Logic and Relativism

But one would have to believe in the objective standards of sound reasons and effective inquiry – i.e. “logic” – to advance such an argument in the first place. But the only way one can believe in such a standard is to also be convinced of its value. Which is to say, logic as a cognitive standard can only be rationally judged to be of any value if one is rationally satisfied that one ought to reason in such a way. But any claim of “ought” is ultimately an ethical claim. Any claim that one “ought” to reason logically is a claim about the Right thing to do, the Good form of reasoning, the Valuable method of inquiry.

Lest there be any lingering doubt, the above argument does indeed place various ethical propositions at the very foundation of even the possibility of reasoned inquiry. Before there can be science, before there can be logic, before there can be any concern for truth at all, there must first be an accepted axiom that such things are good. So any attempt to quarantine relativism to “merely” an ethical claim is doomed to have that quarantine shattered by the rational necessity of an ethical commitment to the truth. Gary Herstein

Meaningful Work

This article really struck a cord with me.

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.

Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.Matthew B. Crawford

Emotion and Rationality

Here is a quote in regards to an error in the economic understanding of rationality.

The word "emotional" has overtones of irrationality, but actually emotion is at once a form of telescoped thinking (it is not irrational to step around an open manhole "instinctively" without first analyzing the costs and benefits of falling into it) and a prompt to action that often, as in the case of investment under uncertainty, cannot be based on complete or even good information and is therefore unavoidably a shot in the dark. We could not survive if we were afraid to act in the face of uncertainty. Richard A. Posner

Equality, Sanctity of Life, and Atheism

To understand Singer, it's helpful to contrast him with "New Atheists" like Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. The New Atheists say we can get rid of God but preserve morality. They insist that no one needs God in order to be good; atheists can act no less virtuously than Christians. (And indeed, some atheists do put Christians to shame.) Even while repudiating the Christian God, Dawkins has publicly called himself a "cultural Christian."

But this position creates a problem outlined more than a century ago by the atheist philosopher Nietzsche. The death of God, Nietzsche argued, means that all the Christian values that have shaped the West rest on a mythical foundation. One may, out of habit, continue to live according to these values for a while. Over time, however, the values will decay, and if they are not replaced by new values, man will truly have to face the prospect of nihilism, what Nietzsche termed "the abyss."

Nietzsche's argument is illustrated in considering two of the central principles of Western civilization: "All men are created equal" and "Human life is precious." Nietzsche attributes both ideas to Christianity. It is because we are created equal and in the image of God that our lives have moral worth and that we share the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nietzsche's warning was that none of these values make sense without the background moral framework against which they were formulated. A post-Christian West, he argued, must go back to the ethical drawing board and reconsider its most cherished values, which include its traditional belief in the equal dignity of every human life.

What they haven't considered, however, is whether Singer, virtually alone among their numbers, is uncompromisingly working out the implications of living in a truly secular society, one completely purged of Christian and transcendental foundations.

Singer resolutely takes up a Nietzschean call for a "transvaluation of values," with a full awareness of the radical implications. DINESH D'SOUZA

"pointers to God"

Collins says belief is ultimately a matter of faith—that God's existence can't, in the end, be proved by science. And yet he sees plenty of "pointers to God," natural phenomena that imply the existence of a biblical God. Here are Collins's "pointers":

• There is something instead of nothing.

• The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, which make simple and beautiful laws.

• The Big Bang: out of nothingness, the universe came into being. That cries out for explanation, since we have not observed nature to create itself . . . it causes us to postulate a creator, and the creator must be outside of time or you haven't solved the problem.

• The precise tuning of the physical constants in the universe. If gravity was a little weaker, things would all start flying a part. You can see a creator in these constants. Francis Collins
  

  
  

Divine Freedom

Religion involves the whole person

Here is a quote for my anonymous buddy to freak out on in the comments section.

