Scottish Nous

Place the Silly Quote

Wherein a law of logic is abused for vile purposes and forced to bear an insufferable burden:

The source of man's rights is not divine law, but the law of identity.  A is A - and Man is Man. (emphasis added)

Friday Random Ten

1. Pennyroyal Tea by Nirvana
2. Tame by The Pixies
3. Parachutes by Coldplay
4. Siempre Te Amare by Poncho Sanchez
5. When It's Sleepy Time Down South by Louis Armstrong
6. Sin City by AC/DC
7. Sorrow by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerard (Gladiator Soundtrack)
8. Well, You Needn't by Thelonious Monk
9. Hopeless Case by G. Love & Special Sauce
10. No Surprises by Radiohead

Sunday Sermonette

Today we excerpt from Pierre Gassendi's objections to Descartes' "Fourth Meditation":

Next you reason that it is impossible that God should deceive you; and in order to make excuses for the deceptive and error-prone faculty which God gave you, you suggest that the fault lies in nothingness, which you say you have some idea of, and which you say you participate in, since you take yourself to be something intermediate between nothingness and God.  This is a splendid argument!  I will pass over the impossibility of explaining how we have an idea of nothingness, and what kind of idea it is, and how we participate in nothingness, and so on.  I will simply point out that this distinction does not obviate the fact that God could have given man a faculty of judgment that was immune from error....

When you discuss this objection you state that it is no cause for suprise if you do not understand the reason for some of God's actions.  This is correct, but it is still surprising that you should have a true idea which represents God as omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly good, and yet that you should nonetheless observe that some of his works are not wholly perfect.  For given that he could have made things more perfect but did not do so, this seems to show that he must have lacked either the knowledge or the power of the will to do so.  He was certainly imperfect if, despite having the knowledge and the power, he lacked the will and preferred imperfection to perfection. (CSM II 214)

Sunday Sermonette

Brought to you in a very fishy poetical form:

Fish (fly-replete in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat'ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto mud! - Death eddies near -
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in.
Oh! never fly conceals a hook
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish
There shall be no more land, say fish!

From Robert Brooke's "Heaven".

Sunday Sermonette

I am unashamedly neglecting philosophy to chew up Heinlein at a rate likely approaching one light year's worth of a string of text per second.  Two posts down you got his elegant exposition of 4D-ism.  This Sunday, you get a statement of one of the two main tenets of logical positivism from To Sail Beyond The Sunset:

So let's listen to the fundamentalists: "God is the Creator.  He Created the World.  The existence of the World proves that it was created; therefore there is a Creator.  That Creator we call 'God.'  Let us all bow down and worship Him, for He is Almighty and His works proclaim His might." 

Will someone please page Dr. S. I. Hayakawa?  Or, if he is busy, any student who received a B+ or better in Logic 101?  I'm looking for someone able to discuss the fallacy of circular reasoning and also the concatenative process by which abstract words can be logically defined by building on concrete words.  What is a "concrete" word?  It is a spell-symbol used to tag something you can point to and thereby agree on, e.g., "cat," "sailboat," "ice-skating" -- agree with such certainty that when you say "sailboat" there is no chance whatever that I will think you mean a furry quadruped with rectractile claws.

With the spell-symbol "God" there is no way to achieve such agreement because there is nothing to point to.  Circular reasoning can't get you out of this dilemma.  Pointing to something (the physical world) and asserting that it has to have a Creator and this Creator necessarily has such-and-such attributes proves nothing save that you have made certain assertions without proof.  You have pointed at a physical thing, the physical world; you have asserted that this physical thing has to have a "Creator" (Who told you that?  What's his mailing address?  Who told him?).  But to assert that something physical was created out of nothing -- not even empty space -- by a Thingamajig you can't point to is not to make a philosophical statement or any sort of statement, it is mere noise, amphigory, sound and fury signifying nothing.

(Disclaimer:  I endorse neither the verification criterion of meaning nor the denial of synthetic a priori justification or knowledge.)

