Who is a Moral Agent (in Gun Control Debates)?

One of the things that interests me about the debate surrounding gun control in the United States right now (recalling, of course, that this debate also appears in Canada whenever election time shows up) is that one of the most coherent oppositions to gun control is focused on the citizen's moral agency. Shouldn't the government focus on preventing actually destructive behaviour (murder) rather than preventing the conditions of that behaviour (gun control)? The role of the government is to produce an environment in which citizens are capable of virtuous action, not incapable of destructive action, though destructive action will be addressed, of course, in the criminal justice system.

I am immediately sympathetic to this kind of argument on two counts. The first is that I do really like moral agency; I get excited when people talk about taking responsibility for their actions. The second is that I like the idea of a state which is focused on helping citizens become virtuous agents rather than forcing them to be obedient agents. Lawful behaviour is much nicer when citizens are lawful for the right reasons rather than out of fear of reprisal. So the ways these particular opponents to gun control articulate their position is attractive to me.

However, I ultimately disagree because I subscribe to what I would call psychological realism. While I do intend to be a strong moral agent and to respect other people's agencies, I am at the same time skeptical that anyone's agency is non-compromised. In other words, I believe that people should take responsibility for their actions when they can but that people often will not and sometimes cannot act the way they should, even when they want to act the way they should. For example, I advise that you read this article entitled "Please Take Away My Right to a Gun" (trigger warning for discussion of suicide and the threat of home invasion), in which the author argues that she does not want to be able to get a gun because during periods of her recurring depression she would be tempted to use it on herself. Many commenters say that the author needs to take responsibility for her actions (and I've read some off-site comments saying that her argument is condescending toward the mentally ill), but I think she's just being realistic: she knows that sometimes she cannot trust her own decision-making processes and she knows that the current system will enable her suicide if she ever attempts it. She is compromised, she wants the state to protect her from herself, and I don't think she's wrong in believing this right trumps the rights of gun ownership.

But this debate has made me re-consider my own position on matters: is what I call "psychological realism" compatible with insisting that people's agencies be respected? One of the reasons I tend to shy away from anything resembling paternalism--particularly colonial paternalism--is that I believe it is intrinsically good to respect other folks' agencies (both to help them develop their characters and as an end-in-itself). But can I realistically continue in this outlook if I ultimately believe that we are all psychologically compromised? If the mentally ill are not full moral agents, how can I be one, either?

Disallowed Opinions

In my third year of my undergraduate degree, I was asked (as a member of the Department Students Council) to attend a job talk by a prospective lecturer. During this talk, the faculty began to ask the lecturer questions, and one of the junior faculty interrupted her own question to say, "I don't mean to sound conservative--I'm not conservative--but... ." I was a bit concerned by this insertion, ticked that the lecturer would feel such distaste for the conservative position that she would need to distance herself from it. When I got home and related this to my housemates, one of them said, "You would be offended by that, wouldn't you?," as though I was somehow emblematic of conservatism. (Which is kind of weird, since I'm socialist, environmentalist, and strongly concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice.)

Now that I look back on this, I realize that that faculty member could not have done otherwise. If you want to be taken seriously in academia, if you want anyone to listen to you, then you need to remove yourself constantly from the suggestion of being conservative. Conservatism is not an allowable position in academia, or at least not humanities departments in Canada. And so even those people who are not conservative--not even remotely conservative--must always be on guard to disavow conservativism in case any particular opinion seems to appear conservative or look like a particular conservative opinion.

There are a few problems with this, and I'm not sure how they rank in terms of destructiveness. One problem is that people who have conservative opinions are effectively barred from conversation (not necessarily because they cannot speak but rather because no one will listen). And while some might not lament the loss of their conservative opinions (more on this in a moment), we should certainly lament the loss of their other opinions, those that are either not conservative or that are not trackable on a conservative-liberal-socialist continuum. These lost opinions may be very good ones, ones we are in need of, but if we are too busy distancing ourselves from conservatism, we won't be able to take them seriously.

The second problem is that a conservative idea could, of course, be correct. I'm having a difficult time imagining a conservative idea which I could support, but then again I don't think much of that left-right continuum, so ideas I might think of as non-conservative could appear conservative to others. At any rate, I am at least willing to admit that there could be opinions which appear conservative that turn out to be rather valuable without turning out to be non-conservative. In fact, that certain positions which I am very certain are correct can be closely if not perfectly formulated in conservative terms (ie. conservationism and conservative are cognate for a reason) suggests that there are conservative ideas which, if slightly reformulated, could fit admirably within a non-conservative framework. All of this indicates that barring conservative ideas from the discourse is counter-productive. And yet, by making conservatism something we must necessarily distance ourselves from if we want to be heard, we have ensured that those ideas do not get aired. And that is bad news indeed.

Santa, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit

In a recent blog post Leah at Unequally Yoked asks Christians whether or not they would raise their children to believe in Santa. Does lying about Santa make children wonder whether they're folks lie about God? Or does belief in Santa differ from belief in God? Below is what I posted. I might expand later.

Believing for a time in Santa actually improved my intellectual faith. I thought that Santa gave toys not to children who behaved but to children who believed in him. My folks warned me that some other people did not believe in Santa, and they would try to convince me to disbelieve, too. I wasn't to listen to them; they did not believe, so of course they would see no evidence, because he didn't bring them presents any more. I was to examine the evidence I received. Eventually I realized Santa was a physical impossibility. For a while I believed in him anyway, but some time in the middle of elementary school the evidence in favour of "my parents are Santa" outweighed "Santa physically exists". Since my Dad was usually the school Santa, and was sometimes identified as Santa by small children, I might easily have believed that my Dad literally was Santa... but the evidence pointed to my Mom, really, so that didn't jive. Instead, I believed that "the spirit of Santa", derived perhaps from St. Nicholas but perhaps instead for a concentration of jovial kindness, inhabited generous people like my parents and made them give gifts. Some point later I believed that Santa was a social reality if not a physical one (not that I'd have articulated it in that way, but the idea was there), and later I disbelieved entirely.

Losing Santa was a process, not an event; my belief in fairies, leprechauns (how I wanted to see one of those!), the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Travel Fairy, pre-Ark dragons and unicorns, and assorted other things went as part of a general questioning of beliefs. (I had an ontological house-cleaning, if you will.) My Christianity transformed many times over since then (from materialism to dualism to other things), but the lessons I learned from my Santa apologetics stuck: there are multiple ways to believe, I had learned in my child-brain, and so I never lost Jesus altogether. (And, anyway, the closest I ever came was to falling from the church was over moral questions concerning salvation, not over metaphysical/epistemological concerns of possibility.)

For me, as a child, the physical Santa helped me understand Jesus; the ethereal Santa helped me understand the Holy Spirit. That process helped me hone apologetics, and I learned early on that other people's beliefs ought not to interfere with mine. For me, Santa, whether or not he exists, was and always will be a servant of Christ.

A Protestant Sort of Angst

I am titling this "Protestant" because it seems to me that this is a particularly Protestant conundrum... but perhaps Catholic people struggle with this, too. Please take no offense at any exclusion I may inadvertantly imply through the title, and also let me know of my error.

I also realize that not all Protestants will share this experience. It's a free will versus determinism sort of thing.

Angst, when used in English, is a term drawn from existentialism. It refers to the feeling (often of horror) that accompanies a person's realization that she is utterly free to self-destruct. Nothing is stopping her from leaping off of a metaphorical (or literal, for that matter) precipice. As much as we all seem to desire freedom, when coming face to face with full free will we experience this angst, a psychological shock. The fear is not that we might fall of the cliff's edge, but that we could leap off of it. This wasn't a feeling I was familiar with. I could imagine it, but I couldn't recall experiencing it.

Many people who were raised Christian, especially those who've had a falling out with the church, report that they feared damnation. This, too, is not something I'd ever felt. (I know. Lucky me.) I have, since I've known the concept of Heaven and Hell, felt fairly sure that I was bound Heavenward. Fearing damnation never made a whole lot of sense to me, since if you believed in such a thing as Hell (enough that fear of it would be worth reporting), you wouldn't have any reasn to think you'd be going there; if you didn't believe in Heaven and Hell, you may well be headed to the latter, but you wouldn't think you were, so why be afraid?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have news: I can now report firsthand the feelings of angst and the fear of damnation.

I was reading the Bible the other night (this was a few weeks ago; I've taken my time getting to this post) and I came upon one of the numerous difficult Old Testament passages. I don't mean "difficult" in the sense of being a cure for insomnia, though there are a few of those; I mean "difficult" in the sense of God-sponsored genocide. If you're not much of a Bible person, that's going to sound a little indicting. Unfortunately, mass murder does come up every so often. In reading, I was faced with the necessity of reconciling the God described here, who insists that every living thing in Town X be slaughtered without mercy (women, children, livestock, pets, pests, and infants all included), with the God I worship weekly, who built a wonderful world and endorses love so much that he underwent humiliation, torture, death, and damnation to redeem a bunch of ingrates. On the one hand, murder; on the other hand, love. How?

