The new blog New Lamps for Old is available at: wrainey.blogspot.com
This, together with the previous sequence of blogs, From the Long Woman's Country, is also
available at: www.blogger.com/profile/16467992146370529404
Monday, October 10, 2016
Sunday, October 9, 2016
My last mailing was on
March 30th 2010.
It was not really intended
as a blog, but rather part of a series of, for want of a better term,
essays. I simply used the blog platform
for convenience. I wasn’t interested in
getting replies or comments or entering into correspondence. As far as I was concerned, I was simply speaking,
if you like, ex-cathedra.
At the time of ceasing,
I felt that I had said all that need saying, though not all that could be
said. Several times over the intervening
years I have been tempted to revive the postings—something that up to now I
have resisted.
It is now the end of
September 2016, and I have finally decided to surrender to the temptation and
restore the mailings, at least for the time being. They are aimed at a very small number of
people, who know who they are, but anyone else who might happen to come across
them is welcome to read them. Beyond
this particular mailing, they are not otherwise being advertised.
The name of the new ‘blog’
is New Lamps for Old.
The address for it is:
The mailings will
probably be more sporadic that previously, and will cover a wider range of
topics.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
The Last Post . . .
As promised, we have come to the terminus of the journey. There are plenty of other things that could be written of; but everything that needs be written has been written, especially in the last handful of mailings.
Thank you to those who accompanied me on the journey—a journey I didn't necessarily want to make, but felt compelled to, under impetus of the silence of others perhaps more entitled to speak.
By way of valediction—as it were, a sort of Horseman, Pass By moment:
Going Solo
I heard last night that you were dead,
the three of you,
a landlady,
someone I worked with,
an old girlfriend;
and I drew a fourth to fill a hand,
my father,
caught obliquely in the sideways mirror of the pub
as I raised my glass,
ambushed by his likeness
in the image.
And if I was to speak falsely of it,
I might say something about the loneliness
of the round-the-world yachtsman
setting out
as the flotilla breaks behind
and turns for shore.
But the truth is I'm indifferent.
19/1/2000
Thank you to those who accompanied me on the journey—a journey I didn't necessarily want to make, but felt compelled to, under impetus of the silence of others perhaps more entitled to speak.
By way of valediction—as it were, a sort of Horseman, Pass By moment:
Going Solo
I heard last night that you were dead,
the three of you,
a landlady,
someone I worked with,
an old girlfriend;
and I drew a fourth to fill a hand,
my father,
caught obliquely in the sideways mirror of the pub
as I raised my glass,
ambushed by his likeness
in the image.
And if I was to speak falsely of it,
I might say something about the loneliness
of the round-the-world yachtsman
setting out
as the flotilla breaks behind
and turns for shore.
But the truth is I'm indifferent.
19/1/2000
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Prince of Darkness . . .
It might appear at times that I am presenting myself, however outlandishly it might seem, as a defender of the Catholic Church. Not necessarily so. My experience of an Irish Catholic upbringing left me with few, if any, nostalgic memories. By my time, the Church had long since become a machine, an institution, no different from any other institution in its reaction to threats and dangers. The problem for it was, however, that it was expected to be much more than that, and was likely to be held to much higher standards of accountability than your average secular institution. Which is why it is in the bind it is in at the moment.
My decision to involve myself in the broader debate wasn't particularly fuelled by any desire to defend the Catholic Church. Rather it was prompted by a relatively intimate knowledge of the forces seeking to bring it down—and that is what is ultimately afoot—and the consequences for human life and freedom and happiness should such forces be allowed to win.
I remember sometime around the late 1980s, an academic from either Oxford or Cambridge writing an op-ed piece in the Daily Telegraph bemoaning the loss of religion and speaking of the need to restore it—for the little people! To him religion was a method of social control, a true 'opium of the people', and certainly not something to be believed in by anyone of a rarified intellect similar to his own, an opinion which he made abundantly clear in the article. And one's instinctive reaction was to take the patronising little prat and give him a kicking—if such a thing had been possible.
There is no doubt that religion has been often used historically for the purposes of social control—for keeping the rich rich and the poor consoled in their poverty. This was often the remit of the institutional Church (indeed, the institutional churches), whose higher benefices were usually reserved for the upper classes.
Writing, for example, of Hungary around the time of the French Revolution, one historian could say that it 'boasted perhaps the largest nobility in Europe. There 75,000 Magnates, and lesser gentry, had things their own way. They owned all the land, had exclusive right to office, filled all the places in the Church, the Army and the Universities; like nobles elsewhere they were exempt from all regular and most special taxes' (The Empire of Reason: Henry Steele Commager, Phoenix, 1978).
Yet that is only one side of the story—the side of the corruption of religion, not of religion itself. Nor is it surprising that people should have turned against religion in such situations, coming to see it, not as part of the solution, but as a major element of the problem. Neither is it surprising that those with deeper agendas should often have sought to take advantage of the perception.
Yet the fact is that there is much more to religion than bishops touching up altar boys or simony or enforced sexual repression—for some reason, though it is in no way relevant, the opening sentence of Anthony Burgess's novel Earthly Pursuits keeps pushing itself into my mind: 'It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.'
As I say, there is more to religion than the faults that are being heaped at the door of its institutional arm. There is, as there has always been, even in pre-Christian and post-Christian times, a religion of the heart, found often among the least sophisticated of people, and truer in its instinct than much of the more elaborate dogma and ceremonial of the churches. Although this is not to suggest that such a naive faith is something necessarily lacking in the established churches either.
