The Shadow Over TLO?

[Joel]

Acutely Decayed, thanks for your comment. 'Your European Son' is a 'special fried rice' kind of story, everything's in there – which has made it hard for me to fit the story into any collection (and the recent reprinting of its parent anthology made that unnecessary). Glad you liked it though.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by ChildofOldLeech

...and I would not hesitate to name you as perhaps the greatest...

That seems to be the kind of statement that refers to any attempt at adumbrating the nature of any perceived God.

[Gray House]

Quote Originally Posted by mark_samuels

Science can only approximate answers in totality by recourse to an underlying philosophical structure; specifically a muddled form of “materialism” (whatever that actually means in an age wherein the structure of the atom has become endlessly divisible and mysterious). Without such an underpinning it becomes nothing more than a complex series of disparate information, of no greater import in and of itself than the results of an autopsy dissecting the body of Beethoven in an attempt to comprehend the meaning of his life and symphonies.

Science is a complex series of disparate information of no importance in and of itself. The autopsy analogy of course assumes there is a meaning to comprehend.

"A potato-masher is not useless if one wants to mash potatoes." - TCATHR

"Nothing is self-justifying. Everything is justified only in a relativistic potato-masher sense." - TCATHR

Science is a potato-masher that does not claim not to be a potato-masher.

	TCATHR The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

[NealJansons]

Quote Originally Posted by Malone

The a priori dismissal of the idea of a transcendental power that is, by its very nature, not subject to the limitations of space and time, and therefore beyond what the modern mind regards as evidence as to its reality, is so-called “scientific” comprehension operating outside its sphere of enquiry and objectively absurd. This is a good example of the 'old totalitarianism'. Do not dare question your God, for he has no need to make an account to you and your puny questions or trivial moral concerns. Live in fear of the deity who pulls your strings and obey the self-appointed guardians of his Power. Ni Dieu ni De Maistre

No, it's actually a well-known problem in philosophy of science. Science, in order to proceed, assumes certain philosophical stances that are fundamentally metaphysical and not subject to the scientific method. These assumptions are:

1. Physicalism/Naturalism- there is nothing besides the physical/natural (this is necessary for the exclusion of so-called "supernatural" causes to events under examination; if one believes one can use experimentation, evidence, and observations to understand how everything works, one must also believe they have principled access, through some means, to all the relevant possible causes and effects). I don't like the use of the term "natural" this way, because it's poor reasoning...if we discovered the existence of ghosts and goblins tomorrow, they would be forever after a part of the taxonomy of the "natural". However, the fact that many philosophers who dealt with epistemological and philosophy of science questions used it, such as Quine with his "Epistemology Naturalized" and the spin-offs of many others using similar titles/catchphrases, is a fact beyond my control. I am just reporting the term as used in the profession.

2. Universal Consistency- the rules of the physical universe are the same everywhere and at all times past and present (this is necessary for any prediction of future--or analysis of past--events).

3. The reliability of mathematico-logical reason (even though the strong physicalist must also believe that reason is just a particular behavior of a particular set of brains, not a universal principle of existence, because that's part of the commitment to physicalism). This is necessary for the whole process of science, obviously.

4. The truth of empiricism, which in turn requires the reliability of sense data and the validity of inferring from previous observations to future or categorical observations about a class of phenomena- All measurement methodologies, from the most high-tech to simple observation, come down to our sense organs and brain's processing, and empiricism, another stance to which the physicalist is committed by definition, require observation to be trustworthy.

Each of these assumptions are problematic and are by their nature, unscientific. They are necessary assumptions, to be sure, but they all lay outside the ability of the scientific method to confirm or disconfirm. In addition to this, each of these assumptions are contentious, philosophically:

1. To assume physicalism or naturalism, then say that since there is no "evidence" of the supernatural thus it doesn't exist, is fallacious...it's begging the question, a way of repeating, usually in a hidden way, the conclusion you want as a premise. Physicalism/naturalism is the belief there is nothing other than the physical/natural (again, I don't like this use of the word natural, but I wish to be clear and acknowledge the use of the term in professional philosophy), while the claim that the supernatural does not exist is, again, the belief that there is nothing beyond the physical/natural.

2. There is no evidence, nor way of gaining evidence, of Universal Consistency. Even if we sent a probe, somehow, to the far reaches of the universe or into the past or present, if the natural laws were different, that would affect the ability of that probe to gain data/evidence. In order to engage in any cosmological origins research or theoretical physics of how suns decay (for example), we have to assume that the physical laws the early universe, inside of a black hole, etc. are the same as they are in our locality. In this case, not only is there no such evidence (nor could there be, in principle...you can't prove Universal Consistency through observation, because the tools you're using require such a consistency to gather/examine the evidence), there are reasons to believe in a "Speckled Universe" theory (the opposite of Universal Consistency): the Standard Model of Physics predicts singularities, places and events where the laws of physics seem to break down or contradict themselves, and Quantum Mechanics also seems to imply that, below a certain scale, matter stops being matter and instead becomes a complex of probabilistic tendencies and non-localized information that follows a completely different set of laws.