Theologians throughout Christendom have given explanations and reconciliations on this point, but that's not what I'm talking about here. The important thing is that the only reconciliation I knew of at the time was Bonhoeffer's, and I haven't found this one convincing. So I could believe that God did this thing, God sponsored hatred and destruction, or I could believe that the Bible is wrong on this count. Not wrong through and through, of course, but wrong about this. Maybe Joshua did kill a bunch of people, but in actual fact God was all like, "Dude, go easy on them, ok?" and Joshua just didn't listen. This last choice is a popular one.

It's also, apparently, a dangerous one. Because if the Bible is wrong about this, how do we know that it hasn't got the rest of it wrong? How do we know it isn't wrong about Jesus, too? How can we be sure?

I've said before and I'll say again that not many people come to Christ through the Bible; usually, they come to the Bible through Christ. It's because they believe in God and Jesus that they believe the Bible has authority. But then what this means is that we believe in Christ by hearsay and by faith alone. Which sounds good when we know that "faith" is invested with such high standing, but is that enough? Very quickly our whole support system begins to fall away. What can we rely on, after all?

So I believe in Jesus not for any reason, but merely because I do. If this is the case, then there's nothing stopping me, nothing at all, from going apostate. I could become an atheist in seconds. The possibility exists, the door is open, and all I need to do is step through. I suddenly recognized my freedom to become an atheist. This was angst.

It horrified me. I felt extremely uncomfortable. I could even see things on the other side of the door, see how life as an atheist would begin. I could see the gateway into that territory, and I already had quite a few of the maps in my back pocket (His Dark Materials, The God Delusion, and suchlike). To an extent it would seem like such a relief to walk through that door. It would be easier, for sure; I wouldn't have to constantly worry about the door being there. The decision would be over. But if I stayed on this side of the door, the temptation would always be there. It would never go away. Never.

But I didn't cross the door, and so I also saw--or at least suspected--the yawning throat of Hell lay that way, too. I'm not certain that Christ offers the only path to salvation, but I'm not certain that there are others, either. From this side of the door, I knew I didn't want to take that risk. But what if, years later or weeks later or minutes later, I went through anyway, a sort of spasm of the will? Could I come back? No longer believing in hell, would I come back? Does the door slam shut? What would happen to me? (You might note that at this point my sense of free will started ebbing away... I feared that I was not in control of my own will. I have to wonder whether this is an element in any feeling angst, this subtle, quiet suspicion of free will's existence even when our realization of that freedom is what brought us to this point.)

It was a fast slope to this point; I was reading the Bible, and bare minutes later I was on the naked edge of apostasy. Was it all this fragile? Was it all this frail?

A passage from Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life came to mind, one which I had previously had trouble with, one worth quoting in full: "In the early years of his ministry, Billy Graham went throuh a time when he struggled with doubts about the accuracy and authority of the Bible. One moonlit night he dropped to his knees in tears and told God that, in spite of confusing passages he didn't understand, from that point on he would completely trust the Bible as the sole authority for his life and ministry. From that day forward, Billy's life was blessed with unusual power and effectiveness." In the next paragraph, Warren writes, "Decide that regardless of culture, tradition, reason, or emotion, you choose the Bible as your final authority."

I could have tried something like this, but it didn't appeal to me at all. I've been skeptical too long to do something as (I thought) deliberately hamstringing as this. Why pray to God for blind belief in the Bible if the Bible does turn out to be ridden with errors after all? I don't think God would want that of me.

I did pray for help, though. I can't recall if I specified what kind of help I wanted. I don't think I did. I think I just asked for help. And, whether it was an act of God or my psychology's refusal to entertain cognitive dissonance, I suddenly felt peace. Free will or no, I realized, I would never give up belief in God. I may have to live forever with atheism a step away, but I would never cease to believe. This doesn't mean that I'll believe in any earthly authority at all, but God... no, God's here to stay. My faith might be lukewarm, too, which isn't a good thing, but it would always be there. Elizabeth Esther has observed of herself that she simply can't not believe, and I feel the same. To an extent, this unrootable belief bothered the skeptical corner of my mind almost as much as Warren's prescription did: was the sense that I couldn't disbelieve justification enough for belief? It's really poor apologetics, barely more than a tautology, but it's there nonetheless. Every a priori premise in philosophy is similarly a tautology, but somehow this is what makes them such reliable proofs.

So I believe, even though that door may always be open before me. I believe, even though I don't know why. I believe, even though I don't always know in what, exactly. What seems in the end to matter is that I believe.

Since that night, I've read more apologetics and am feeling more comfortable with belief. FYI. And I'm also aware that a number of these experiences argue for determinism of some degree... something to think about.

Listening and That Kind of Atheist

Sorry. This is a long one.

Jon and I were sitting down in the Lazy Scholar. This was on my most recent--and final--trip to Ontario. We were talking about one hundred and one related things, and Jon brought up a girl I will call Sally Drew. (This protects her privacy a little bit, but Jon and Cait will recognize immediately who I'm talking about.) I've never to my knowledge met this Sally Drew. Jon implied that she is my intellectual match, and the thing about Jon is that he often and vocally overestimates how intelligent I am. It seemed as though he was suggesting that she is in a way my antithesis (or I suppose that we are antitheses of one another), in that she is a vociferous and evangelical atheist, frequently waxing upon the irrationality of religion. This is a girl who has committed a lot of her not insignificant mental resources to supporting atheism. She has the arguements all worked out, and she's honed them well (or as well as you can if you're under twenty-five). Jon in effect said that Sally Drew is certain of her atheism and tries to convince others to follow suit.

I said, "That makes me so sad."

Jon said, "That's what she says about you."

I was shocked by two things: the first was that Sally Drew knows of my existence and is judging me somewhere; the second was that I was judging her in exactly the same way that I did not want to be judged. To say we were antitheses was perhaps truer then than at any other point; we were mirror images, judging each other through Jon.

What does really make me sad, and I said this to Jon, is that while I am more than willing to try to see things from an atheist perspective, to understand why other people think what they do and to participate in our common humanity, I do not see atheists attempting the same. I quite literally cannot think of a single atheist who has done this. This is what makes me sad. I am sure that there are atheists who do. There must be. But those I have met do not, or at the very least I cannot tell that they do.

And I do try to understand things from an atheist perspective, in the same way that when I look at situations I sometimes think, "What would a Buddhist think of this?," or "Now, a Taoist would say such-and-such in this situation." I follow an atheist blog, I have read atheist books, and I do a smattering of research on-line. I try to listen when non-Christians talk about spiritual things (truth, meaning in death, morality, and so forth), and not just so I can make an articulate response. Trying on different perspectives--within an epistemological quarantine,* of course--is something I have trained myself to do. It's a very postmodern ability, of course, but it is an important one even to an absolutist like me.

(Of course I fail to practice it all the time. Such are we dusty creatures.)

It is perhaps this ability's postmodernism that makes it so unattractive to rational materialists. After all, most of these vocal atheists I encounter are not just atheists, but a specific kind of atheist. That is, they believe not just that there is no God (an atheist existentialist, a Buddhist, and a nihilist would all agree with that), but also that the world we experience is rationally understandable and can be understood strictly in material (ie. physical, scientific, empirical) terms. No existentialist, Buddhist, or nihilist would agree with rational materialism, however atheist they were. Rational materialism has little time for postmodernism because rational materialism requires reason and experience to be universal. Different perspectives do not matter because what is true is true for everyone. Maybe perspectives matter for social issues, politics, culture, and so on, but when it comes to what the universe looks like, there's no point wondering how other people see it. All that matters is logic and science.

(I find trying rational materialism on comparatively easy because I used to be a rational materialist. I was amateur status, and I tried to reconcile it with Christianity, but it's still a mindset that I'm familiar with.)

Whatever the cause, I have not found a vocal atheist willing to try on my perspective to the same degree that I am willing to try on theirs. This is clearly true of my antithesis, Sally Drew; this is clearly true of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and the rest of the New Atheists; this is true of the atheists I encounter at http://www.atheistrev.com/. Perhaps it is untrue of those atheists who are quiet, whose atheism I do not encounter. The trouble is, I wouldn't know.

This is what makes me sad. If, of course, "sad" is defined as "scared, angry, and despairing." It's also true that I'm sad about her being an atheist, but that's not something you go around saying out loud. That sort of thing makes you sound arrogant and condescending, which are things Christians need to steer away from.** Also, how I feel about her being an atheist is beside the point; what is the point, at least to the conversation I was having with Jon and to this article, is that it upsets me when people like Sally Drew refuse to see things from another point of view.

Sally Drew likely has not met a Christian willing to see things from her point of view. Or, if she has, that Christian has not made it clear that he is trying to do so. I suspect that there are many atheists who do honestly try to understand how Christians and other non-atheists see the world. But, as I've said ad nauseaum, I have not recognized this in them. Which makes me wonder whether it is visible that I attempt to otherstand things from other people's points of view. Do people know that I try to do this? I have reason to suspect that they do not, and this is what really scares me.

I wondered for a while why religious-themed conversations I had with a certain agnostic former housemate tended to go sour. Each one seemed to end worse than the last, until some unkind words were spoken and we never had those conversations again. It wasn't until after that last conversation that I realized what was happening: he understood my justifications of my beliefs to by assaults on his beliefs. This was mainly my fault. I did not bother to explain that I see no reason for my experiences and philosophizing to make a difference to someone else's belief system. This is why I believe; it does not mean that I think you have to. But I never told him that, and so I think he felt threatened. In response he tried to "disprove" my justifications and beliefs, and then I felt defensive, and it turned into an argument. Somehow I never noticed it happening as it happened. It was only in retrospect that I could ever see what went wrong.