I used the phrase above, the 'post-Christian' era. And really I think that this describes the epoch we are living in. From as far back as the 18th century, the philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment tended to identify religion—and specifically Christianity, and specifically within Christianity, the Catholic Church—as the linch-pin holding together all the evils of the world that kept man in chains. Simply abolish religion was the more or less general prescription and men would become as gods.
Now the succeeding centuries, right up to the present moment, have acted as a laboratory for this view, as religion has become ever more increasingly marginalised. And has it produced a new and reformed human nature? Or has it instead uncorked the bottle and—outside of the limited world of the liberal and chattering classes—let the genie of human unregeneracy fly free? Are people on average, or even in total, any happier or any better as a result of the undermining of religion? Have men, indeed, become as gods?
Sociobiologists—basically another name for the Neo-Darwinists that we have been in previous mailings discussing, and who believe that there is nothing else in the universe, or nothing else needed to explain the universe, than simply the material processes of Darwinian evolution—use a phrase 'survival value'. What this means is that if something has survived over the countless aeons of human development, then it has done so simply because it has played a useful role in the evolution of mankind.
Which is why for them religion is a problem: go back to the remotest periods of recoverable knowledge and you find evidence of religious beliefs and practices. Therefore if religion, and the religious instinct, continue to survive today, then it is only because they have had a positive influence on the course of human development.
Forced to recognise this fact, the sociobiologists attempt to explain it away. Religion, the religious instinct, is purely an accident that—equally accidentally—happened to be favourable to our development as a social species. In itself it means nothing. It is just a happenstance thrown up by evolution that has proved useful to us, in much the same way as the circumstance of being double-jointed might be of benefit to a contortionist. Given their fundamentally materialist (atheistic) beliefs, what else are the sociobiologists to say?
A second string to the argument is the contention that even if a thing was beneficial to human development in the past, that does not mean that it is necessarily so any longer. This might be seen as a justification for the more aggressive school of scientific atheism—the Dawkinses and Hitchinses etc—whose aim isn't just the marginalisation of religion, but its annihilation.
And this raises the question, how do you destroy a religion or the religious outlook?
A new development in the field of genetic science—epigenetic theory—seems to offer the possibility that it might be possible to eradicate belief and the instinct to belief by radically changing the intellectual and cultural environment, and that any such change might also, to some extent, be transmissable down subsequent generations. [Indeed, although it is somewhat early to say yet with any certainty, epigenetic theory threatens to provide the possibility of a radical corrective to conventional theories of evolution.]
Such a programme for eliminating religious belief was attempted in the Soviet Union under Stalin, except that historical factors intervened before its conclusion, so that the jury must remain out on its actual efficacy. The German invasion of 1941 forced Stalin to take the Orthodox Church once again aboard, prompted by the cynical calculation that the Russian population might be more likely to fight and die for 'Mother Russia' than for communism.
A second arguable way of seeing off religion is to take it on at its own game. The French revolutionaries, post-1792, attempted to install a Cult of Reason in place of the Catholic religion, a process that included placing an actress, symbolising Reason, on a throne on the high altar of Notre Dame cathedral. Something similar was tried some fifty or so years later by Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, a philosophical movement which, broadly speaking, disallows the consideration of anything that cannot be factually proven, and which arguably underlies all the subsequent developments of materialistic and atheistic thought right up to our own day.
'Comte spent his old age devising for this Religion of Humanity an intricate system of priesthood, sacraments, prayers, and disciplines; and proposed a new calendar in which the names of pagan deities and mediaeval saints should be replaced by the heroes of human progress. As a wit put it, Comte offered the world all of Catholicism except Christianity' (The Story of Philosophy: Will Durant, Simon and Schuster, 1926).
The failure of both these attempts at creating man-made religions—religions that eschewed the divine—seems to demonstrate the inherent futility of the project.
The third, and most sinister, and most relevant, method of destroying a religion is to undermine it from within, to hollow it out to the extent that it inevitably collapses in on itself. This involves a Gramsci-ian type interventionism under which a head of pressure is built up for modernisation and liberal alterations to the liturgy and dogma of the religion concerned. Such movements are often led by provocateurs, people deliberately planted within the particular church to achieve the intended end—really, the interim end; for the ultimate end is always the destruction of the religion—which is basically to turn the church into a parody of itself. The supporters of such programmes—at least at rank-and-file level—are often naive and susceptible to manipulation; what Lenin in another context described as the 'useful idiots'.
If we take the Catholic Church, for example: at the moment it is under enormous pressure to make concession after concession, in the form of resignations and self-abnegations and apologies. The fact is, of course, that no amount of concessions is ever likely to be enough to satisfy the demands of those making them. Indeed, each concession is likely only to whet the appetite for new ones. For at the end, whether all those involved in the campaign perceive it or not, the real impetus is not for the renewal of the Chuch, but for its destruction.
The best recompense that the Church can make for its past failures is to ensure that they cannot happen in the future. Let it issue its apologies and make its compensatory payments and whatever else, but at some stage, if it is not to be destroyed, a line has to be drawn under the matter and a decision made: this far and no further.
No more than allowing, say, the mothers of children killed in motorcar accidents a decisive role in the framing of road traffic legislation, it does not make sense to expect the broader Catholic Church to surrender totally to the chorus of the damaged, and the cacophony of liberal cheerleaders urging them on from the stalls. This is not intended as either a dismissive or callous comment. But the fact is that, in both of the situations mentioned, there is likely to be too much emotion, too much hurt, too much of a reactive looking for vengeance, for it to be possible to arrive at any commonsense rational consensus.