But religion, once the glow of conversion [to atheism] had worn off, was not a matter of argument alone. It involves the whole person. Therefore I was drawn, over and over again, to the disconcerting recognition that so very many of the people I had most admired and loved, either in life or in books, had been believers. Reading Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi, and following it up with Gandhi’s own autobiography, The Story of My Experiments With Truth, I found it impossible not to realise that all life, all being, derives from God, as Gandhi gave his life to demonstrate. Of course, there are arguments that might make you doubt the love of God. But a life like Gandhi’s, which was focused on God so deeply, reminded me of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a bit like trying to assert that music is an aberration, and that although Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a musical sense. Attractive and amusing as David Hume was, did he confront the complexities of human existence as deeply as his contemporary Samuel Johnson, and did I really find him as interesting? A N Wilson

Gianna Jessen

Two Reasons Not to Give Up

With the constant chattering about gay, "rights" I think it's important to remind ourselves what we are fighting for. Here are two reasons not to give up on the fight against same-sex marriage

absence of the personal God

A quote...

For related reasons, Europeans seem also to be living in a postreligious fantasy. Very few go to church or think of themselves as members of a church. Hostile to the various forms of repression caused by their nations’ religious past, Europeans generally see religion as little more than a source of injustice and repression, a multifaceted affront to the person and his rights. Just a few decades ago, European intellectuals prided themselves on being full of existentialist anxiety in the absence of God—but the contemporary European claims to be too enlightened to be moved, as a person, toward any kind of illusory transcendence. He refuses either to believe in God or to be haunted by His absence. But the longings that make a person more than a merely biological being remain just beneath the surface. The person remains miserably disoriented in the perceived absence of the personal God. Peter Augustine Lawler

Some thought for Christians

Some thought for Christians.

If you are not able to see why homosexuality is wrong, it does not necessarily follow that, because of this, homosexuality is therefore not a sin. It reminds me of the scientists who believed that, because they could not see anything in breast milk that was essentially different from baby formula, that therefore it was equal. Mothers in third world countries were given formula and encouraged to stop breastfeeding. When the formula ran out mothers were not able to feed their babies due to their breast milk drying up. Formula fed babies were more likely to die from diarrhea because they were not protected by the antibodies that is in mother's breast milk. Some studies have even shown that babies who have been formula fed have a higher incidence of lower IQ's. All these problems and more have occurred because these scientist's were not able to see all of the unintended consequences. There has to be the realization that reality is extremely complex, and there are a lot of things that we just don't know that we don't know.

Our society is very good at science, but this strength comes with the weakness and illusion that we know more than we really do. Science does not have anything to say about morality. Science tells us about the physical world, but it has nothing to tell us about what we ought to do. Philosophy alone does not have access to the data to gain the objective perspective on who we really are and what our end is. As Christians we have been given the data that gives the answers to know who we are and what we ought to do morally. Our data is Divine Revelation. The fact that evil acts sometimes looks like good is more reason to hold firm to the faith that was given to us by Christ.

Christians who are faithful to Divine revelation are going to be marginalized by secularists and tagged as a "hate group". It's already happening. And it's not because we "hate" those with same sex attraction but because we will not agree that homosexual acts lead society to good ends. We need to trust Christ and the deposit of faith that He gave us.

Roman Catholic Political Philosophy

This is a quote from a book review on James V. Schall's book Roman Catholic Political Philosophy.

The distinction between political and religious concerns, though important to recognize, is not as great as is supposed by many--especially by modern secularists, who tend to compartmentalize religion when they think of it at all. For one thing, every person, no matter how oriented toward revelation, must live in the world, and cannot wholly escape political matters or the concerns of the social sciences. Moreover, because politics does not represent humankind's ultimate end, good political philosophy must point beyond itself, and the good state must point beyond itself. A point central to Schall, and in his view a key mark of Roman Catholic political philosophy, is this recognition that "the ultimate destiny of each human being, the political animal, is not located in politics" (p. 158). Following Eric Voegelin, Schall recognizes the rise of ideology, and then the exhaustion of ideology, as symptoms of modern society's failure to recognize this basic reality. In closing itself to revelation and rejecting metaphysics, politics becomes its own monstrous metaphysics. Paralleling the phenomenon of political modernity is modern philosophy's hubristic tendency to identify the wholeness of reality with what is knowable through philosophy's methods. We neglect the vital role of revelation at our peril. (A book review by William F. Byrne)

Suffering

We look in vain for an emotionally satisfying answer to suffering because suffering is inherently a matter of being separated from the good. Complaining that there is not a “satisfying” answer to suffering is like complaining that water is wet.