The thing about rational materialism, though, is that any justification must hold universally true. If I give reasons for believing, they must by necessity apply to whoever I'm speaking to (according to rational materialism). So giving an account of my belief is an attack on theirs, from their point of view. I wish I was better at communicating that that's not how I see it.

How is this important? Good question. It seems to me that we as a world need to get along a little better. One of the ways we might go about doing this is listening to each other. And I mean really listening, not getting down enough of the points to make a decent rebuttal. I am trying to get better at doing this. I want to hear your journey, and I will try not to take your experiences as a direct assault on the validity of my own. But I want the same from you. I want the same from everyone. (That I will not get this is likely one of the crosses I must bear.)

We cannot attempt peace without listening. We cannot love without listening. We cannot listen if we are unwilling to understand. From what I have seen, very few people of any worldview are willing.***

--------
* "Epistemological quarantine" refers to quarantining beliefs so that they don't interfere with the rest of your belief system; I try these ideas on without allowing them any sticking power. I do not really believe these things. I just pretend that I do so I can get a better idea of seeing what it's like.
** Not to throw stones or anything, but I'd like to tell atheists that arrogance and condescension look just as bad on you as they do on us.
*** Let me be clear that in order to listen we must be willing to understand. Successfully understanding is unnecessary. It must be so, for I doubt that full understanding is possible.

A Second Post on Postmodernism

Part II

(If you have not read Part I, I suggest you do so now.)

I think it's about time we move from the foundations of postmodernism to some of its common but not essential traits, as well as some examples of postmodernist thought.

This radical destabilizing of belief and knowledge must necessarily apply to the postmodernist's own beliefs, and they are not naive enough to overlook this. A postmodern thinker will in general use a specific sort of irony in anything they say; they don't necessarily mean the opposite of what they say, but they are continually aware that whatever they say applies only right now, to this context, from this perspective. Many have given up hoping to find a universal solution, even to the problems posed about postmodernism, and as such give only preliminary answers. Other postmodernists hope to find some grand rhythm behind the confusion postmodernism has so far uncovered, though they think that pattern will be better expressed in terms of dynamics, relationships, and tendencies rather than systems, identities, and facts. Postmodernism doubts the efficacy of things like logic, especially logical language and scientific discourse, which makes postmodern express difficult. Irony as a result plays an important role in at least the expression of postmodern ideas, leading the movement into wordplay, bet-hedging, satire, and deliberate self-parody.

As you may be able to tell from what I've written so far, and from the emphasis on wordplay and bet-hedging, you can guess that another postmodern trait is obscure language. Postmodernism writing and speech tends to be full of neologisms, vague language that sounds hyper-specific, compound nonce words, words heavy with suffixes, and brackets or slashes in the middle of words (such as "in/deforming the text" or "uni(n)formed"). This is partly an attempt to create a new way of discussion that doesn't rely on modernist philosophy, but, as Stephen Katz discusses in his essay, it can also be an attempt to dismantle criticism against postmodernism or hide the fact that you have nothing of interest to say. For instance, you can intimidate opponents by confusing them; they are less likely to call you out if they don't understand what you're saying, because they don't want to sound like an idiot. Instead, they try to pick up the rules of your wordgames and play those games themselves, validating your position in the process. Further, if no one understand what you're saying, they can't tell if you're not saying anything at all. Lastly, it's difficult to come up with a cogent criticism against such an argument because there aren't the standard logical pieces to work with. Even if someone does come up with an argument against what you've said, you can just fire back that binary logic (ie. modernist logic) can't address postmodern ideas, which transcend such historically located ideas. (Cait, Jon, I think you'll recognize certain professors who do this kind of thing. Think the use of "problematize" or "the economics of _______.")

I think this is almost enough for one post, and I hope it gives you a good if basic idea of what postmodernism is. I think I should give you three basic areas in which postmodernism really makes a difference in how we operate.

Identity: postmodernism dismantles the concept of self, like it dismantles many other things. This deserves a post in and of itself, but I'll give you a very brief sketch here of two 'models' of the postmodern self. First there is the Protean self, which changes according to social situation. The idea is that there is no core 'self' with predictable traits that run through a person. Rather, each person's self-concept, behaviour patterns, thought patterns, and even beliefs change as they are in different social circumstances. (Which is why we feel uncomfortable when two of our social groups begin to mingle; this is a manifestation between conflict or competition between two of our self-concepts as we try to wear both at the same time.) We are culturally trained to try to be a consistent self throughout all of our interactions, but this runs counter to what we actually do. Thus we feel guilt about changing our masks when we ought not to feel guilty. Some thinkers suggest that only some people are truly Protean, a sort of vanguard of the new postmodern self, while others suggest that all people are Protean and may only appear otherwise due to social restraints.

The second postmodern position on identity is that there is no self. When Descartes encountered his own thoughts, he reasoned that there must be a thinker, famously stating, cogito ergo sum. Buddhists disagreed with this assessment since before the birth of Christ. Having conducted a similar experiment, they determined not cogito, which means "I think," but rather, "there are thoughts." They then searched for something other than those thoughts that could be having them, and came up with nothing. They concluded that there are thoughts, desires, urges, fears, neuroses, and more, but that there was no 'self' having them: rather, what we think of as the self is simply all of these things bundled together, coming into existence and then disappearing just as quickly. Some postmodernists agree. They say that what we think of as a 'self' is just a bundle of drives, emotions, fears, beliefs, cultural expectations, biases, beliefs, beliefs about beliefs, and so forth, some or many of which are contradictory, jockeying for relative prominence. There is no "core" self, but instead a bunch of different self-components arranging and re-arranging. The fact that many of us experience having a self is simply due to the fact that our culture has since childhood insisted that we have this experience; it, too, is a cultural construct. I should also point out that attributing these self-components to biological/neurological processes might be tempting, but postmodernism would likely shy away from that. Rather, these components are themselves culturally constructed, or if not that at least they can only be understood or experienced through cultural mediation. Which is to say, (almost) everyone experiences lust and sexual arousal--but we can only experience it if we have a cultural category for it, and so how we experience it depends on what culture we are in. Notice that this view is not inconsistent with, but also not dependent on, that of the Protean self.

Science: While one of the two major backlashes against postmodernism is scientism (also called rational-materialism or the cult of reason), there is such a thing as postmodern science. This is the sort of science which is non-dogmatic, recognizing that every discovery is tentative and only legitimate in so far as it works. It has little concern for truth and more concern with whether or not it works in the current situation. Postmodern science values other domains of knowledge and does not try to impose its own discoveries upon others. Further, it often violates what are considered in theory to be rules of the scientific method, while arguing that, in practice, most major advances in science are produced by breaks from the scientific method. There is actually great overlap between the scientism of Lee Smolin, who I wrote on before, and certain postmodern scientists, as they wrestle with what makes science tick. Most importantly, postmodern scientists see the scientific method as a social construct, no more objectively valid than competing constructs; there choice of it is arbitrary, personal, historical, and, since they are aware of this, ironic. My understanding of postmodern scientists is that they don't voice their postmodern opinions too loudly in the department, since that would kill their chances of advancement.

Religion: The second major backlash against postmodernism is traditionalism, with religious fundamentalism being among these (along with the sort of 50s-ideology of consumerism and normative society). However, there is postmodernist religion as well. Buddhism and Hinduism have had postmodern members before there was such a thing as postmodernism, but even some monotheists are getting on board. The idea that our current form of worship is just a way that man has constructed in order to reach God is a postmodernist one, and it should be noted that early postmodernist writers got their ideas from Vicco, who wrote on religion. Many people recognize that their own religious beliefs are a historical 'accident,' meaning that they are only Christian or Muslim or Taoist or Sikh due to where and when they were born, but at the same time they happily and usually without internal conflict participate piously in worship. While these people might not be postmodernists, that is a postmodern attitude. There are of course other more radically postmodernist theologians, but I know less about these and so won't try to discuss them.

Likely the greatest intellectual contribution that postmodernism has made, and likely the one thread underlying all postmodernist thought, is nicely put by Walter Truett Anderson the editor of The Truth About the Truth as, roughly, "Postmodernism has changed our beliefs about belief." Its ideas and mannerisms run through our culture and has taken a strong grip on at least the arts departments in academia, so much so that postmodernism itself has sort of become that culture that we cannot see because we live within it. You might find that a number of things I mentioned are beliefs you hold yourself and you never knew that those beliefs have postmodern origins. I know I found that. While I don't agree with all of postmoderism--I believe, for instance, in an accessible universal reality--I find myself sympathetic to much of it. I will save my criticisms for another time.

If you have any questions, please ask.

A Post on Postmodernism

Part I

I will here, as promised after finishing Walter Truett Anderson's The Truth About the Truth, outline postmodernism in a similar manner as I did existentialism before. At this moment it is not my intention to critique po-mo, but I will warn you that I am writing from a critical stand-point; that is, I do not hold that the full tenants of postmodernism are true. So I may be biased.