People in general—and especially those who enjoy the luxury of not being immediately involved—need to stop and think and take a deep breath before they dig a hole that they may regret ultimately having got themselves into. The end result of giving in to pure emotion in any situation is to risk not just throwing out the bathwater, but often the baby with it as well.
Of course, on the other hand, the world is coming down around our ears, and there is no reason why the Catholic Church should be immune to the deficits—of ability, of intellect, of leadership, of honour—that are affecting all other institutions. With the rest of them, it may indeed be forced ultimately to fold its tent and steal off into the night—or at least into the desert, where, shorn of its wealth and power and perhaps much of its membership, it will have to undergo a long and painful process of self-renewal. And who is to say that this may not by the happiest option?
It is just that, in the meantime, things seem to be developing in such an unpleasant and hysterical manner.
My decision to involve myself in the broader debate wasn't particularly fuelled by any desire to defend the Catholic Church. Rather it was prompted by a relatively intimate knowledge of the forces seeking to bring it down—and that is what is ultimately afoot—and the consequences for human life and freedom and happiness should such forces be allowed to win.
I remember sometime around the late 1980s, an academic from either Oxford or Cambridge writing an op-ed piece in the Daily Telegraph bemoaning the loss of religion and speaking of the need to restore it—for the little people! To him religion was a method of social control, a true 'opium of the people', and certainly not something to be believed in by anyone of a rarified intellect similar to his own, an opinion which he made abundantly clear in the article. And one's instinctive reaction was to take the patronising little prat and give him a kicking—if such a thing had been possible.
There is no doubt that religion has been often used historically for the purposes of social control—for keeping the rich rich and the poor consoled in their poverty. This was often the remit of the institutional Church (indeed, the institutional churches), whose higher benefices were usually reserved for the upper classes.
Writing, for example, of Hungary around the time of the French Revolution, one historian could say that it 'boasted perhaps the largest nobility in Europe. There 75,000 Magnates, and lesser gentry, had things their own way. They owned all the land, had exclusive right to office, filled all the places in the Church, the Army and the Universities; like nobles elsewhere they were exempt from all regular and most special taxes' (The Empire of Reason: Henry Steele Commager, Phoenix, 1978).
Yet that is only one side of the story—the side of the corruption of religion, not of religion itself. Nor is it surprising that people should have turned against religion in such situations, coming to see it, not as part of the solution, but as a major element of the problem. Neither is it surprising that those with deeper agendas should often have sought to take advantage of the perception.
Yet the fact is that there is much more to religion than bishops touching up altar boys or simony or enforced sexual repression—for some reason, though it is in no way relevant, the opening sentence of Anthony Burgess's novel Earthly Pursuits keeps pushing itself into my mind: 'It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.'
As I say, there is more to religion than the faults that are being heaped at the door of its institutional arm. There is, as there has always been, even in pre-Christian and post-Christian times, a religion of the heart, found often among the least sophisticated of people, and truer in its instinct than much of the more elaborate dogma and ceremonial of the churches. Although this is not to suggest that such a naive faith is something necessarily lacking in the established churches either.
I used the phrase above, the 'post-Christian' era. And really I think that this describes the epoch we are living in. From as far back as the 18th century, the philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment tended to identify religion—and specifically Christianity, and specifically within Christianity, the Catholic Church—as the linch-pin holding together all the evils of the world that kept man in chains. Simply abolish religion was the more or less general prescription and men would become as gods.
Now the succeeding centuries, right up to the present moment, have acted as a laboratory for this view, as religion has become ever more increasingly marginalised. And has it produced a new and reformed human nature? Or has it instead uncorked the bottle and—outside of the limited world of the liberal and chattering classes—let the genie of human unregeneracy fly free? Are people on average, or even in total, any happier or any better as a result of the undermining of religion? Have men, indeed, become as gods?
Sociobiologists—basically another name for the Neo-Darwinists that we have been in previous mailings discussing, and who believe that there is nothing else in the universe, or nothing else needed to explain the universe, than simply the material processes of Darwinian evolution—use a phrase 'survival value'. What this means is that if something has survived over the countless aeons of human development, then it has done so simply because it has played a useful role in the evolution of mankind.
Which is why for them religion is a problem: go back to the remotest periods of recoverable knowledge and you find evidence of religious beliefs and practices. Therefore if religion, and the religious instinct, continue to survive today, then it is only because they have had a positive influence on the course of human development.
Forced to recognise this fact, the sociobiologists attempt to explain it away. Religion, the religious instinct, is purely an accident that—equally accidentally—happened to be favourable to our development as a social species. In itself it means nothing. It is just a happenstance thrown up by evolution that has proved useful to us, in much the same way as the circumstance of being double-jointed might be of benefit to a contortionist. Given their fundamentally materialist (atheistic) beliefs, what else are the sociobiologists to say?
A second string to the argument is the contention that even if a thing was beneficial to human development in the past, that does not mean that it is necessarily so any longer. This might be seen as a justification for the more aggressive school of scientific atheism—the Dawkinses and Hitchinses etc—whose aim isn't just the marginalisation of religion, but its annihilation.
And this raises the question, how do you destroy a religion or the religious outlook?
