21st-century Christian Philosopher

Having written a couple of posts (here and here) now about unreconciled, or disparate, thinking, I find my thoughts following my White Rabbit down this path.

It occurred to me that Paul deals with this through much of his first letter to the Corinthians. In the Greeks, Paul is dealing with a culture that loves to argue. The Greeks love debate, but their factiousness nonetheless pervades their culture to the point of bickering and quarrelling. And Paul takes on both.

The Greeks of Corinth were following after their tradition. Men of their society, discussed and debated the good and the bad about various statements philosophers made about the “Good” or the value of life. As a result one tended to find oneself trusting one thinker more than another. Whoever seemed to use the words that you agree with, whoever seemed to paint a more compelling picture of life and purpose and value, this is the teacher you take after.

You followed the teaching that made sense to you. You argued against ideas from other camps that clashed with the way your school saw the world.

Some Corinthians carried this pattern over. Paul says this:

(I Cor 1) ¹¹For I have been informed…that there are quarrels among you. ¹²Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, “I am of Paul,” and “I of Apollos,” and “I of Cephas,” and “I of Christ.”

Thus they tried to fit the new life fit into the old pattern, and they wound up arguing one Christian evangelist against the other. They identified with a single preacher, or Jesus himself—apart from Paul or Peter. To some extent, they shut out what other preachers were saying. As if what they were saying were competing ways of understanding the faith. Paul and Apollos use different words or different imagery or even have different fundamental assumptions about the faith. How can we agree about fundamental assumptions. Such a stalemate leaves one only able to state fundamental differences: “You follow Paul, but we follow Apollos.”

But Paul makes it clear that it is not about who argues best. He cites that the Lord will set aside “the cleverness of the clever.” (I Cor 1:19) What stands among us is a real fact, the value in this is not in the phrasing or eloquence of the speaker. Thus any apparent conflict in the words of one evangelist against another is more like noise. The fundamental reality does not depend on words.

We are baptized (immersed) into the Spirit (breath) of God, we are not shown a treatise and argued into the Kingdom. The language is palpable not theoretical. In fact what Paul kind of gets at by taking the whole “foolishness of God” tack, is perhaps that words fail us all. Perhaps because God does not exist to be described, but met and embraced. We should not count words as key for they accepted this new metaphor for their life not by “eloquent words” but by the power of the Spirit, so says Paul.

Paul also evinces an attitude that clever words can prove anything, thus severing the connection completely. Words cannot fully capture God, and eloquent words can convince men of many things, not just a single one. (Witness the disparity of the Greeks in their own tradition.) This is why Paul said that had be used eloquent words, the gospel would have been no more compelling than any number of things that men had become convinced of.

Paul also talks about how the traditional wisdom of both the Jews and the Greeks have failed them. Paul writes, “Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom.” But he makes it clear that the cross of Christ is a stumbling block to either system of collective knowledge to understanding God. Thus, unmoored from the context through which you see the world, how do you argue the fitness or failure of anything?

Paul seems to want us to instruct the rest of our thought patterns by this key difference.

James Fletcher Baxter makes a comment in relation to my post No Value.

James makes some good points. He states them more bluntly than I fear that my method allows me. But he voices a number of my suspicions. And I find his deconstruction of “group” quite evocative of Nietzsche.

James asks, “Have you ever seen a group—or is it a verbal convenience?” To which, I would reply,”Most likely a verbal convenience”. Indeed “group” is a sort of synthetic concept, where its “member” is described according to the mean behavior or trait which categorizes “the group”.

But it gets interesting trying to reconcile this here: were we without classes, the whole order of deductive logic flies out the window.

Some, who don’t know how I think, might see a jab at what James says there. But it is really indifferent. My statement presents the trade-off. Without dependable rules, we cannot reason that the world requires articles of long-standing human confidence to remain valid.

What is true is the confidence that we place in the idea of syllogisms. People have said that valid syllogistic forms present a true conclusion in all cases where the premises are true. But if there are no classes, then there are no true premises from which to form input into the syllogism. My analysis is only that one concept depends on the other, or refers to the other.

Thus, it does not matter what confidence we place in deductive forms, if it requires the premises to be stated in a template that clashes with empiricism, it simply clashes with empiricism. It leaves the possible resolution that perhaps empiricism and classes are both badly understood notions as well. We’ve just never tested their consistency to this extent.