3. As I mention, under physicalism/naturalism, not only are there no gods, there are no "abstract particulars"...which is philosopher speak for categories, relations, and properties that "real" things--cabbages and kings--seem to fall into or possess. There is no physicalist meaning for terms like law, justice, equality, or even reason...instead these things are artifacts of minds, invented, passed along, refined, etc. Categories are really just a name, a set of items we set off in our heads; we say "there exists a class of animal called zebras" but the class itself doesn't really exist under physicalism...only the zebras. Putting them together in a set, engaging in abstractions, etc. is a purely mental and social behavior. Properties are also mental and social: the ball is not really red, it's just that it absorbs all light of a certain wavelength except one, which reflects back into our evolved, limited eyes and is processed by our evolved, limited brains into a piece of data we call color. Red, and the category of "things that are red", under physicalism, are just in our heads. Yet that means so is mathematics and logic, the bases of human reasoning; they are invented technologies, artifacts of mind and society, abstractions only. There is no two, no pi, no phi...there are only certain abstractions of certain relations, held in certain minds at certain times. Even relations don't really exist except in our heads...they are all abstracted observations of mind, evolved brains, according to naturalism. Thus, there is no reason to believe that reason is a reliable source of knowledge under physicalism/naturalism...we evolved to reproduce, avoid danger, and engage in actions that facilitated those two things, not to infer true propositional knowledge about the universe. It doesn't matter WHY we run from the tiger to evolution, so long as we run; it doesn't matter why we have sex to evolution, so long as we have it. Just look at the irrational freak-outs people have about preserving their lives and the lives of their offspring, and having sexual relationships is so irrational that no one really knows how to do it "right", we just do it "as best we can".

4. Empiricism, the epistemological stance required by a commitment to physicalism/naturalism, requires us to "believe what we see"...but we know that almost all people have glitches in their senses to some degree, whether as mild as blind spots or as all encompassing as a psychotic episode. We try to get away from this by taking in a lot of different observations and finding a sort of average that most people can agree on, but this has no possible scientific or logical justification: there is no reason to believe that multiplying errors somehow makes them no longer errors, and a multiplicity of social agreement does not guarantee truth (it's actually fallacious to argue from that...argumentum ad populum). In addition to this, it is questionable, logically, to believe in inductive logic; serials of events often due not follow similarly from their prequels, it is unpredictable "black swan" events that change everything throughout history, and no physical law we have any evidence for underlies induction in any way. But empiricism depends upon inductive logic, even though it is remarkably unreliable for so many things.

Thus, this isn't about authoritarians or even religion. This is about dismissing so-called supernatural claims using a system which is, itself, philosophically problematic and ungrounded. You can't use physicalism/naturalism as your basic assumption and then say the process built upon that assumption has disproved idealism, platonic realism, or even supernaturalism...to do so is just as circular as those who say they believe the Bible because it is the word of their god and they believe that the Bible is the word of their god because the Bible says so. But it's an even more egregious error, because those people acknowledge they are believing on faith, not pretending that it's all been "proven".

You don't have to believe me, though. Do some research...the various problems in philosophy of science are addressed throughout the philosophical profession, and these are really very basic issues. If you really want to hurt your head, read up on the "Undetermination Problem". What do you do when you have two or more theories that fit all the evidence but are themselves mutually exclusive? Well, what real science has done is pick the theory that is simpler or tends to open up more possible experimentation/inferences...in other words, they've gone for what's easiest to work with and what provides job security, not what is truly justified by the science. This makes sense for a professional explorer of reality; they're just trying to get things done and make a living, like anyone else, but it also means that basing your beliefs on science gives you an only mildly better chance of believing true things.

An unnuanced and complete acceptance of "what science says"--especially in reference to claims which can't be examined scientifically--is just as problematic as an unnuanced and complete acceptance of any religion.

[gveranon]

Quote Originally Posted by Gray House

"A potato-masher is not useless if one wants to mash potatoes." - TCATHR

Somebody ought to market a potato masher with this quote incised on the handle.