A new development in the field of genetic science—epigenetic theory—seems to offer the possibility that it might be possible to eradicate belief and the instinct to belief by radically changing the intellectual and cultural environment, and that any such change might also, to some extent, be transmissable down subsequent generations. [Indeed, although it is somewhat early to say yet with any certainty, epigenetic theory threatens to provide the possibility of a radical corrective to conventional theories of evolution.]
Such a programme for eliminating religious belief was attempted in the Soviet Union under Stalin, except that historical factors intervened before its conclusion, so that the jury must remain out on its actual efficacy. The German invasion of 1941 forced Stalin to take the Orthodox Church once again aboard, prompted by the cynical calculation that the Russian population might be more likely to fight and die for 'Mother Russia' than for communism.
A second arguable way of seeing off religion is to take it on at its own game. The French revolutionaries, post-1792, attempted to install a Cult of Reason in place of the Catholic religion, a process that included placing an actress, symbolising Reason, on a throne on the high altar of Notre Dame cathedral. Something similar was tried some fifty or so years later by Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, a philosophical movement which, broadly speaking, disallows the consideration of anything that cannot be factually proven, and which arguably underlies all the subsequent developments of materialistic and atheistic thought right up to our own day.
'Comte spent his old age devising for this Religion of Humanity an intricate system of priesthood, sacraments, prayers, and disciplines; and proposed a new calendar in which the names of pagan deities and mediaeval saints should be replaced by the heroes of human progress. As a wit put it, Comte offered the world all of Catholicism except Christianity' (The Story of Philosophy: Will Durant, Simon and Schuster, 1926).
The failure of both these attempts at creating man-made religions—religions that eschewed the divine—seems to demonstrate the inherent futility of the project.
The third, and most sinister, and most relevant, method of destroying a religion is to undermine it from within, to hollow it out to the extent that it inevitably collapses in on itself. This involves a Gramsci-ian type interventionism under which a head of pressure is built up for modernisation and liberal alterations to the liturgy and dogma of the religion concerned. Such movements are often led by provocateurs, people deliberately planted within the particular church to achieve the intended end—really, the interim end; for the ultimate end is always the destruction of the religion—which is basically to turn the church into a parody of itself. The supporters of such programmes—at least at rank-and-file level—are often naive and susceptible to manipulation; what Lenin in another context described as the 'useful idiots'.
If we take the Catholic Church, for example: at the moment it is under enormous pressure to make concession after concession, in the form of resignations and self-abnegations and apologies. The fact is, of course, that no amount of concessions is ever likely to be enough to satisfy the demands of those making them. Indeed, each concession is likely only to whet the appetite for new ones. For at the end, whether all those involved in the campaign perceive it or not, the real impetus is not for the renewal of the Chuch, but for its destruction.
The best recompense that the Church can make for its past failures is to ensure that they cannot happen in the future. Let it issue its apologies and make its compensatory payments and whatever else, but at some stage, if it is not to be destroyed, a line has to be drawn under the matter and a decision made: this far and no further.
No more than allowing, say, the mothers of children killed in motorcar accidents a decisive role in the framing of road traffic legislation, it does not make sense to expect the broader Catholic Church to surrender totally to the chorus of the damaged, and the cacophony of liberal cheerleaders urging them on from the stalls. This is not intended as either a dismissive or callous comment. But the fact is that, in both of the situations mentioned, there is likely to be too much emotion, too much hurt, too much of a reactive looking for vengeance, for it to be possible to arrive at any commonsense rational consensus.
People in general—and especially those who enjoy the luxury of not being immediately involved—need to stop and think and take a deep breath before they dig a hole that they may regret ultimately having got themselves into. The end result of giving in to pure emotion in any situation is to risk not just throwing out the bathwater, but often the baby with it as well.
Of course, on the other hand, the world is coming down around our ears, and there is no reason why the Catholic Church should be immune to the deficits—of ability, of intellect, of leadership, of honour—that are affecting all other institutions. With the rest of them, it may indeed be forced ultimately to fold its tent and steal off into the night—or at least into the desert, where, shorn of its wealth and power and perhaps much of its membership, it will have to undergo a long and painful process of self-renewal. And who is to say that this may not by the happiest option?
It is just that, in the meantime, things seem to be developing in such an unpleasant and hysterical manner.
Monday, March 22, 2010
The Shape of Things that Are Trying to Come (2) . . .
The Neo-Darwinists that we spoke of in the last mailing have developed the logic implicit in Darwin's theory of biological evolution to its utmost extent. The emergence of, say, the human race isn't the result of the unfolding of some great preformed plan; instead, it is the accidental end result of a whole chain of events, involving all sorts of material phenomena and organisms, stretching right back to the beginning of time. Human beings need not have existed at all. Any alteration in the nature of the environmental challenges facing life as it emerged over the past millions of years could arguably have produced a totally different result.
Well, this is what they say . . . and in terms of the classical Darwinian theory it would seem to be correct. There is no overriding purpose winding its way through the genes of a whole sequence of intermediate creatures and leading intentionally and ultimately to humanity. If we are shaped at all, then it is by the environment, and the whole series of problems it poses for life as it emerges. The accidental factors that allow some species, or some members of species, to survive in situations where others go down to extinction are the very things that give creation its 'ultimate' form.
As I say, this is the Neo-Darwinian contention . . . and the consequences arising from that contention. But it all depends on the continuing validity of the classical Darwinian model—something over which there is still much debate in scientific circles.
Now, in general, the Neo-Darwinian scientists and philosophers tend also not to emphasise the implied creative role of the environment in the classical scheme of things, for such a thing allows for the possible re-emergence of the idea of purpose in a new guise; i.e. God may not have crammed the plans for the eventual emergence of human beings in the very first cell created, but he could achieve much the same result by orchestrating the environment in suitable ways.