Where do we read of syllogisms? Aristotle is the main source. So, apart from what some human has written one time or another, where should we get our confidence in this idea?

In the long-standing tradition of athiestic well-poisoning: Remember, Aristotle dreamt up the Prime Mover concept (wikipedia wrongly attributes this to Acquinas, so linking elsewhere avoids confusion), established that the Earth was definitely the center of the cosmos, or even argued that different masses fell at different rates. In fact the failure of the Church to budge Aristotle’s errors was an appeal to the authority of “The Philosopher”.

Thus what is often called a failure of the Church is arguably an overly-strong adherence to a secular authority, and never truly reconciled to whether “The Philosopher” would have stood a better chance than Job quizzed by God.

Where it seems it ran into trouble when it considered a extra-scriptural authority as in some way necessary to scriptural authority, or at least confused the two. “The Philosopher” is actually how scholastics referred to Aristotle (capital ‘T’ + capital ‘P’ ). One of my instructors in college, quite schooled in Medieval philosophy, once explained that the approach to knowledge of the Scholastics was threefold:

1. What does the Bible say?
2. What does The Philosopher say?
3. It cannot be known.

So to some degree, deductive logic is bound up with our confidence in Aristotle. We can see that authorities of the past invested great confidence in Aristotle. But its payoff has been of indeterminate value.

…more to come…

C. S. Bunyan writes about this post

I’m interested, though, in your parenthetical comment in the paragraph dealing with “magical thinking.” What do you mean by integrate better? Did I miss something? Is there somewhere else where you wrote about this idea?

Ray, let me explain: I broke the paragraph up on size alone without rereading it for flow. The “true” paragraph would merge the last two paragraphs. Thus, it would discuss the role of “magical thinking” in Marxism—if it has any parallel (which is not explored).

As to the comment: I think I integrate the theme of minds holding unreconciled notions into my thinking better than Harris does. However, I doubt I’ve discussed it in those terms before. I would put that down as an editorial comment. Harris may use the the concept, but such a thing is much more central to my thought.

That said, your question gives me an excellent opportunity to explain that idea. The rest of this post addresses the topic to all readers, and not specifically to you. (Thus you can disregard my NOTE below, unless that is the type of thing you might conclude.)

Harris uses the case of disjointed thinking in isolated cases. He dismisses that scientific progress before the 19th century has anything to do with religious values, whether or not a religious culture did it. Harris divides the wheat from the chaff: well, people can hold conflicting ideas in their head, he explains.

And though he doesn’t expressly use it there, we can read it in his summary assessment 0f applied Marxism, namely Stalin and Mao. Harris grants that they paid “lip service” to secularism and rationality, but their doctrine contained irrational ideas despite the value of strict (and one might say, militant) “rationalism”.

Still, he spends most of the book examining faith as a sort of rigid gullibility and “certainty”. Then he implicates if for a “swallow-anything” “magical thinking” that caused the Spaniards to see Moors flying about on brooms. So, he charges it as well for witch hysteria and fanciful flights of gullible superstition. These two are linked mainly because both are found in the Medieval mind. (Thus a co-occurance implies causal connection.)

But, the Stalinist who advocates “rationalism” holds two things in his head: both an irrational idea and a bias against that which sounds irrational. These have nothing to do with each other, per Harris, they are just coincidences. But Harris aborts the notion that Church only paid lip service to “brotherly love” because there were religious people with non-scriptural ideas doing horrible things, regardless of how out of step these things were with a reasonable view of scripture.

Thus viewing the contents of the mind from outside, Harris don’t even broach the subject of a good or bad reason to attribute connections to coinciding thoughts. Religion is enough like “magical thinking” for Harris to place the atrocities of the Church age at its doorstep.

This resembles another disjointedness that skeptics see. Michael Martin refutes that atheism conflicts with morality. His proof is that there are atheists who believe in acting morally. However, in another essay, he argues that Christianity and Science are at odds from each other, despite the occurrence of Christians with degrees in Science.

This follows along similar lines. The Christian scientist is an concoction, the moral atheist is rational because atheist have rational reasons for accepting what they accept.

Thus where the skeptical mind is mixed with what becomes irrational, the combination is not significant. Otherwise it is presumed to be rational. Where the Christian mind is mixed with the rational, it is a hodgepodge of rationalized behavior, otherwise it is preseumed irrational.