I think one of the first things you'll notice about postmodernism is that you will already believe a number of postmodernist ideas and you don't even know it. I know that a lot of the academic work I've produced has been to some extent or another postmodern, and I hadn't known it until now. Postmodernism has both openly and covertly made inroads into our culture, and we can no longer easily identify which of our own personal beliefs has its origins in this new-ish philosophy. Further, something we must keep in mind about postmodernism is that it is less a coherent philosophical movement as a number of related sub-movements, trends, subcultures, and individuals who all have certain things in common. This statement is true of most philosophical schools, but it seems truer of postmodernism than of anything before it.

So, that out of the way, we can ask, What is postmodernism?

Most essentially put, postmodernism is a trend of philosophical belief that challenges not only what we know but how we claim to know it. Modernism before it held that there is an objective world in which we live; moreover, objective knowledge was attainable and that it was worthy of being attained. Perhaps it was the only kind of knowledge worth attaining. Some postmodernists challenge both of these ideas, though all postmodernists challenge the idea that objective knowledge is ever attainable. This is perhaps the crux of all postmodernism but, as with all philosophical movements, the different strains have other things in common, or at least in broad strokes. I will outline these.

I suspect that you will notice immediately how the relativisms (moral, cultural, epistemic, aesthetic) are postmodern ideas. Moral relativism says that everyone generates his or her own equally valid set of moral values; cultural relativism says that each cultures values, beliefs, and customs are equally legitimate or right; epistemic relativism says that everyone's beliefs about what is true are equally correct; aesthetic relativism says that everyone's judgements of art or beauty are equally accurate. These are the extreme forms of each relativism, and I must emphasize that most people hold more qualified and nuanced views than these. A common qualification is this: while there may be a best culture or truest set of moral standards, we cannot step outside our own culture or morals to determine which of two competing standards/cultures is best, and so any decision we make between the two is arbitrary. We simply cannot know. Therefore they may not be equally true, but they are equally justified.

Each postmodernist thinker chooses among these relativisms, of course, and adds his or her own qualifications. Even people who are predominately not postmodernist often choose some relativism or another. Many rational materialists, who are by definition not postmodernist, espouse aesthetic relativism, and some espouse cultural relativism. Similarly, some religious fundamentalists, who again are by definition not postmodernist, nonetheless believe that certain elements of culture are relative.

A key word in postmodernism is "constructed." According to postmodernism, our categories, ideas, and logical laws are culturally constructed. This is where deconstructionism comes in, breaking down and challenging our preconceptions. Gender roles are a common target. The sort of feminism which suggests that our ideas of "man" and "woman" are just made up by patriarchal society is a subset of postmodernism, or at least borrows this idea from it. Thus any transvestite is postmodernist in action if not in explicit philosophy. Biological sex is also sometimes a target, and those postmodernists who challenge this cite the number of people who do not phenotypically match one biological sex, or whose phenotypical (ie. anatomical) gender is distinct from their genetic gender (ie. their XX or XY chromosomes). Ideas of beauty, truth, ability, ethnicity and race, and identity are also subject to attempted deconstruction.

The idea of cultural construction does not mean that we are free to make anything up. It means that the discourses (another popular word) in our culture are responsible for creating the worldview (or world, as it's often called) in which we live. Throughout most of history, most people were not aware that they had a worldview. They were like fish in water, not noticing that there was water. When modernism came along, people noticed that there were such things as cultures, but Western people thought you could analyze these cultures objectively, as though you were outside of it. It would be as though a fish crawled out of the water to determine what salinity of water was best. Postmodernism insists that there is no "outside of the water" to swim to in order to make such a judgement... or, if there is, you actually cannot make a judgement from that perspective. Or, in the same way that Mephistopholes takes Hell with him wherever he goes, even if he leaves Hell, we take culture with us wherever we go, even if we leave human society entirely. We cannot escape it.

What postmodernism does, though, is make us aware of our own water by introducing us to other waters (to extend the fish metaphor). In becoming aware of our own culture, and how arbitrary it is, we can all contribute to the project of changing that culture to something we like better. As I said before, not all postmodernists are relativist through and through, but rather are only relativist about some things. Thus feminists believe that it is absolutely true (in the sense of moral absolutism, the belief that a one set of morals is better than all others) that women should be treated equally to men, and thus try to break down the restricting gender roles on both men and women. Either a small number of us try to recreate culture to our own standards, creating a subculture (such as nihilist-punk), or we try to engage all of society in this change (as feminism or anti-racism has).

I hope that you'll notice multiculturalism's importance in postmodernism; indeed, the blending of cultures is a key component in some postmodern lifestyles (which is a thing, as Tycho would say), and culture clashes and/or interactions created modernism, according to some of the authors in The Truth About the Truth, and postmodernism following it. It's only through having to seriously reckon with other cultures that we gained the perspective necessary to see "through" our own, as it were. Therefore the idea of culture being a construct, and taking part in its own construction, is a descendant of recognizing the multiplicity of cultures. By the same token, the conscious trading of traditions, ideas, rituals, and narratives between cultures is a result of postmodern though. (I must emphasize the importance of conscious in the previous sentence.) An equally important element is the supposed conflict between the powerful domains of knowledge in modern academia, especially the growing rift between science, religion, and certain modernist philosophies, like existentialism. Recognizing that there was no possible way to get 'out' of any mode of thought to make a decision regarding which of these approaches are most valid may have been another key component in the development of postmodernism. (Such a decision is called a metadecision, while the language it would be expressed in is called a metalanguage. Postmodernism of course denies the existence/validity of either.)

That all being said, the multicultural element is perhaps better attributed to postmodernity, which refers less to a philosophy and more to the culture which takes postmodern tenants to be true, or at least culturally viable. That is to say, whether or not we are individually postmodern, we are all living in postmodernity. Make sense? This is important to note because it has become popular to attribute postmodernism, or the label 'postmodern', to many historical speakers, so much so that Eco jokes that soon enough Homer will be postmodern. People are now retroactively attributing postmodernism to any artist who held some ideas that are now labeled postmodern. Buddha would be a great example. Scholars, both postmodern and not postmodern, are arguing over this approach's validity.

And I'll write the rest in a second post. See you then!

Tetramorium caespitum

or, Pavement Ant

You march with many sisters, Amazon.
Across your desert mount you track your twin
In rushed obedience to now begin
The second hill to bring adherents on
This upper plain, for war against your foes.
Of your six limbs you give but empty care;
For queen and colony alone you bear
The unexamined burdens, senseless blows.
If thinking were your province, then would you
Forsake your bloody kind? Does thought condone
That social animals desire to be alone?
Would reason force the end of selfless crews?
What fate's the maid's who lacks a queen to give
Her harvest to, and guards her chance to live?

The "Real Christian" Question

[This post has nothing to do with probing my identity. Sorry if this is what you were expecting.]

Lately I've been spending a little time at Atheist Revolution, a blog which is devoted to "breaking free from irrational belief and opposing Christian extremism in America." I originally found it at the Blogger's Choice awards, and have been snooping over there silently to see what the atheists are getting up to these days. It's part of my personal fair-reading policy, though it's also an excellent exercise in keeping my temper and not writing stupid things on the Internet.

A common theme at Rev. Atheist's blog (the url, http://www.atheistrev.com/, always makes me think of an atheist reverend) is discussing why people like Pat Robertson are "real Christians." Or, actually, from what I can tell, the theme is discussing that more than discussing why, but I think I can infer the why easily enough by what Vjack (the author) says. You could likely find a representative post in short order by going through the recent archives, but I'll give you a good one here. I encourage you to go and read it now. It's rather short.

Alright, I hope you've read it. In case you missed it, the article was supposed to be ironic. That is, Vjack does not remotely buy the claim that people who claim to be Christian and then do un-Christ-like things are thereby not Christians. Given the sorts of arguments he has likely been in and given his understanding of what Christianity is, I completely understand where he is coming from. On the other hand, I have heard Christians discuss the idea of "real Christians" and "non-Christians who say they're Christians" enough times to know that they are using the term in a valid way. What we have here is a case of equivocation: one term, in this case "real Christian", has two or more meanings, and these are getting confused. I hope to clear this up.

I can imagine the sort of debate Vjack might be in; Vjack will make a claim like, Pat Robertson and George Bush and Pope Urban II all demonstrate that Christians can be dangerous and stupid, and then his Christian opposite will make a claim like, Those are not real Christians. Vjack will then try to parse what his opponent means, and his opponent will 'help' him as follows: Because these people do things that are not in keeping with Christianity, they cannot be Christians. And this sounds an awful lot like, if a Christian sins, they either immediately become non-Christian or reveal that they never were Christian.

You can understand why an atheist would find this notion absurd. Stated like that, I find the idea absurd. An atheist, especially a rational materialist one, will likely understand Christianity as a sociological phenomenon; a Christian is a member of this movement called Christianity, or this group of individuals, organizations, and institutions roughly known as Christendom. Thus it seems kind of silly to claim that there is some sort of moral identity clause in Christian membership that says that one can only be a Christian if one doesn't do such-and-such and always does this-and-that. If you are part of the sociological movement, then you are a Christian. Of course, some behaviours might strongly suggest you aren't actually a "real Christian"--consulting the priestess of Delphi, for instance, or summoning Satan by burning a Bible--but for the most part, if a person is any sort of Christian, they are necessarily a "real Christian."