And this is the great no, no of modern materialist or atheistic philosophy and science, whether in relation to the gene or the environment. There is no room for purpose or meaning in their scheme of things. To speak of either is to allow the possibility of a way back in for the existence of God and for religion. And this is why they are so intent on denying any role to purpose or meaning in the universe—beyond, that is, the limited purposes of conscious beings—and insist instead that everything has come about purely by accident.
I raised the question in my last posting as to whether the atheism was a consequence of science, or the particular variant of science we are discussing a consequence of atheism. In my opinion the latter is predominantly the case. The atheists and materialists have embraced classical Darwinism primarily because it seems to reinforce their beliefs, or the lack of them. Nor is there any room for agnosticism on the matter. Under the new dispensation one is not allowed to park one's doubts or personal beliefs off-campus, as it were. Materialist philosophy and science now hold the soapbox, and unless you can explain and justify your opinions in terms purely of mechanistic science then you are likely to be shouted down.
I asked a philosophy lecturer once—the same one as mentioned in an earlier posting—what would happen to meaning in the absence of belief in God, and her reply was along the lines that we will create our own meanings. Possibly what she said was that we would create our own meanings, in the plural. I don't exactly recall, but in any event the result would be the same.
Now in the world of men, the world of four dimensional reality, there are no fixed meanings. Everything changes over time. But in relation to the bigger questions—the 'What's it all about?' type questions—the search is for a meaning (let's capitalise it: a Meaning) that stands outside the limitations of space and time. A transcendent Meaning, never changing, and that explains once and for all the basis and the purpose of existence.
If we were to look at it, say, from the Christian point of view—and here I am, as the Yanks say, to some extent 'winging' it; for I am not at all qualified to speak in this department. But, as I say, if we were to look at it from the Christian viewpoint, then it would seem that the Meaning of life, and of everything else that is, could be summed up basically as follows: God exists; the universe and all that it contains, including human life, was created by God—and created to a purpose, which purpose involves man's submission to and cooperation with the Will of God, as ultimately made known through Revelation.
Another way of looking at it is that God and the Will of God provide the fixed and unchanging amphitheatre within which the small contingent dramas and meanings of human life are constantly coming into production and then passing away.
The problem for the rational materialist and his point of view is that where there are meanings there can be no meaning. The seven or so billion human beings in the world do not speak with a unified voice—in fact there are some seven billion individual voices. And with each voice potentially an individual meaning. Even if by some miracle (and here we are really entering the world of fantasy) everybody in the world could agree on a shared meaning, it would only have currency during the lifetime of those who had framed it. There is no way it could be made binding on subsequent generations, each of which would under the logic of the Neo-Darwinist agenda be free to come up with its own meanings, general and individual.
The other point, of course, is that if meanings are to be purely the product of mankind, then one man's meaning is basically as good as another's. In the world of man-made meanings, what is there to distinguish Hitler's meaning from Christ's, Gandhi's from Mao's, the Buddha's from Lenin's? They are all human meanings, and since there is no ultimate Meaning, one is arguably as legitimate as any other.
The cry of course will go up that any overarching secular meaning must at root be humanitarian. But why should this be so? Secularism and atheism and materialism have plundered the storehouses of the revealed world religions for many of their moral ideas—ideas which, whatever the doctrinal differences that may lie between them, are more or less commonly shared among all the great religions. But from the philosophical point of view this is, of course, no justification for the validity of such ideas. All ideas, whether they are at root humanitarian or involve the triumph of the will or the race or the class, have to justify themselves independently before the court of 'reason'.
And basically in the materialist world of Godless 'accident', there is no fixed and immovable starting point for 'reason', no unchallengeable position from which one with any certainty can argue, either backwards towards or forwards from, to the effect that, for example, logically such-and-such a thing is true, because, in turn, such-and-such another thing is true . . .all leading back ultimately to some fixed and undeniable assertion that by its very nature must be true, and that acts as a foundation plinth for everything else.
Describing the 'flaw' that lies at the foundations of all seemingly rational chains of argument, a flaw which he describes as 'the premise about the limits of rationality', the philosopher William Warren Bartley goes on to detail how this 'premise—which arises out of the need to stem an infinite regress and from the fact that arbitrary dogmatic commitment seems to be the only way to do this—can be explained as follows. No matter what belief is advanced, someone can always challenge it with: "How do you know?" and "Give me a reason." Unless this procedure is to go on forever, it must be halted at a "standard," "criterion," "ulimate presupposition," "end," or "goal" whose authority is simply accepted' (The Retreat to Commitment: William Warren Bartley, Chatto and Windus, 1964).
In other words, to the extent that most religions take their ultimate stand on some form of revelation, the rationalists do much the same thing, except that instead of revelation it involves some subjective starting point of their own, a process, from the point of view of reason, as logically flawed as that of their religious opponents. While Christians, for example, ground their religions ultimately in the God of Revelation, the materialist rationalists, while all the time denying the fact, ground theirs instead in some metaphorical 'god' of their own subjectivist choosing.
One might get the impression from this posting that, compared to religious authoritarianism, the left-liberal agenda offers the posibility of a broader smörgåsbord of alternative beliefs and meanings. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, it arguably offers less.