On the other hand, speaking of rationalists in general, they cite a fallacy whenever you try to qualify whether something is or isn’t consistent with the Christian faith. Christians are what they do. They will tell you that you are committing the “No True Scotsman fallacy”. This has become a popular argument. They will throw it at you, whenever you argue that there is something core to Christianity, and “Christian” becomes a word to describe everyone who called themselves Christian.

On the other hand, I have observed time and time again, atheists arguing that no truly rational person would accept mass slaughter, because mass slaughter is not rational.

I surmise that this is an equivocation. Mass slaughter is not rational because we do not accept it. Any number of parties find a reason, in their own worldview, to reject that such slaughter has a rational argument. Of course, these days, we just shout people down, call them NAZIs, if someone were to even consider whether it can be rational or not. But regardless if it is in place because of social taboos or whatever, we pay a price to call it rational.

However, rational also has another sense, and that is “strictly rational”. Many anti-theists essentially argue that if you do not restrict yourself to strictly rational patterns of argument, then you have a potential for being irrational.

This pattern occurs in anti-theistic arguments. If your every thought is not strictly rational, they regard that you have unmoored yourself from the ground of rational thought. There are no limitations on your thought; they have no idea how far the disease has spread. But whereas when I qualified mass slaughter as irrational, it did not depend on any one view. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindi and atheists would all reject genocide.

Thus when we say that pogroms are not rational, our rationalism encompasses not just contents of view but how far outside the aggregate curve it is. On the other hand, “strictly rational” requires us to hold the same taboo against falling off the edge of rationality that our opponent holds.

I note a few thing about the argument above. First, it doesn’t disappear into supernatural mists. It’s at least partly original. So, should I succeed in my argument, there can be little doubt that I have a capacity to be rational. I reason linearly from premise to conclusion. But, many of my past opponents view me as “irrational” because when everything is sorted out, I may hold some irrational beliefs.

Despite that none of this is supernatural in the least, the argument that I usually get is my opponent’s certainty that having rejected God, they must be more rational than I am. Thus the typical atheist asserts the coherency of his or her thoughts, where skepticism about mental dualities would cause us all to search our minds and perhaps pray “Search me, O Reason, and see if there are any ways in me which displease you”.

But there is another piece to all this. That is that mass slaughter and even genocide cannot be ruled out as rational if the free-thought nugget I found at 2think.org makes as much sense as the atheist there thinks it does:

The author Matt Berry states, “[The search for] Truth does not begin with an answer on behalf of which all questions must constantly rearrange themselves. The [search for] Truth begins with fearless questions.” This all seems so basic and self-evident, but large segments of the population haven’t been able to (or don’t want to) grasp this fundamental Truth. http://2think.org/2think.shtml#berry

Thus the search for truth does not center around the irrationality of mass murder. It must rearrange itself. Couldn’t the irrationality of mass murder principle change as well? Couldn’t “When is genocide rational?” be seen as a “fearless question”? If a “all questions must constantly rearrange themselves,” can we foresee no case where genocide might be rational? Are we even being strictly rational to rule out genocide based on a consensus of people who are largely irrational on the basis of their “God beliefs”.

NOTE: I am in no way implying that Berry (and his follower(?)) at 2think.org are advocating genocide or mass slaughter. I in no way intend that the best reading of their words. I’m just applying the principle which my philosophy embodies much, much more than many “free thinkers”, that an emotional attraction to the authority or rationality is no substitute for making a rational argument, when you are making it. And I am trying to complete the picture of equivocation.

By cutting both ways, I make the equivocation clear. The strict rationalists want no general consensus on what is rational when they argue that they have a rational advantage. But they invoke a general consensus on rationality to argue whether or not the general consensus of rational thought allows for pogroms. Thus were “No True Scotsman” an actual fallacy, they would have committed it.

But I think that this is telling as well: The “No True Scotsman” fallacy

What is the “No True Scotsman ‘fallacy’”? Well, it is best explained in an interchange:

Uncle Angus: Ye’ puttin’ sugar in yer porridge, laddie? We Scotsman dunna put sugar in rrr porridge!

Little Dylan: Mr. McKellen puts sugar in his porridge, uncle.

Uncle Angus: Well, no true Scotsman’s puts sugar in his porridge!

So there you go. If you were afraid that logic had no formal answer to a curmudgeon with stubborn personal definitions, you need fear no longer. We’ve got a fallacy for you. If anybody ever hosts a debate about what Scotsmen put on their porridge, you’re equipped with this one.