There remains the slight concern about how a person becomes a member of this sociological phenomenon, which is thorny and, regardless of what anyone might say, intractable. You cannot simply say that anyone who claims to be of a particular religion is of that religion. I can claim to be Taoist however often and vigorously as I like; if I don't believe that there is a Tao ordering the world, if I take pride in pride, if I shun the local natural world and delight in the cosmopolitan centres, if I have no truck with either the Tao Te Ching or the I Ching, if I am determinedly competetive, and if I think meditation, feng shui, and tai chi are for idiots, then I am absolutely not Taoist. Claiming membership is not sufficient. (Which is to say, Ghandi was not Christian or Muslim, regardless of what he might have claimed.) Membership must instead lie in some combination of beliefs and behaviours, but the requirements are a source of contention even among Religious Studies scholars, who presumably would have the best idea about this sort of thing. Like all sociological phenomena, religions have fuzzy borders.

However, if we can grant that all Christians must agree on at least some basic set of beliefs (the existence and divinity of Jesus Christ, the existence of a Holy Spirit, the value if not truth of the Bible, the existence of a potentially eternal soul, salvation acheived through the Crucifixion, the in-born sinfulness of human nature coupled with the inherent goodness of the soul) and that anyone who professes these beliefs and meets some minimum requirement of Christian behaviour (which may be no more than not worshipping other gods), then certainly there are Christians, under the sociological definition just given, who do profoundly un-Christ-like things. Claiming that these people are not "real Christians" seems utterly absurd if you are thinking of "Christian" in the sociological sense required. Of course they're real Christians; they are real people, and they meet all of the criteria required to be a Christian.

If Vjack's hypothetical opponent indeed did mean that these people do not fall under the sociological umbrella of Christianity, then he would be rather wrong. A Religious Studies scholar* must conclude that people like Pat Robertson are Christians, and real ones, at that.

However, I suspect Vjack's hypothetical opponent might have meant something else entirely, and in this case he could be quite right in his claim.

A Christian** will view Christianity as something other than a sociological phenomenon. (An intelligent one will still see that there is a sociological phenomenon called Christianity and that it overlaps rather a bit with the Christianity to which she claims allegiance, but strictly speaking she is not claiming allegiance to the sociological phenomenon.) Christianity to a Christian is more than just a set of beliefs and institutions, but also a relationship to God and a particular outlook. A Christian identifies themselves as such when they have decided to act like Christ, simply put. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that Christians have decided to try to act like Christ and call on the Holy Spirit for help. To a Christian, being a real Christian means genuinely attempting to share Jesus' worldview and trying to emulate Jesus' ethics.

Under this definition, it is unlikely that a member of the Ku Klux Klan could be a real Christian. Why? Because the KKK espouses hate, and Jesus espoused love. It is necessarily impossible that a person proud of hating could be a "real Christian." That's not to say that a person who hates cannot be a Christian. What I'm saying is that person who thinks that in some circumstances it's good to hate other people, as did the KKK, cannot be Christian. That's part of the definition of a Christian. (The Bible does, at least in the NRSV translation, encourage hating sin, but hating the sinner is not such a good thing.)

Of course, the KKK could talk about believing in Christ and salvation and the Word of the Lord; he could go to church and sing hymns; he could vote for the Christian Right and give to charity; he could be part of the temperance movement and teach Sunday School. Under the vast majority of sociological or academic definitions, he would be a Christian, and if we only were looking at this sociological membership, it would be absurd to claim that he was not a "real Christian." But, so long as he believes that it is good to hate black people, then he cannot in truth be a "real Christian," as a real Christian does not believe that it is good to hate. (Of course, we could always posit the existence of his daughter, who does not believe that it is good to hate but nonetheless attends Klan meetings, burns crosses in fronts yards, and if truth be told hates black people regardless of her desire not to. Whether or not she is a real Christian would be a matter of debate were it not for the fact that it isn't any of our business. It's God's business, and His alone.)

Is this sufficiently clear? To the rational-materialist/anthropologist, it makes no sense to distinguish between real Christians and less-than-real Christians; if a person is a Christian at all, then she is a real Christian. To the Christian, however, there is a huge difference between a person is following Christ and one who isn't, and that has little to do with public identification as a Christian.

Of course, the rational materialist atheist might say, "Sure, they think there's a difference, but I know there isn't. How does this make their claim any less absurd?" Put another, it's fair to ask how the Christian's understanding of the term "real Christian" has any relevance to an non-Christian. I do have an answer for that.

Let's go back to the hypothetical debate between our hypothetical blogging atheist and our hypothetical Christian. The atheist has made some arguement which attempts to undermine Christianity's validity by saying that many Christians are loathsome creatures who molest children and slaughter Jewish people and ostracize people for 'sins' that aren't actually wrong. This argument is trying to demonstrate that Christians are hypocrits and, somehow, that Christians are hypocrits will prove that the tenants of Christianity are false. (Which of course is a steaming pile of manure; that's an ad hominem arguement. However, I have heard this arguement before, so we'll run with it.) The Christian wants to demonstrate that most Christians are not hypocrits, so makes the distinction between real and not-real Christians. The atheist scoffs. But ought she? No. Because the Christian actually has a point here. That is, Christianity the sociological phenomenon may be flawed, but Christianity the religion, the Christianity which is neither more nor less than trying your hardest to be like Jesus and calling on the Holy Spirit to help you do so, that Christianity is a different thing altogether from the sociological phenomenon that shares its name. Which is to say that any judgement derived from the sociological phenomenon is invalid when applied to the "walk of like" Christianity.

I'll give you an example. A scientist somewhere does experiment in which he takes a frog and puts in the freezer. Note that, while doing so, he is wearing a lab coat and lab goggles and has his Ph.D.s in Biology and Astrophysics mounted on the wall behind him. He takes the frog out sometime later and thwacks it on the table, demonstrating that it is as hard as a rock. He then carefully thaws the frog, and it's quite fine. It hops around and ribbits and eats some flies and finds a lady-frog and begets itself some tadpoles. The scientist then writes a paper saying that if we freeze our limbs, we will be able to do more dangerous labour because we will be safe from damage. He cites his frozen frog as proof.

This is not "real" science, obviously. If this is all he ever does, then he is not a real scientist. We know this. A real scientist follows the scientific method, and that's not something this guy does. So he's not a real scientist. Except, of course, for the fact that he's receiving grant money to do this, is employed by a department of science in a accredited university, claims to be a scientist, and is perceived to be a scientist by his peers and students. Sociologically speaking, he is a scientist; as far as the scientific method is concerned, he is not. If we tried to claim that science is somehow flawed because this guy is an idiot and makes ridiculous claims in the guise of proven facts, we ourselves would be the ones making ridiculous claims. In fact, even if 99.9% of scientists were like this guy, we'd still be wrong to claim that science itself is faulty. The scientific institutions might be derailed, but that doesn't mean that science is.

In the same way, claiming that people like Klan members demonstrate that there is something wrong with Christianity is only valid if you're talking about Christianity as a particular sociological phenomenon. This is a different Christianity than the one I am claiming to be a part of; there is overlap, of course, and I am certainly a member of the sociological Christianity, too. But what is not flawed is the religion in which I attempt to be Christ-like and, frankly, people who espouse hate are not a part of that religion. What this means is that you may point out as many problems as you like with the Pat-Robertson Christianity; that bothers me not, for he's not part of my Christianity. In this sense, he is not a "real Christian".

To be honest, I don't think it is often my place to judge whether or not a person is really trying to follow Christ. I cannot get into their headspace and so simply cannot know. For this reason you will not often see me making the real/not-real distinction. But I wanted to outline why this distinction could be a legitimate claim on the part of a Christian and how this affects concerns about making generalizations about Christianity as a whole.

[This post is too long, so I'm cutting it off now. I'm actually truncating the "Why this is important part," because there are a lot of anti-religious arguements that fall down when this distinction is brought to light. But I realize blogs are not the best forum for dissertations, so I will stop going on now. Just one more paragraph and then the footnotes.]

Of course, there's also the issue that the debate itself is derailed, here. Whether a person does horrific things doesn't affect whether or not "their" Christianity--even if it's the very specific kind my hypothetical Christian is endorsing--is a good thing. We don't want to abolish science because the Nazis did real science (ie. following the scientific method) when mutilating people in their Holocaust laboratories. But that's a whole new ball-game.

-----

*I'm not an authoratative Religious Studies scholar; it was my minor in undergrad, is all. I am not claiming to represent the standpoint of such a scholar. Rather, I am saying that from such a standpoint a person would likely draw such a conclusion.
** I suppose it's not quite fair to generalize like this; certainly many Christians will disagree with what I've said. I am being lazy and saying "a Christian" when what I mean is "the sort of hypothetical Christian I'm talking about who could reasonably make the claim that some people professing to be Christians are in fact not real Christians."
***At this point I've voyaged to far into speculation to make any claim that my hypothetical atheist resembles vjack at all. Not that he ever did, more than likely.

Choosing Certainty Over Accuracy

OR

Behavioural vs. Cognitive Approaches

OR

More Trends in Modern Foolishness

I was thinking the other day about this, so let's give it a rant.

In my Religious Studies class this past school year I had cause to consider something I learned in my first year Psych 100 course, which in turn caused me to reflect upon general trends in the thinking of popular scientism. (If you've read my blog, I am sure you can already guess that I will be disagreeing with the trends in the thinking of popular scientism.) That's the background.