Suffering is a consequence of Adam and Eve disobeying God. Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This knowledge is not the bookish type of knowledge. It's the experiential type of knowing. Peter Kreeft said the following in regards to the word knowing, “The same word is used in Genesis 4 for sexual intercourse: Adam "knew" Eve and the result was not a book but a baby.”

Suffering is a result of experientially knowing what evil is. It is the experiencing of what it means to be separated from the source of all good. There had to be some type of consequence that results from our free choices for there to be any meaning behind our actions. The consequence was not just an experience of suffering but also a separation from grace. Due to original sin, human nature is a little bit off and weakened.

The experience of suffering really could have be worse. God's justice demands the consequence of suffering but there is also the mercy that we are not totally deprived of God's goodness. We are still able to know goodness and we still have the ability to be reconciled to God and His grace.

Suffering does say a lot about God. The Christian God is courageous; reckless even from the human point of view. When humans create a computer simulation of the world, we make it safe. There are reset buttons and little to no consequences.

The Christian God is not playing games with the world. There are real consequences and the stakes are high. Free will gives us the ability to love but it is not without a cost. With the ability to choose to love there is also the power to reject God and his love. We are living God's story. In this story there are real dangers with real suffering. God has allowed suffering but he has conquered suffering also. Jesus took on all the sins of humanity during His passion and as a result, all the eternal debt that justice requires. He is a God that chose to test himself through taking on human weakness. He tested himself to the point that he descended into hell. He saw the world from the view of our sin and human weakness, even to the point of a despairing atheist. He was able to say on the cross, ""My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Matt 27:46 Jesus had not given up trust or faith in himself but had taken on the weakest part of humanity. He was quoting Psalm 22 which does not end in despair, surrender, or failure. (Go Read Psalm 22 to find out the full scope of what Jesus was saying)


The Christian God is strong enough even to die and in so doing Jesus conquered suffering, sin, and death when he rose from the dead. We are part of God's story and in this story it does not always make sense to us. Being separated from God -due to original sin- we are blinded by our human weakness. We have to trust and follow Christ through His-story because, “God is his own interpreter, And he will make it plain.”

(Images from Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece)

In Defense of Dignity

A central concept used by Catholics in understanding bioethics is dignity. Here is some arguments against this and a response by Fr. James Martin.

Second, dignity is fungible. The Council [The President's Council on Bioethics] and [the] Vatican treat dignity as a sacred value, never to be compromised. In fact, every one of us voluntarily and repeatedly relinquishes dignity for other goods in life. Getting out of a small car is undignified. Having sex is undignified. Doffing your belt and spread- eagling to allow a security guard to slide a wand up your crotch is undignified. Most pointedly, modern medicine is a gantlet of indignities. Most readers of this article have undergone a pelvic or rectal examination, and many have had the pleasure of a colonoscopy as well. We repeatedly vote with our feet (and other body parts) that dignity is a trivial value, well worth trading off for life, health, and safety (Steven Pinker)

But voluntary relinquishments of dignity are not the point. Involuntary ones are. The fetus does not voluntarily choose to relinquish life. The worker in the developing world is not voluntarily denied a living wage. The child living in a slum does not voluntarily choose hunger. The handicapped person does not voluntarily choose to be discriminated against. The nursing-home patient does not voluntarily choose to be treated inhumanely. The torture victim does not voluntarily choose physical agony. The victim of genocide does not voluntarily choose death.

This is quite different from getting out of a small car. In Catholic social teaching, human dignity has little to do with occasionally looking "undignified" or "silly." It is about the inviolable value and worth of every human being, who is created by God. But this foundational concept in human rights is not something that appeals simply to Catholics, or Christians, or even simply to believers. As Pope Benedict XVI said in his recent speech to the U.N. General Assembly, "Human rights are increasingly being presented as the common language and the ethical substratum of international relations. At the same time, the universality, indivisibility and interdependence of human rights all serve as guarantees safeguarding human dignity." (James Martin, SJ)

Hat tip to Didymus from the Catholic Answers Form that pointed me to the article.

Its hard for me to imagine why anyone would have a problem with human dignity being a central concept in ethics.

Conversion: We have to change...not the Church

I really agree with what is being said at the first part of this song. We are called to be changed by Christ. I am still in the process of conversion to the Catholic Church.

Modernism's Existential Crisis

This quote is from a book review...