But, here is another case in point. I believe that I have made a very good case that what was said was the classical equivocation. (But, then rationalists can not equivocate, because equivocation is not rational, right?) But it is also obvious that if “No True Scotsman” were a fallacy, they definitely cross the line. Thus it has long been my finding that a lack of analysis created the Scotsman “fallacy”.

But just search on line and see how many atheists reproduce lack of understanding of classic Logic. Here is one case in point: at The Atheist Net, the author of this entry links to equivocation, but then it says its an ad hoc fallacy as well. But not even our difficult friend attributes the eating of Haggis to becoming a Scotsman. There for there is no “after-the-fact explanation which doesn’t apply to other situations” [1]; there is no after-the-fact explanation at all, there is no fact (event) to be after, it is a definitional division which is not precisely stipulated.

However, I just have to add that by the crusty Scotsman qualifying it to “true Scotsman” it actually mitigates any kind of “fallacy” at all. Which is why I make fun of a fallacy having been created around this. Uncle Angus probably lacks a way to think about the terms in elaboration. He is not addressing biological inheritance at all. He even recognizes the term “Scotsman” as a separate physical fact. In fact, he probably wants to say something more about culture and toughing it out as characteristic to Scottish values. So unless you fear that you are going to have to debate as reflexive thinker as you might meet around the family breakfast table, there really is no reason to create this “fallacy”.

This is where the NTS expression runs afoul of strict rationalism, the strict rationalists want him only to confine himself to the textbook or clinical meaning of Scotsman. It’s not enough to recognize a role for heritage, you must confine yourself to that definition. The rationalists must be able to check your math. (Harris asserts no less himself.)

This is were the acid test falls down. The acid test is based on whether a “free thinker” can “search [you] … and find anyways in [you] that are ‘unclean’”. And by the mere presence of uncleanliness, you shall be judged whole. In fact, in any number of conversations that I have had on the topic, my faith can immediately become the topic if I try to point out any overstatement, whether or not I did anything more to bring it into view than admit that I am a fundamentalist Christian.

Meanwhile, I am quite willing that Harris is capable thinker on this point or that one. His capability of thought is not a package to be judged. Why? Because I accept at base that people will have blind-spots (heck, I think I can point to a scripture verse about that ) and that people have thoughts that they have never integrated into the whole.

It might have something to do with “spiritual blindness”. It might have something to do with a lack of a defining stress. Evolutionarily, if you reach an impasse where you need two stomaches, you either have two stomachs (or close enough) or you don’t. Until that time a lack of a selecting forces allowed various stomach configurations to exist. Thus it could be that we allow a jungle up in our heads until reality forces us one way or the other. We trim back the jungle according to expectations made on us by society as our attempt to gather acceptance or autonomy. What’s up there in our brains that has not been tested? Anything that hasn’t needed to take a form as of yet.

It might be some fusion of both. If the “old nature” is truly the “old nature” then any way that fleshly brain acts can clearly be called the “natural state” of man, if God has something to add to that, then we might expect a difference in distribution rather than a difference in kind.

It’s interesting. I hold both of these views. Both at once. I can hold them separately and I can integrate them. If I read right, Harris wants me to view them as a type of schizophrenic adaptation to my unintegrated wish-fulfillment fantasy, which by-the-way fails to describe my path at all. Me, I think it’s neat.

In my last post, I wrote about how the sheer number of religious people would almost guarantee that they will make up a significant portion of other groups. Including those involved in the bloodshed of others. Even a high statistical correlation between religion and war is not necessarily conclusive if the religious group is abundant enough.

Even Harris, in Chapter 3, notes that almost all technological achievements were contributed by a participant in a religious culture prior to the nineteenth century. There just weren’t the secular atheists to do it. But on the subject of wars, Harris seems to ignore this relationship.

Which is why it is the central weakness of Harris’ argument to ignore or shrug off Marxism–in all its forms. First, atheists, as a group, have fought few wars. We covered this above: they just have not been around in that big of numbers for that long of time. But the Marxist revolutions and purges have been atheist and secular. Thus where atheism/secularism has clustered it has resulted in wars. They are ultimately for peace, but they are wars no less.