The fact is that there must generally always be a prevailing worldview, a consensus, whether arrived at voluntarily or enforced. The present struggle isn't between an authoritarian Church (or churches) and a more liberal 'let it all hang out' philosophy. Rather it is between two authoritarianisms, one theistic, the other atheistic.
Well, this is what they say . . . and in terms of the classical Darwinian theory it would seem to be correct. There is no overriding purpose winding its way through the genes of a whole sequence of intermediate creatures and leading intentionally and ultimately to humanity. If we are shaped at all, then it is by the environment, and the whole series of problems it poses for life as it emerges. The accidental factors that allow some species, or some members of species, to survive in situations where others go down to extinction are the very things that give creation its 'ultimate' form.
As I say, this is the Neo-Darwinian contention . . . and the consequences arising from that contention. But it all depends on the continuing validity of the classical Darwinian model—something over which there is still much debate in scientific circles.
Now, in general, the Neo-Darwinian scientists and philosophers tend also not to emphasise the implied creative role of the environment in the classical scheme of things, for such a thing allows for the possible re-emergence of the idea of purpose in a new guise; i.e. God may not have crammed the plans for the eventual emergence of human beings in the very first cell created, but he could achieve much the same result by orchestrating the environment in suitable ways.
And this is the great no, no of modern materialist or atheistic philosophy and science, whether in relation to the gene or the environment. There is no room for purpose or meaning in their scheme of things. To speak of either is to allow the possibility of a way back in for the existence of God and for religion. And this is why they are so intent on denying any role to purpose or meaning in the universe—beyond, that is, the limited purposes of conscious beings—and insist instead that everything has come about purely by accident.
I raised the question in my last posting as to whether the atheism was a consequence of science, or the particular variant of science we are discussing a consequence of atheism. In my opinion the latter is predominantly the case. The atheists and materialists have embraced classical Darwinism primarily because it seems to reinforce their beliefs, or the lack of them. Nor is there any room for agnosticism on the matter. Under the new dispensation one is not allowed to park one's doubts or personal beliefs off-campus, as it were. Materialist philosophy and science now hold the soapbox, and unless you can explain and justify your opinions in terms purely of mechanistic science then you are likely to be shouted down.
I asked a philosophy lecturer once—the same one as mentioned in an earlier posting—what would happen to meaning in the absence of belief in God, and her reply was along the lines that we will create our own meanings. Possibly what she said was that we would create our own meanings, in the plural. I don't exactly recall, but in any event the result would be the same.
Now in the world of men, the world of four dimensional reality, there are no fixed meanings. Everything changes over time. But in relation to the bigger questions—the 'What's it all about?' type questions—the search is for a meaning (let's capitalise it: a Meaning) that stands outside the limitations of space and time. A transcendent Meaning, never changing, and that explains once and for all the basis and the purpose of existence.
If we were to look at it, say, from the Christian point of view—and here I am, as the Yanks say, to some extent 'winging' it; for I am not at all qualified to speak in this department. But, as I say, if we were to look at it from the Christian viewpoint, then it would seem that the Meaning of life, and of everything else that is, could be summed up basically as follows: God exists; the universe and all that it contains, including human life, was created by God—and created to a purpose, which purpose involves man's submission to and cooperation with the Will of God, as ultimately made known through Revelation.
Another way of looking at it is that God and the Will of God provide the fixed and unchanging amphitheatre within which the small contingent dramas and meanings of human life are constantly coming into production and then passing away.
The problem for the rational materialist and his point of view is that where there are meanings there can be no meaning. The seven or so billion human beings in the world do not speak with a unified voice—in fact there are some seven billion individual voices. And with each voice potentially an individual meaning. Even if by some miracle (and here we are really entering the world of fantasy) everybody in the world could agree on a shared meaning, it would only have currency during the lifetime of those who had framed it. There is no way it could be made binding on subsequent generations, each of which would under the logic of the Neo-Darwinist agenda be free to come up with its own meanings, general and individual.
The other point, of course, is that if meanings are to be purely the product of mankind, then one man's meaning is basically as good as another's. In the world of man-made meanings, what is there to distinguish Hitler's meaning from Christ's, Gandhi's from Mao's, the Buddha's from Lenin's? They are all human meanings, and since there is no ultimate Meaning, one is arguably as legitimate as any other.
The cry of course will go up that any overarching secular meaning must at root be humanitarian. But why should this be so? Secularism and atheism and materialism have plundered the storehouses of the revealed world religions for many of their moral ideas—ideas which, whatever the doctrinal differences that may lie between them, are more or less commonly shared among all the great religions. But from the philosophical point of view this is, of course, no justification for the validity of such ideas. All ideas, whether they are at root humanitarian or involve the triumph of the will or the race or the class, have to justify themselves independently before the court of 'reason'.
And basically in the materialist world of Godless 'accident', there is no fixed and immovable starting point for 'reason', no unchallengeable position from which one with any certainty can argue, either backwards towards or forwards from, to the effect that, for example, logically such-and-such a thing is true, because, in turn, such-and-such another thing is true . . .all leading back ultimately to some fixed and undeniable assertion that by its very nature must be true, and that acts as a foundation plinth for everything else.
Describing the 'flaw' that lies at the foundations of all seemingly rational chains of argument, a flaw which he describes as 'the premise about the limits of rationality', the philosopher William Warren Bartley goes on to detail how this 'premise—which arises out of the need to stem an infinite regress and from the fact that arbitrary dogmatic commitment seems to be the only way to do this—can be explained as follows. No matter what belief is advanced, someone can always challenge it with: "How do you know?" and "Give me a reason." Unless this procedure is to go on forever, it must be halted at a "standard," "criterion," "ulimate presupposition," "end," or "goal" whose authority is simply accepted' (The Retreat to Commitment: William Warren Bartley, Chatto and Windus, 1964).