Sunday Sermonette

Well, I was going to post Karen Armstong's opinionated reconstruction of the religious notions of Early Common Era Platonists who "needed no grotesque salvation by means of a crucified Messiah."  But I left the book with a friend last night, so that passage is out for this week at least.  To continue the tradition of offering excerpts from (gasp!) Christians, I bring you some epistemological reflections from B.B. Warfield's Counterfeit Miracles:

The essay now claiming our attention is probably the most specious plea for the credibility and reality of the whole mass of ecclesiastical miracles ever penned.  I say the whole mass, although Newman, with great apparent candor, admits that there is to be found among them every variety of miracle, of every degree of intrinsic credibility or incredibility, and supported by every degree of evidence or no evidence.  For, after he has, under the cover of this candor, concentrated attention upon what seem to him the particular miracles most deserving to be true, and supported by the most direct and weighty evidence, he subtly suggests that, on their basis, many more in themselves doubtful or distasteful may be allowed, that insufficiency of proof is not the same as disproof, and that very many things must be admitted by us to be very likely true for the truth of which we have no evidence at all - inasmuch as we must distinguish sharply between the fact and the proof of the fact, and must be prepared to admit that the failure of the latter does not carry with it the rejection of the former.

Warfield's major thesis - a defense of the cessation of the charismata - will not be of too much interest to most members of the reality-based community, but his argument for it is quite the pleasing  read.  The chain of reasoning described in the above passage is very common, and I suspect that if you think hard enough, you'll be able to come up with at least one or two instances of our prevailing government making a similar appeal: the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  (Neither is evidence that there is evidence for p necessarily evidence for p.)

Sunday Sermonette

This week's sermonette comes from a theist, Blaise Pascal:

When I see the blind and wretched state of man,  when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape.  Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. -Pensees

Such despair is overly self-indulgent, and  Pascal might have marvelled at the fortitude of the existentialists who followed him.  The passage exagerrates a bit, since we are, fortunately, capable of knowing many things, but I enjoy the reflection it provokes, and, after my post on the London bombings, I've been thinking about this "wretched state of man".  David Stove, who provided material for a previous sermonette, said "the vast majority [of humanity] adopt the local religious madness".  That alone is a sad indictment of our collective state.

Saturday Lyric Blogging

Simon and Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence":

Hello, darkness, my old friend.
I've come to talk with you again.
Because a a vision softly creeping
left its seeds while I was sleeping,
and the vision that was planted in my brain...
still remains...
within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone
the narrow streets of cobblestone.
'Neath the halo of a street lamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp,
when my eyes were stabbed
by the flash of a neon light...
that split the night...
and touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking.
People hearing without listening.
People writing songs that voices never share...
And no one dare...
disturb the sound of silence.

"Fools," said I, "you do not know!
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you -
take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words like silent raindrops fell
and echoed in the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed
to the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning
in the words that it was forming.
And the sign said: "The words of the prophets
are written on the subway walls
and tenement halls
and whispered in the sound of silence."

Sunday Sermonette

Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg in his book Dreams of a Final Theory:

Religious people have grappled for millennia with the theodicy, the problem posed by the existence of suffering in a world that is supposed to be ruled by a good God. They have found ingenious solutions in terms of various supposed divine plans. I will not try to argue with these solutions, much less to add one of my own. Remembrance of the Holocaust leaves me unsympathetic to attempts to justify the ways of God to man. If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers.

Sunday Sermonette

I'll post a slightly unusual Sunday Sermonette this week.  Bertrand Russell is always perfect for this feature, and I suppose one can derive at least one moral lesson from this quoted material.  But really, I just find it hilarious.  If you haven't read Heinlein, you need to.  From Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, where Valentine Michael Smith learns why humans laugh:

But today even the misanthropy of camels could not shake Mike's moodiness.  Nor did monkeys and apes cheer him up.  They stood in front of a cage containing a family of capuchins, watching them eat, sleep, court, nurse, groom, and swarm aimlessly around, while Jill tossed them peanuts.

She tossed one to a monk; before he coult eat it a larger male not only stole his peanut but gave him a beating.  The little fellow made no attempt to pursue his tormentor; he pounded his knuckles against the floor and chattered helpless rage.  Mike watched solemnly.

Suddenly the mistreated monkey rushed across the cage, picked a monkey still smaller, bowled it over and gave it a dubbing worse than the one he had suffered.  The third monk crawled away, whimpering.  The other monks paid no attention.

Mike threw back his head and laughed - and went on laughing, uncontrollably.  He gasped for breath, started to tremble and stink to the floor, still laughing.

Bertrand Russell, twenty-nine years earlier:

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ’The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race. -Education and the Social Order

Heinlein's final thought:

There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more effective ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all other ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself.  Man was his own grimmest joke on himself.  The very bedrock of humor was --

"Man is the animal who laughs," Jubal answered.