Now I have heard the secularists’ answer to this: Marxism, they answer, is a religion. Indeed, even Harris relies on this type of argument: “although [Stalin and Mao] paid lip service to a rationality, communism was little more than a political religion”. Harris further says: “Even though their beliefs did not reach beyond this world, they were both cultic and irrational.” [page 79]

Thus we have to consider that on Flavin, when any blue faction dominates a side, they are actually red. So the reds are still at the base of the problem, because it is them and the “so-called” blues which make up the warring faction on Flavin.

Or some anti-theists consider that “ideologies” can be as destructive as religions. But in that case, this “religion” shows few of the dynamics that Harris’ describes.

There are two key dynamics that Harris uses to illustrate the effects of religion: the Afterlife and the Sacred Book. Harris argues that the idea of the afterlife helps one give up life more easily than is rational. The Sacred Book is proof that you have it right and everybody else has it wrong. It becomes your source of scorn for others who will not embrace your standard. And thus your standard of judgement, and thus your rationale for carrying out your judgment.

Marxism has no afterlife. So it chips at the correlation that Harris sees between a view that there is someplace else to go and our willingness to part with our lives here. The ethic of Marxism is even hostile to the idea that one should believe in an afterlife. Such a belief lends credence to the idea of not taking action today. As if you could experience any other type of justice except what you made this very day.

Assuming that the Marxists are as big of empiricists as they might claim, armed conflict hadn’t changed. Some people on each side were going to die. Marx didn’t preach that the “rational” people should leverage their adherence to Science to build superior killing machines so that war would be revolutionized for the destruction of the luddites. He advocated taking up the struggle now.

The whole idea that anything could be put off was just not Marxian. You are only going to be anywhere for ~50 years. After that, it would be just as if you never lived.

Another dynamic that Harris pins to religion is “magical thinking”. By this device, Harris holds religion responsible for what religious people have done based on beliefs that had little to do with the religion. And although Harris elsewhere explains that a human mind can hold vastly disparate opinions (a concept which I think I integrate better than Harris does), religion is the culprit, because well, they were religious.

Again, Marxism does not contain what is easily identifiable (not just arguably so, but objectively so) as “magical thinking”. In fact very, very little of what Harris says in The Nature of Belief implicates Marxism in any form, although he assures you that red-type-thinking is the culprit in two paragraphs at the end. Thanks, Sam.

When I began, my blog entries on the topic (here and here), I had no interest in reading Sam Harris’ book. I had a stack of books I wanted to read, and his was not one of them.

I wrote the earlier posts to critique the speech I saw on CSPAN2. But the more my entries assumed the theme “Just What is He Saying?” the more I realized that I did not avail myself of a better understanding.

So I read his book. And it surprised me a bit.

For example, Harris is not a materialist, but a mystic. “Mysticism,” says Harris, “is a rational enterprise. Religion is not.” in his Chapter entitled Experiments in Consciousness [pg 221]. And a couple of places Harris repudiates materialism with skepticism, very similar to how I might proceed.

But the main point of his book is not how better mysticism is than religion, he wants us to abandon religion. And one of the tools he uses in this book has been used before.

What marks Harris’ argument as ineffective to me is that while he elsewhere complains about how widespread religion is, he implicates it for taking a role in a lot of wars. But it is hard to see how that could not be.

There are a lot of us about. Suppose I told you that 90% of the the planet Flavin was crimson red and another 10% were sky blue. Then suppose I told you that the reds could be found in a vast majority of battles on that planet.

Well, battles don’t fight themselves. You need combatants. Imagine a grabbag of people that a god-like hand reaches into to pull out random warriors for each side. You are going to have a predominantly red side in most cases. You only need to compute the binomial distribution in order to see that a majority blue side is very hard to come up with for any faction of a significant size.

Now on Earth, battles aren’t fought as meaninglessly as on Flavin. Difference of opinion plays a role. The clash between ideas, ideologies, peoples and cultures plays a role in creating wars on Earth. The sample is not drawn at random, but comes out of the mix. People who picture themselves as in the same boat as certain others will band with them. People who prefer one cause to antother will side one way as opposed to the other.

Thus, a ground of reality, a basic belief system, helps sort out who’s on whose “side”. More often than not, it allows those people to at least believe that they are speaking on the same terms.

Thus you still have mostly “red” people fighting on either side, but they are fighting for reasons. The statistical structure is the same. But it is definitely true that the language used to discuss the war on either side will contain more elements of the mutual ground of belief.

Now this is just a nitpick, until I add a few more points….