In other words, to the extent that most religions take their ultimate stand on some form of revelation, the rationalists do much the same thing, except that instead of revelation it involves some subjective starting point of their own, a process, from the point of view of reason, as logically flawed as that of their religious opponents. While Christians, for example, ground their religions ultimately in the God of Revelation, the materialist rationalists, while all the time denying the fact, ground theirs instead in some metaphorical 'god' of their own subjectivist choosing.
One might get the impression from this posting that, compared to religious authoritarianism, the left-liberal agenda offers the posibility of a broader smörgåsbord of alternative beliefs and meanings. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, it arguably offers less.
The fact is that there must generally always be a prevailing worldview, a consensus, whether arrived at voluntarily or enforced. The present struggle isn't between an authoritarian Church (or churches) and a more liberal 'let it all hang out' philosophy. Rather it is between two authoritarianisms, one theistic, the other atheistic.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
The Shape of Things that are Trying to Come . . .
Let's do another philosophical thought experiment—a thought experiment, by the way, is basically a hypothetical situation. Now a hypothetical situation is valuable to the extent that it stays grounded in reality—to the extent that the reader can allow that such and such a situation is indeed possible. By comparison, the problem with thought experiments is that they are quite capable of losing any connection with reality—and very often do. But still there are situations where they are useful, such as here, at this moment.
Let us take a car. For arguments sake, an Audi L Turbo A4, whose pistons fire in the sequence 1,3,4,2. Now let us imagine that, purely fortuitously, some sort of intelligent life-form, capable of analysis and thought, comes into existence within the engine, aided no doubt by the presence of carbon and heat. As this being—let's call it Audi Murphy—examines its situation, it comes to the conclusion that ultimately the meaning of everything in its world resolves down to the sequence 1,3,4,2. It is this sequence that explains and lies at the root of everything that happens in the engine. And, from the viewpoint of Audi Murphy, this is of course a true description.
Yet the fact is that Audi Murphy has no way of knowing that anything exists beyond his engine. In his moments of leisure, he may ponder if anything lies beyond the pistons and the sequence of their firing. But how is he to know? He can have no knowledge of the car, or the purpose of the car, much less of the driver of the car. There is no way he could possibly envisage what it is like to get up on a sunny morning and suddenly decide to drive to the beach. All such things are totally outside the range of his experience or knowledge. His 'science', his theory of reality, is bounded by, is true, and works, only within the closed system of his engine.
At this point we leave Audi Murphy and the thought experiment behind (and it is only a rough experiment, open no doubt to the nitpicking of anyone determined to bring it down.)
Yet there is an analogy between it and the real world as we know it, except that among the general run of modern scientists the explanatory theory of all that exists is not 1, 3, 4, 2 but rather an all-encompassing Darwinism. Especially among the Neo-Darwinists—scientists and philosophers etc. who are attempting to take the techniques and tenets of biological evolution and apply them to explaining everything that is—from our most refined thoughts to the very bases of our natures. Indeed, there is a branch of physics currently engaged in trying to come up with a Darwinian explanation for the emergence of the stars and planets etc. of the cosmos.
Now let me say here that I am not in the business of propounding any alternative fundamentalist mythos. There seems little doubt that evolutionary theory can be used to account for much of what we see about us, and that the general run of the phenomena of nature are ultimately explicable in term of the laws of material physics.
The Darwinian theory of biological evolution is capable of supplying a rational explanation of life on this planet and its development—and yet there has always been to me something deeply and instinctively unsatisfactory about it. In its operation it bears more than a passing resemblance to the notion (mentioned in one of the earlier mailings) of a million monkeys with a million typewriters, who if left long enough must ultimately come up with the works of Shakespeare. The question about the classical Darwinian theory of evolution is not is it rational, but is it true?
The other problem is that even if it was possible to explain the genesis of the universe in Darwinian terms, ultimately one still comes up against the blank wall of matter. It is the point beyond which neo-Darwinian and materialist scientists are incapable of going. What is matter? How did it arise? How is it to be explained? One philosopher of a neo-Darwinist bent recognises that 'There are problems in understanding how matter could have arisen from nothing, but not obviously more serious than those involved in explaining how God could have arisen from nothing. Indeed, given the simplicity of matter, its existence might seem to present fewer problems' (Human Nature after Darwin: Janet Radcliffe Richards, OU, 1999).
There are certain presumptions involved here, not least that if God exists then he needs to explain himself, and specifically in terms of physicalist science. But basically what is also being said is go with what you are comfortable with—so long as it doesn't involve any belief in ultimate creation or the supernatural!
Ultimately, for the purely secular scientist, the existence of matter provides the point beyond which—like Audi Murphy and his 1,3,4,2—he cannot progress, the point beyond which his explanations falter off into silence.
And yet there are others for whom such a barrier is easily surmounted—those who choose to believe in a divine revelation—such as the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims and the Hindus, to mention just a few of the great historical revealed religions of mankind.
Of course, for the atheistic scientist or philosopher the whole idea of revelation is very easy to shoot down. It doesn't even need thinking about. There can be no revelation because there is nobody or nothing to do the revealing. That is the bedrock of atheism: there is only material nature with nothing beyond it. If, for example, Moses claimed to have received the Ten Commandments as a result of divine revelation, only two options can present themselves to the convinced materialist: either Moses himself consciously made up the whole thing, or else he was mad.
Now atheism, or materialism, is a legitimate philosophical standpoint. It is a position that people in all good conscience can hold. And one can understand how people might soberly—and perhaps even regretfully—arrive at the ultimate conclusion that there is no God, no spiritual dimension, no world other than this one.
Yet when you go to the texts and the public pronouncements, rather than the cold facts of dispassionate science, one arrives instead at, for want of a better term, hysteria. Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Understanding of Science at Oxford University, Fellow of the Royal Society, and member of what has been described as the New Atheism Movement, in an interview in 2001 with Emily Hourican in The Dubliner magazine, said: ‘I am delighted that one of the leading Roman Catholic seminaries for the training of young priests in Ireland is closing down because it can’t get any recruits. When I read that in the newspaper, it left me smiling for the rest of the day. However, if the Catholic Church does die in Ireland—and I devoutly hope it will—I hope it will not be replaced by some other idiotic superstition like New-Ageism or some other kind of religion . . . The Roman Catholic Church is one of the forces for evil in the world . . .’ Nor has Dawkins's tone mellowed over the intervening years.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Following on from last day . . .
There is somebody I know, a builder, a comparatively young fellow in his late twenties. And as he will tell you himself, he effectively left school at fourteen in order to go to work. He's a very good builder, very competent. But more than that, I would class him as being near genius. It is amazing to talk to somebody and find a mind working a consistent three steps ahead of your own. He is a builder, but he could have been anything. In terms of native ability and 'can do' capacity, there is nothing he couldn't turn his hand or mind to and not be succesful at. I would have the utmost confidence in him in any field—he is endowed with a sort of 'fire and forget' capacity: just show him a problem and turn him loose on it and you no longer need to even think about it.
Nor is he an isolated case. The world is full of people like him, possessed of a fierce unacademic intelligence, able to cut to the heart of the matter in an instant and knowing almost instinctively what to do about it. Guys with an eye to problem solving, seemingly pre-loaded by nature with those skills that higher education cannot teach, or, if it can, then only inadequately. I know what I am talking about, for I worked with some of them. And as often as not they were mechanics or fitters or carpenters or labourers or somesuch—part of the great support apparatus underlying the whole artificial superstructure of modern society. The other thing significant about them was that, in general, they loved what they did—as do, in fact, most people who work with their hands for a living.
The fact is that the world isn't full of labourers or gardeners or hairdressers or whatever, crying into their pints over thwarted dreams of being lawyers or doctors or accountants. And yet this is an undeniable implication of the policy of stampeding everybody into the third-level system—the whole thing made even more amazing by the fact that it is often, and especially in Britain, the erstwhile socialists who are the main architects of this implicitly patronising idea.
Now I am not suggesting that the world is full of 'cheerful, horny-handed sons of toil', all of whom are secretly geniuses. Far from it. Many, if not most, workers are arguably dissatisfied with their lot, especially those on the repetitive production-line side of things. But, then, so too, one imagines, the same might be said of psychiatrists and lecturers and chiropodists etc. It is part of the human condition.
What I am trying to say is that people's life-choices are made for a whole pile of reasons, and not simply for money or status. And to use these latter factors as the sole yardstick for measuring success or failure is to totally misunderstand life. The same thing with education—ideally intelligence and ability should be the prerequisites for entry into its higher spheres; but that does not translate into the idea that educational qualifications—especially in this modern era of dumbing down—can in any way be the sole measurement of ability and intelligence. They are not and have never been.
The truth of the matter is that nowadays there are more idiots with degrees, than we poor idiots without them.
Nor is he an isolated case. The world is full of people like him, possessed of a fierce unacademic intelligence, able to cut to the heart of the matter in an instant and knowing almost instinctively what to do about it. Guys with an eye to problem solving, seemingly pre-loaded by nature with those skills that higher education cannot teach, or, if it can, then only inadequately. I know what I am talking about, for I worked with some of them. And as often as not they were mechanics or fitters or carpenters or labourers or somesuch—part of the great support apparatus underlying the whole artificial superstructure of modern society. The other thing significant about them was that, in general, they loved what they did—as do, in fact, most people who work with their hands for a living.
The fact is that the world isn't full of labourers or gardeners or hairdressers or whatever, crying into their pints over thwarted dreams of being lawyers or doctors or accountants. And yet this is an undeniable implication of the policy of stampeding everybody into the third-level system—the whole thing made even more amazing by the fact that it is often, and especially in Britain, the erstwhile socialists who are the main architects of this implicitly patronising idea.
Now I am not suggesting that the world is full of 'cheerful, horny-handed sons of toil', all of whom are secretly geniuses. Far from it. Many, if not most, workers are arguably dissatisfied with their lot, especially those on the repetitive production-line side of things. But, then, so too, one imagines, the same might be said of psychiatrists and lecturers and chiropodists etc. It is part of the human condition.
What I am trying to say is that people's life-choices are made for a whole pile of reasons, and not simply for money or status. And to use these latter factors as the sole yardstick for measuring success or failure is to totally misunderstand life. The same thing with education—ideally intelligence and ability should be the prerequisites for entry into its higher spheres; but that does not translate into the idea that educational qualifications—especially in this modern era of dumbing down—can in any way be the sole measurement of ability and intelligence. They are not and have never been.
The truth of the matter is that nowadays there are more idiots with degrees, than we poor idiots without them.
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