For all its erudition, Modernism can never quite capture the profundity of the modernist moment, its intense disillusionment with the social world, and its concomitant yearning for its re-enchantment - or, paraphrasing Baudelaire, to find the ‘beauty’, ‘the eternal’ and ‘the immutable’ in ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’. Reducing the modernist sensibility to something that often seems no more than a psychological impulse – the lure of heresy – Gay misses the great historical, existential crisis that modernism expresses. (Tim Black)

I tried to find the original quote by Baudelaire but I was only able to find this small snippet...

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Dick to the Dawk to the Ph.D.

In posting this, I'm not denying natural selection but I think it is making a great point. It also has the benifit of being hilarious.

The Over Reach of Neuro-(whatumacallit)

Two quotes on the over reaching of Neuro-(whatumacallit)

QUOTE 1:

That is why one would expect critics to be on the side of the poets, with their sense of this complexity, rather than siding with the terribles simplificateurs of scientism. A. S. Byatt’s neural approach to literary criticism is not only unhelpful but actually undermines the calling of a humanist intellectual, for whom literary art is an extreme expression of our distinctively human freedom, of our liberation from our organic, indeed material, state.Link

QUOTE 2:

While the sudden visibility of the brain is indeed remarkable, the greater significance is perhaps more symbolic. Brain images are still far cruder than one would think after reading the sensational revelations attributed to them in the science pages of newspapers and magazines. And it must be remembered that these are secondary images of blood flow and glucose in the brain, and not of brain tissue itself. We seem to forget that it is not as if a camera were entering the brain and taking pictures of what is going on. At this point, the most that can be said is that brain imaging indirectly and very broadly measures the activity of groups of thousands of neurons when the brain is engaged in a physical or mental task. While there are some correlations between brain activity in certain regions and external, observable behavior, it is very hard to gauge what the pictures really mean. How does the flow of blood in parts of the brain correspond to feelings, moods, opinions, emotions, imagination? It remains a daunting task to create theories to “operationalize” what is going on underneath all the pretty pictures.

The state of the art right now is that we can read brains—to some very crude extent—but we can’t even begin to read minds. Wall Street Journal science writer Sharon Begley has coined the term “cognitive paparazzi” to describe those who claim they can. “What does neuroscience know about how the brain makes decisions? Basically nothing,” says Michael Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. LINK

I'm not dissing science here just it's over simplification.

Religion and Disadvantaged Youth

Hmmm maybe religion isn't all that bad.

The Role of Religious and Social Organizations in the Lives of Disadvantaged Youth


---- Abstract -----

This paper examines whether participation in religious or other social organizations can help offset the negative effects of growing up in a disadvantaged environment. Using the National Survey of Families and Households, we collect measures of disadvantage as well as parental involvement with religious and other social organizations when the youth were ages 3 to 19 and we observe their outcomes 13 to 15 years later. We consider a range of definitions of disadvantage in childhood (family income and poverty measures, family characteristics including parental education, and child characteristics including parental assessments of the child) and a range of outcome measures in adulthood (including education, income, and measures of health and psychological wellbeing). Overall, we find strong evidence that youth with religiously active parents are less affected later in life by childhood disadvantage than youth whose parents did not frequently attend religious services. These buffering effects of religious organizations are most pronounced when outcomes are measured by high school graduation or non-smoking and when disadvantage is measured by family resources or maternal education, but we also find buffering effects for a number of other outcome-disadvantage pairs. We generally find much weaker buffering effects for other social organizations. Rajeev Dehejia, Thomas DeLeire, Erzo F.P. Luttmer, Joshua Mitchell

A Darwinian society = fascist state

My favorite example comes from an interview Richard Dawkins, England’s most pious atheist and loudest Darwinian, gave to an Austrian newspaper, Die Presse (July 30, 2005), where he made this whopper of a concession: “No decent person wants to live in a society that works according to Darwinian laws. . . . A Darwinian society would be a fascist state.” With that move Dawkins has undercut his whole project, which requires that Darwinism be made applicable in all areas of life. His ethical critique of Darwinian dystopias itself testifies to man’s uniqueness, specifically his possession of a conscience independent of evolutionary forces. And once conscience asserts its independence, it’s but a short step to establish that the same holds true of man’s natural desire for God. (Edward T. Oakes, First Things)

This is a great argument.