We read a book by Pascal Boyer (you'll have maybe read his name before in these posts) for my Interpretation of Religion course. In his book, Pascal Boyer claims that people worship statues of saints and pictures of religious people. To the argument that people are not worshiping but revering the statues, he says that there is no difference between worship and reverence (when the word is used in this sense). He says something along the lines of, "Imagine that you replaced the statue with a sign that says 'Pray.' People would be outraged/not think it's the same thing at all." Now, I'm not going to argue that no one worships statues of saints. That would be patently wrong. Some people expressly do. My point is this: Boyer is using a behaviouralist approach. He does not take into account the internal conditions of a person. Religious phenomenon (that is, religious belief and practice, not miracles) is measurable, he says, and what parts of it are not are irrelevant. Thus the internal emotional and intellectual state of the practitioner is irrelevant, except perhaps as it manifests in questionnaires. What is far more important to him is behaviour...so if people respond negatively to replacing a statue with a sign that says, "Pray," then Boyer assumes that they take the statue to be more than just a reminder to pray (which is what most people say it is, according to him).

The crux of the problem is the divide between behavioural psychology and cognitive psychology. Behavioural psychology essentially follows the idea that we cannot know what other people are thinking; we can only know what they are doing. So we learn about human 'psychology' through behaviour alone. We discuss behaviour alone. When we make models predicting behaviour, we do not even do so much as hypothesize or refer to thought processes. Rather, we say, "When this person experiences this stimulus, they produce this response." It is somewhat more complicated, of course, but they only care about behaviour. We cannot discuss thoughts.

Cognitive psychology disagrees. They say that thought processes are quite relevant and, while ultimately unknowably, are at least within range of an educated guess.

Behavioural psychologists are unwilling to make this guess, however. They are unwilling to sacrifice their certainty. They cannot be certain at all about thoughts, but they can measure behaviour and stimuli. They'll stick to their certainty, thanks, and look down on the cognitive psychologists for not doing so. The problem is that cognitive psychologists have proven that, in many cases, their models (thoughts and all) actually produce more accurate results. Behavioural psychology cannot predict certain behaviours that cognitive psychology can.

It's like there's a machine in a box. You stick an object on the conveyer belt, which takes the object to the machine. Then another conveyer belt brings out the object, which has been altered by the machine. Behaviouralists put objects on and try to find patterns with how they come out. Cognitive psychologists do the same thing, but also try to take stabs at how the machine inside operates. Their theories are obviously not certain at all, but often those theories are nonetheless better able to predict how a given object will look when it comes out of the box. Behavioural psychologists are unwilling to deal with the uncertainty, and so get poorer results.

The bottom line, then, is that behaviouralists choose certainty over accuracy. They cannot be certain about thoughts, so reject them from their models. In so doing, they lose accuracy. But it seems to be that their certainty hardly improves. Since we know that their theories are less able to predict phenomenon, I think we can safely say that they have even less certainty in the end. They may not takes guesses at things they cannot know; instead, they make firm theories that they can be certain are inadequate.

Boyer's statue problem is similar. He looks at the behaviour of someone worshipping a statue and someone revering a statue, and concludes that worshipping and revering are the same thing. This does not take into consideration the practitioner's subjective experience, and this could have drastic results for the rest of his theory (turns out it doesn't, but it could have).

Incidentally, I am have an interesting counter-example for Boyer. Say we remove the Mona Lisa and replace it with a sing that says, "Contemplate Renaissance ideals of beauty and gender." If people respond angerly and claim that it's not the same, does that mean they were worshipping the Mona Lisa? No. It means that the Mona Lisa is more than something that gives them instructions to perform a cognitive task, but gave them particular means to do so. Similarly, statues or icons do not only give us the instructions to perform a cognitive task (pray), but also remind us of assorted details concerning the saint or scenario presented, giving us aids to perform these tasks. We are experiential people, and sometimes we need images to help jog our emotions (to sympathy, to joy, to protectiveness, to thankfulness, to joviality). This is what icons do for some people; they rever the icons, which means in the Orthodox Church that the patrons respect the icons and use them as objects through which they can worship the Godhead.

Final note: I have noticed through conversations with the scientistically-minded that permeating the scientific culture is this idea that certainty is somehow an requirement or even ultimate end in knowledge. A lack of certainty gives some mathematical or scientific-type people anxiety crises or makes them uncomfortable with a particular field of thought. Sciences are "ranked" according to certainty (pure mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology OR ...biology, geology, environmental sciences). Oddly, this places mathematics, which isn't actually a science at all, but rather pure rationalism (as opposed to empiricism, under which domain exists science), at the head of the list. There seems to be an idea that, if you are studying something for its own sake and not for its benefits, there is more value in studying something certain than uncertain. To me this seems ridiculous and actually awful. Consider first that much of physics--quantum and, especially, M-theory--is actually theoretically unverifiable, let alone practically unverifiable. Despite it's absolute "certainty," it can neither be proven nor disproven. Consider second that there is actually no reason whatsoever to prefer certainty (or, at least, none that I have heard). Why is uncertainty and ambiguity not something equally worth picking at? Why is knowledge that is certainty inherently more valuable than that which is uncertain? I cannot think of a reason. Perhaps it is more trustworthy, but that doesn't make it more relevant or interesting.

Anyway, that is my rant about behaviouralism vs. cognitivism, and they related topic of certainty.

Now, to bed.

Personal Resolution Not To Be A Blog Slave: Status = FAILED

I worked at Heritage Park today, helping set up for National Aborignal Day.

Yes, the government has set aside one day for the recognition of Aboriginal people. Before you get all antsy, I'll point out that the Earth gets an hour, and that's not even official. So a day isn't bad. Relatively speaking. Well, yeah, it's pretty bad, but that's beside the point. The point just so happens to be that I worked at Heritage Park today.

Considerations:

1) Cleaning the interiors of ships is not very hard work. Tedious, dusty, cramped, hot, finickety work, yes, but is not physically trying. At the end of the day I am sweating and dirty and my legs are tired, but I am not cardiovascularly exhausted. Preparing for NAD when you haven't been doing that sort of work for two months is. I was in much better shape by this time last summer than I am today. My perseverence is as good as it ever was (which is really the best thing I had going for me: I'd work past my "exhausted" point far longer than most of my coworkers, even if my exhausted point was sometimes sooner). My stamina isn't.

2) The fact that a girl is cute and cheerful and employed at the other site does not mean she is single. Rats. I'm not sure what I was expecting in Fort McMurray.

3) Working away at ships is good for contemplating literary theory, the philosophy of interpersonal relationships, and theology. Working away at events with loads of people is good for actually developing interpersonal relationships.

4) Drinking water when you're very thirsty can make you even thirstier for the rest of the day.

5) I haven't mowed lawns in four years. I haven't really had a lawn to mow, or at least not for more than two weeks at a time. Today was the first in that time. It's not that bad.

6) I am a slave to the computer screen. Or maybe I'm just a bit bored.

7) It's funny. I'm in a lieu period right now. My relationships are in stasus. I'm not developing new ones very much right now. I like my coworkers well enough, but I'm not making the step from 'coworker' to 'friend.' I have made that step once or so in the past, but it isn't really happening right now. And I'm sitting here re-evaluating all of my past friendships and maybe somewhat more than friendships, but I'm not discovering anything new or coming to terms with things I already new. I'm just...re-living it all interally. My isolation isn't really allowing me to develop; perhaps I am allowing my isolation to prevent me from developing. I'm cryogenically frozen, but stuff's still going on anyway. Not much of note, but stuff. Hence blogging all the time, except, unlike Kay or Cait or, I see recently, Roz, it's not really me processing anything. It's just me doing what I always do on my blog, which is keep everything at an even longer arm's length than with people and with myself. My only new discovery is this one: my laid-back approach to relationships is just an excuse to not feel anything, and that goes badly when I can't help feeling something anyway, as I have forgotten how to deal with it. As a result, I am not particularly upset that I am not growing in relationships, even though I suspect cerbrally that it's a bad thing. That is my one new idea, and it counts for absolutely nothing, because over here in stasus, knowing that I am not growing doesn't help an iota. Knowing how to grow might, but I haven't got that figured out yet, and I am feeling too lethargic to figure it out.

8) I need to blog less. It takes up time I could be writing or reading or doing something productive. But I think I enjoy it too much to give it up. And somebody will squawk if I let it slide.

9) A good old-fashioned-looking tipi is really cool. So are older native folks (often elders). And old people in general. I like being around them. Little kids are great too. A little kid came up to me today and we talked about what I was doing, and then about the bumblebee in the flowers. And earlier today an Metis elder helped us erect the tent for the event on Sunday, and we talked about the time he worked on the river boat at the Park and the D250 at my work site.