[Spotbowserfido2]

Quote Originally Posted by Gray House

Quote Originally Posted by mark_samuels Science can only approximate answers in totality by recourse to an underlying philosophical structure; specifically a muddled form of “materialism” (whatever that actually means in an age wherein the structure of the atom has become endlessly divisible and mysterious). Without such an underpinning it becomes nothing more than a complex series of disparate information, of no greater import in and of itself than the results of an autopsy dissecting the body of Beethoven in an attempt to comprehend the meaning of his life and symphonies. Science is a complex series of disparate information of no importance in and of itself. The autopsy analogy of course assumes there is a meaning to comprehend. "A potato-masher is not useless if one wants to mash potatoes." - TCATHR "Nothing is self-justifying. Everything is justified only in a relativistic potato-masher sense." - TCATHR Science is a potato-masher that does not claim not to be a potato-masher.

My experience as a short order cook has taught me that a potato-masher is useless against a hard raw potato. Spuds must be boiled before the masher can be truly useful. Does this constitute an unfair manipulation of study matter towards a desired scientific effect?

	TCATHR The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

[Joel]

What rather puzzles me is that people who want priests to tell us how to live our lives never actually explain why priests should tell us how to live our lives. They just attack atheism, as if the existence of a god necessarily implied the existence of a god that wants priests to tell us how to live our lives, Attacks on atheism take us no closer to choosing between monotheism and polytheism, or between Christianity and Islam, or between Catholicism and Protestantism – are we to take it that those choices are unimportant and make no difference? How many times do I need to say: the determinants of those choices are not intellectual, they are social and cultural? They do not derive either from rational problem-solving or from personal neurosis: they derive from which crowd you belong to, which roof you step under.

You’ll have to excuse me if I seem selective in my responses to posts, though I appreciate them all, especially kind remarks about my fiction, which I certainly did not anticipate. For one thing, I have been out all night on a Halloween-jag.

Anyway, what I regard as being most requiring of a response is the claim that the societal aspects of the question are paramount and are the only ones worth consideration. Do not believe that this conclusion is arrived at neutrally. It isn’t. It requires the ideological acceptance of an underlying philosophical dismissal of any position save that of materialism—a position that I contend is untenable.

No one, of course, wants individual priests to tell us how to live, as if they were operating their own moral cartel. This is putting the cart before the horse, and is precisely an example of muddled thinking. Priests, of course, are bound by centuries of spiritual teaching that recognises moral injunctions as having no intrinsic basis except where they are transcendentally foundational in nature. Unless we have reference to a trans-historical mode of moral conduct then all we are left with is the idea that societies are capable of deciding these questions for themselves in terms of man-made deliberations. This may sound acceptable in crass modernity, where we have been conditioned to accept such values through universal education and mass communications (i.e. via secular propaganda) from school-age, but then one comes up against the argument that totalitarian schooling (say, the likes of Nazism or Communism) is equally capable of settling the argument as to which conduct is right or wrong. Which it is; but only within its own limited reference frame of brute force.

One needs here always to remember that priests are as subject to human failings as anyone else. It is only the office of priesthood that is holy, not the priest himself. Indeed, in the case of recent child abuse scandals, my reaction to such perversity would be to have the proven offenders jailed for life. Mark the point, however, that such penalties and rigorous searching-out must also be applied to those who have been protected by the liberal-socialist-atheist coterie of the BBC or those school-teachers in the secular state system also guilty of such crimes. And when those atheist/secularists decry the Church for harbouring such criminals, let them also be consistent, and publicise and object equally to the abominations committed by any group of individuals in a position of pastoral trust, whether religious or not.

So, what is the transcendental mode of moral conduct? Essentially, it’s the Decalogue and the example of Christ as revealed through the Gospels. Now, bear in mind that I am saying this from a position of being a European, by virtue of birth and culture. I do not believe that the other Abrahamic religions do not also approach towards the truth, and given the assault by atheism/secularism in the West, am not surprised when they regard we in the decayed West with repulsion.

This overweening arrogance on the part of those who uphold a negligible and transitory episode in human history (i.e. current Western modernity), as being more “advanced” or “progressive” than any other civilisation, in the face of thousands of years of reasoned tradition (the basis of which most in the West are now being made wilfully ignorant) and our disdain of other non-acquisitive societies and cultures still existing is, frankly, intellectually indefensible, narrow-minded and blinkered in the extreme.

[ChildofOldLeech]

A very thoughtful response which raises some valid concerns; however I can only refer to Al Einstein when he gave what I feel is the last word on the subject:

“The word 'God' is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, and religious scripture a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.”

[Joel]

My post last night was fever-driven ranting – I hadn't been to a Halloween party, just been unwell – and I came here this morning to delete it, but so much work has gone into Mark's response that it would be unfair. We really are getting into a debate here on the relative merits of the Roman Catholic Church and the numerous Protestant sects that have partly displaced it – 'modernity' starts with the Reformation – but I don't think the greater age of the Roman Church proves its intellectual and moral superiority. Nor was the Enlightenment a Twitter feed. But I'll leave that for other TLO members to explore if they wish, or ignore. I think I've said enough here.

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE