he only cheerleads what he wishes was the end of Right-leaning evangelicalism.  After pointing out that the trends present in mega-churches and the “emerging” church are not dispositive of the major part of evangelical Christendom, Charles, whose knowledge of evangelicalism is wide and deep, provides plenty of examples that were in Kirkpatrick’s backyard, but which he failed to notice…  maybe the fences were too high in New York City, so Kirkpatrick had to go to the midwest to find something to write about.  Ending graphs, though Charles’ entire take is worth reading:

And yet, had Kirkpatrick done his homework, his research would have taken him, not to Wichita, Kansas, but to his own backyard and New York City, where evangelical congregations are vibrant and socially engaged. Consider, for example, the very large and increasingly influential Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, which embodies what is salutary, healthy, and encouraging about Protestant evangelicalism. But because Redeemer, given its simultaneous commitments to theological orthodoxy and social responsibility, has been making a difference in the city for almost two decades (and doing so without a so-called leftward political shift), such evidence would undermine Kirkpatrick’s thesis. Similar examples abound in metropolitan areas nationwide.
Continue reading “Evangelicals, politics and society: what the Left wishes was true, but isn’t”

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Oct 05 2008

Capitalism tried and found guilty for the crimes of socialists

Category: economy,media,philosophy,politics — harmonicminer @ 9:05 am

I should probably stop quoting Mr. Bidinotto so much, but his analysis is simply dead on target. After reviewing the history of the current financial meltdown (that’s what happens when you play with something as radioactive as cheap financing for bad credit risks with a short half-life in the name of equality), he opines:

Now, what’s Congress’s answer to all of this?

To nationalize the bad loans — thus formalizing the taxpayers’ obligation to underwrite the rampant irresponsibility that led to this mess in the first place.

The welfare state established the basic moral principle we now see in all its ugliness: that responsible taxpayers are to be sacrificial servants of the irresponsible — that they are to buffer the irresponsible from the destructive consequences of their actions, by absorbing that damage themselves.

But now, we are adding the following amendment to this premise of moral cannibalism: that the greater and more destructive the irrationality caused by others, the more immediate and pressing is the taxpayers’ moral duty to absorb the harm onto themselves.

Continue reading “Capitalism tried and found guilty for the crimes of socialists”

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