The Gallery

In the spirit of posting things you'll not have seen before, I'm going to post "The Gallery." This is one which might get me in trouble with particular friends if they read it... to those friends, who never read my blog but there's always a first, none of the characters are supposed to represent actual people. Except one, but that person really isn't going to be reading this.
It was written for a creative writing class last year. I was experimenting with form a bit back then. Still am, really, but less overtly.
---------------------------------------------

The Gallery

      He once had a dream where he walked through the winding passages of a carnival freak show. In it, the gallery’s denizens were sitting in chairs or on stools, each in a separate niche or room, posing without obvious chains, but he could tell behind their eyes that they were not here by free will in the strictest sense of the word. It was more a case of
      not having anywhere else to go, so we sat around our living room and talked about stuff. I was feeling tired and out of it from cleaning the house all day, so I listened more than talked.
      Rafe and Carol were arguing about religion from either end of the futon while Julie watched TV. It was really Joe who had started it, of course. He’d asked if Rafe believed Muslims were all going to Hell. Rafe made some sort of diplomatic answer that said, “Yes, I believe that all Muslims are going to Hell, but I don’t want to say it out loud.” Carol, as usual, got mad about it.
      “I’m not saying that I think there is a heaven or a hell,” she said. “I honestly don’t think there is. But I don’t see how you can be so closed-minded about the afterlife to say that all people who have different religions than you are going to hell.”
      I didn’t want to get involved and I certainly didn’t enjoy the argument, but I saw Joe that was grinning and his eyes
      were a little more mischievous than the usual person’s were. The man wearing a stained work-shirt and last week’s grime clearly enjoyed this exhibit: The Four-Legged Girl, sixteen or so, who had two pairs of legs. All four appendages lined up in a row next to each other, left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. Above the waist, the girl was normal, as far as he could tell. She used all four legs in an odd pattern as she waltzed to the sound of an old gramophone, seemingly for her own amusement rather than theirs. The other viewer was noticeably relishing the thought of what someone could do with a girl who was double below the navel, but all he wanted to do was ask if it felt odd to have extra feet, or if the rest of the world just looked top-heavy. He did wonder about things along the same line as the man next to him, but it was not
      something you talk about if you want to avoid insulting someone,” Julie said from the floor in front of the TV.
      “Exactly.” Rafe nodded. “I had a Muslim friend when I was a kid in summer camp, once. We just didn’t go there.”
      “Think about it,” Julie went on. “Muslim people likely think all Christians are going to hell. Christians likely think all Muslim people are going to hell. Muslims and Christians likely think all Buddhists are going to hell. So they probably don’t want to talk about it because it wouldn’t help social situations any.”
      “But that’s exactly what I’m trying to say,” Carol said. She flapped her arms quite a bit as she spoke. “If everyone thinks everyone else is damned, then society falls apart, unless they’re open-minded enough to realize that other religions are just as right as they are.”
      “No one of any religion will think that other religions are just as right,” Rafe muttered. When Carol shot a look at him, he spoke up. “It’s part of religion to believe only in one God. As a Christian, I am bound to say that other religions are wrong.”
      Julie looked like she might disagree with this, but first Carol went red in the ears and said, “I just wish that being a Christian wasn’t the same as being
      a Pinhead. That was what the sign called him, anyway. It also said he was The Missing Link between humanity and animals. A young gentleman, probably educated from both university and newspapers, had a young woman clinging to his arm and was displaying the exhibit’s varying points of interest to her. The display looked dolefully at the observers, sitting on the stump placed in front of his tent, which was so small and open that he had no privacy. His head was small, and hence the name. More specifically, it sloped back radically from the eyebrows and ears and came to a clear, rounded tip at the top. His head, but not his chin, was shaved, giving him a Neanderthalic appearance. The dreamer wondered whether the man could read, and then thought, just for a moment, that when the gentlemen examined various points of phrenology, that man on display was thinking ‘I know
      exactly what you mean,” Rafe interrupted. “You think that religious people can’t be very smart or else they wouldn’t be religious at all. Dawkins’ book, and all that.”
      “I just don’t see how an intelligent person can believe in God,” Carol said. She’d now turned on the futon and crossed her legs so that she was facing Rafe directly.
      Julie had swiveled back from the TV to say something, but Rafe cut her off before she could start. I could see his hands tremble a little. “Perhaps intelligent people have figured out that reason isn’t everything, and atheists could learn something from that.”
      “He’s right,” Julie said.
      “There’s emotion, intuition—which studies show is more reliable than calculation—there’s faith, authority…”
      “Oh, come on,” Carol said. “Those are logical fallacies. You learn that in grade ten.”
      “Logical fallacies,” Rafe said. “There’s your logic again. Thinking like your typical doctor…”
      Joe’s amusement aside, I wasn’t feeling very comfortable with all the tension, as from either side of the futon the two heads
      argued with each other. That the Two-Headed Woman’s two heads would bicker did seem somewhat caricatured to him. It was generally understood that couples who argued and resolved their differences had healthier relationships, so he hoped that was the case here. They sat on a stool in the centre of their niche, wearing a sleek black dress reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn. There was no fabric between their young necks, so the viewers could see that this was no hoax. A flurry of boys, entering adolescent awkwardness and clearly not old enough to be there, clustered and gaped at the women. One of them shouted out at them and asked if they had the same boyfriend. The woman on the left stopped the hushed debate to ask the boy if he thought he was man enough to satisfy both of them. Her sister scolded her and they fell back to arguing. Suddenly, the spat seemed to flare, but then fell into laughter. He then wished he could get to know them over coffee, or as life-long friends; asking personal questions from a distance like the hassling rabble would not bring him any
      understanding of the situation or of the people involved,” Julie continued. “Look, unless you genuinely try to see things from the other person’s point of view, you won’t get anywhere.”
      “But,” Carol objected, “none of the religious people I’ve met have ever tried to do that. And that includes my parents, who are very liberal for missionaries.”
      “Not that you seem to be trying all that hard yourself,” said Rafe.
      “It’s different,” Carol went on. “By definition, if you believe in a religion, you have to discount other points of view. I at least examine them objectively.”
      I somehow doubted that, but still felt too uncomfortable to say anything.
      “I don’t mean that you have to believe what the other person is saying.” Julie had pivoted entirely at this point. “I’m just saying that you have to respect that the other person has reasons for believing what they do. I mean, you two arguing on the couch is maybe a step forward in dialogue, or whatever, but it doesn’t mean anything if you’re simply trying to convince the other person of your point of view.”
      Both Rafe and Carol began to glower, but Joe cut in, saying, “What’s really happening is that they both want to screw each other, but they can’t because Rafe’s Christian and Carol isn’t, so they’re trying to convert each other. Really, it’s their unresolved sexual attraction that’s causing all the arguments.”
      Julie raised her eyebrows at me and started to laugh, but then she noticed how embarrassed Rafe and Carol seemed, like Joe’s comment
      had exposed something private. The middle-aged woman watching vocalized her shock at his public display, saying how terrible it is to show yourself in such a way. The dreamer watched as the man crawled about his living quarters on all fours. His knees, according to the sign and visual testament, bent backwards. The middle-aged woman said that he should be employed in something useful and out of sight—perhaps as a beast of burden on a farm in the country, where none could see him. Horse-Man was trying to ignore her, but his head was consistently drawn in her direction when she hectored. Eventually, he surrendered and sat in a modified lotus position on the floor. It made his limbs less shocking, but
      it still doesn’t obscure what they really are,” Carol said, though less passionately than before Joe’s comment. “Religions just fulfill some psychological desire.”
      Julie, now frustrated with the argument, had returned to watching TV.
      Joe said, “With so many people believing in religion, there has to be something behind it, yeah, but I agree it isn’t necessarily logical.”
      “Once again, logic isn’t everything,” Rafe argued. “There’s also—”
      I was about to leave the room to go to the kitchen and make a sandwich or something, but Julie spun around and shut the argument up for good.
      “Just talk about something else, OK? You’re clearly not going anywhere and there’s no point getting everyone upset over this. You know each other well enough to know that you aren’t the stereotypes that you’re talking about. Rafe is perfectly intelligent and isn’t anti-Semitic, Carol, you know that, and Carol’s not immoral and, I don’t know, an abortionist or something. So, if you’re done taking this out on the rest of us, let’s talk about something else.”
      Carol looked like she was still willing to argue, but Rafe said, “Yeah, alright.” With some reluctance, Carol mumbled, “I’m sorry, Julie.”
      “You’re a Christian, Julie. Do you think all Muslims go to hell?” Joe asked, and all four of us laughed
      shakily as she lay on her bed. The sign called her Snake-Woman, but he thought it was a misnomer. She lacked any bones beneath her ribcage, and so the rest of her lay draped like animal skins. Other than her toned arms and thick neck, she lacked any muscle-tone at all. They were alone together in this room, and she spoke to him between her wheezing giggles.
      “Don’t feel sorry for me.”
      “I—” he said, and didn’t know whether he wanted to say ‘don’t’ or ‘can’t help it.’
      “I am happy with my life.”
      “I can’t see how you could be.”
      “You don’t have to.”

The God of the Physicians (A Glosa)

like one of those slow diseases
of the joint or the bone
that doctors diagnose in terms you recognize
as bigger words for dying.
“How It Will Happen,” Bronwen Wallace

I was reading a book on modernity,
and it told me that God wasn’t just dead;
He was justifiably executed by philosophy.
He’d been buried next to Santa Claus’ cenotaph
and the Easter bunny’s empty grave.
As a transcendental notion He eases
the Oedipal husk of childhood grudges
but in a healthy society religion haunts
old men’s minds; it warps and seizes
like one of those slow diseases.

I had to ask myself whether the author
of that book, who’s long exhaled his last,
realized that Descartes’ radical doubt
fell short of the mountainous monks who floated
beneath the frenzy of their ego-less thoughts.
Easy enough to say that author died alone,
joining no ancestral procession, but the geneticist
measures his spectres in levels of carbon
monoxide hallucination and the neural drone
of the joint or the bone.

Long dead is the mysterious world;
now answers tame as easily as early dogs.
Neurologists preach an epileptic Muhammad,
meditate on posterior superior parietal lobes,
and convert to transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Now Jesus Christ will anaesthetize
Lazarus with the suppressed proletariat,
and Donne’s holy agues are simply common
colds and pneumonia and I realize
that doctors diagnose in terms you recognize.

The homilies are now irrational
numbers, higher powers are exponents,
and thinkers on the problem of evil
suggest democracy and capitalism as cures.
Unsolved mysteries aren’t numinous
but symptoms of simply not trying,
and instead of nirvana or rapture
the modernists propose lack of brain
function, expiry, or flat-lining
as bigger words for dying.

Dawkins Moment I

On page 155, Dawkins writes: "I am not advocating some sort of narrowly scientistic way of thinking."

But, Dawkins, you are. You really, really are.

Go to Dawkins Directory

Disputing Dawkins III

I have previously argued that there is no reason to believe that we can measure the probability of God's existence. Let's ignore that for the time being; let's pretend that we can.

Dawkins suggests that, if we measure God's probability of existence on a spectrum, entering assorted data into the equation, then we will find that God's existence is extremely improbable.

I disagree entirely, and will in this post argue, even positing that measuring God's existence is possible, against Dawkins'


Argument for the Improbability of God's Existence.


Again, I feel manacled by the fact that I don't have a copy of the book to use. Maybe I'll download one. So I'm going by memory and by the (poorish) notes I took while reading. Apologies.

By page 14o of the chapter "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God," I'm quite willing to concede that biodiversity and life's existence do not logically require God's existence, granted a universe for them to exist in. I wasn't ever an ardent creationist anyway. Yet explanations for the origin of the world's phenomenon does not demonstrate that God's existence is improbable; it only demonstrates that creationism isn't necessarily true. This is a hugely important distinction.

After this, Dawkins seems to ask for an explanation for God's existence; this is usually known as the 'who made God?' question. Now, my natural inclination is to write this off as nonsense--no one made God. Sure, I don't understand how this could be. I don't expect to understand everything. I realize that this will not fly for the voraciously curious Dawkins, who insists that all questions he cares to ask are answerable (and, oddly, all questions that he doesn't care to ask are nonsensical). However, I want to point out that we don't know how the universe came about, either. I don't mean to play God of the Gaps, here; it's my guess that there will always be an infinite regress on determining the origins of the universe, but that's not the point. My point is that just as we may figure out how the universe could come into existence, someone may eventually come up with a brilliant and convincing account of how God has always existed. In other words, if I can't say, "Well, science doesn't have an answer for it," then Dawkins can't say, "Well, theology doesn't have an answer for it." I suppose we'll just have to wait for what the future comes up with (or doesn't). (And on another aside, I doubt Dawkins would be convinced with the answer, and not just because he's biased against it; the answer would likely be rationalist and not empiricist, and so he'd never be willing to accept.)

Then Dawkins addresses "other ways of knowing besides the scientific" (p 154). His answer seems to be that personal experience could be illusory, and that revelation would be measurable, and since we've never measured a revelation before, it can't have happened. Now, that personal experience could be illusory is certainly true; the major problem with Dawkins using this line of argument is that he offers no way of determining which experiences are illusory. Why are religious experiences hallucinations--or products of human bias and expectation--while scientific observations are accurate? The answer is pretty simple--that wouldn't help his argument at all. (And if you're of the scientific bent, you'll likely try to tell me otherwise. Go read Haraway. Go talk to some native elders. At the very least, read this story.) Further, I'm not sure why he insists that revelation ought to be measurable. Well, I think I know why; it's just wrong.

Think of it this way. Say God exists, a God who can communicate with humans. This God, as we believe it, operates beyond the known laws of the universe. If God is capable of this, surely God is capable of hiding the means of communication from our observation until it arrives in the human's minds. Why would God do this? Well, I'm not altogether worried about such a question--why anybody does anything isn't something I can know--but, for the sake of argument, I'd guess it might be so that we have the ability to choose whether to believe or not. That's a fairly common line of reasoning, so I don't think I need to outline it here. The point is that if God exists, and beyond humanly-knowable physics, there's no reason that God's communication with us need be measurable.

Dawkins also posits that a God that can communicate with all humans simultaneously, and answer all of their prayers, that God must be extraordinarily complicated. Well, perhaps. But perhaps not. C. S. Lewis anticipates this in Mere Christianity, and as Dawkins has indicated that he's read Lewis' book, it's a bit disappointing that Dawkins bothers to mention this. He does, however, and so I will say what C. S. Lewis said. That is, God is eternal, meaning not that he exists for all time, but that he exists outside of time. It's a bit of a brain-breaker if you're not familiar with this sort of thinking, but bear with me. Imagine the timeline as a line on a piece of paper, and along this line all things from the beginning to the end occur. You can jot down samples along the line if you care to. Now, you can draw on it the portion when you have existed and you can pinpoint the present along the line. As time progresses, the present slides along that line. It goes on inexorably, and doesn't go backwards. Theory of relativity does some interesting things with this sort of demonstration. I don't know much about this, but you could research it if you cared to. Theology also does some interesting things, and that's what I'm talking about here. See, God does not move along the line in some order, as the present does. God doesn't even hop along from one point to another like a time-traveler would. Instead, God exists out of the line. From this point, He can gaze upon any part of the timeline at will, in any order He wills. To say that God must communicate with all praying people simultaneously is silly. He only has to communicate with one at a 'time'. God experiences time differently.

But even if this were not the case, something which produces complicated things does not necessitate that that thing is itself complicated. Dawkins, in fact, provides an excellent example. The process of Darwinian evolution is, in its fundamentals, very simple, and yet it has produced very complicated things.

And then Dawkins claims to have proved that God is monstrously improbable. On pages 157-158, he generates a list that summarizes his 'arguments' and comes to the 'conclusion' he wants. I'll paraphrase the items here:

1) Humanity's greatest intellectual challenge is to exlpain complexity in the world.
2) Natural temptation is to posit 'design' as the answer.
3) The natural temptation is fallacious, as we get to the "Who designed the designer" question; therefore, "design is not a sufficient answer to the question is #1; we need what Dawkins calls a crane, which builds gradually from simplicity to complexity.
4) Most ingenious and powerful crane created so far is Darwinian evolution; design is an illusion; evolution is cummulative.
5) There is not yet an equivalent crane for physics; could be mulitverses, a Darwin-like theory; heavier demands, but anthropic principle allows for more luck then our intuition is comfortable with.
6) We should not give up hope for a crane in physics; current weak cranes are self-evidently better than the "self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer."

And then he says, "If the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion--the God Hypothesis--is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist. This is the main conclusion of the book so far."

Which is utterly preposterous.

He does not provide ANY ANSWER WHATSOEVER to the following question: Why must the first cause be simple? Phrased differently, why must a complex God be the result of a cummulative process?

Now, it doesn't take a person trained in logic to see that his list of premises isn't an argument, because each step does not build off of the previous one. Namely, #4 goes against his conclusion, and then #5 flatly denies #4. There's no proof or argument, but simple assertion. And then all he does is demonstrate that God's existence is not necessary to explain the existence of the world. The closest he comes to demonstrating that God is unlikely is to ask the "Who made God?" question, which fundamentally presupposes a rational materialist framework, and if you're willing to believe in God, you might as well go whole-hog and say God exists outside of that framework. The problem is, Dawkins is unwilling to give up his rational materialism even in limited contexts, or to acknowledge that a rational person could.

Now, there are other big problems with his argument that sit in his fundamental presuppositions: that humans can grasp the universe using logic alone; that humans can grasp the universe at all; that humans can use logic effectively; that the universe follows logical laws; that rationality is the best measure. These problems are laced into the one above, as you can see, so it's harder for me to tease this argument out of these. However, let's just simplify for a second and see where I've come so far.

If we can measure God's existence along a spectrum of probability, I'm willing to concede that the complexity of the universe is not going to push the probability any closer to 100%. That being said, the "Who made God?" question isn't going to push it any closer to 0%, either. And that's where Dawkins leaves us--right where we started. He most certainly doesn't get us within sight of "almost certainly does not exist."
As he argues that a rational person ought not believe in God because of this improbability, and that we therefore must only deal with religion in its this-world effects, and that, since religion's real-world effects are (according to him), negative, we must do away with religion. If God's existence is not improbable, however, then the rest of the argument falls apart.

Of course, I disagree even further back; I don't think we can even measure God's probability. But I will always try to argue this way, and attack each part as individually as possible. That is always the best way to argue.

As a note, I'd like to say I'm less satisfied with the arguments on the post here. While I'm sure all of it's true, some of it feels like a cop-out to me. Specifically, my refutation of the "Who made God?" question feels a little weak. This being said, I'm absolutely certain that that question is nonsensical. I just don't feel I argued it well. My apologies for that.

Go to the Dawkins Directory