Comments on: Promiscuous meme(plexes)

By: mc

mc — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 07:49:05 +0000

“First Christianity is not a religion that anyone who was just winging it would ever make up, a made up religion wouldn’t look like Christianity since it’s not a religion any would dream up from the comfort of one’s armchair”
That’s true of all religions isn’t it? Or at least the major ones at their inception. They do go against the grain of human nature, “please lord, help me to stop sinning…only not now” was the entreaty of St. Augustine.
To paraphrase the 1960 inaugural address: “…We choose to do [these] things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”

By: James Kabala

James Kabala — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 07:43:37 +0000

Oops! I should have the read the comments more carefully instead of skimming them. I’m sorry.

By: razib

razib — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 21:19:23 +0000

j mct, i was aware of the context…i will admit i used the quote for rhetorical affect, but now i’ll have to restrain myself :)

By: j mct

j mct — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 20:16:40 +0000

I don’t want to seem too picky Razib but I’ve seen you do this before. You’re screwing up that Tertullian quote.

Tertullian was a lawyer before he became a Christian apologist/writer and was quite famous for being very clever and witty with withering barb type stuff and lots of Christians liked reading him even if he didn’t convert many pagans to Christianity, he was kind of like Ann Coulter.

“I believe it because it is absurd” does not mean that Tertullian thinks that Christianity requires one to believe in anything offensive to reason like a square circle of a right triange where a^2 + b^2 isn’t equal to c^2. “Absurd” means two things. First Christianity is not a religion that anyone who was just winging it would ever make up, a made up religion wouldn’t look like Christianity since it’s not a religion any would dream up from the comfort of one’s armchair. Related to this, it is also one that someone who was making up a religion with the intention that it would flourish would never come up with, because if you look at it, Christianity just shouldn’t ‘sell’. But since it was a very fast growing religion by Tertullian’s times, eventhough persecuted, Tertullian is saying that given these disadvantages it must have one real big thing going for it, that thing being that it is true.

So now that you know about Tertullian don’t do that again! :).

By: David Boxenhorn

David Boxenhorn — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 13:39:53 +0000

Here are some interesting Judaizers.

By: Robert Speirs

Robert Speirs — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 13:35:24 +0000

A quick look at Dean Esmay's blog:

http://www.deanesmay.com/

especially his e-book delineating the evidence on both sides of the HIV=AIDS question, and at the Duesberg material:

http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/index/pduesberg.htm

should be sufficient to bring into question in your mind your assertion that there is no scientific basis for disputing the causation of "AIDS" by the HIV virus.

By: razib

razib — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 12:00:28 +0000

i already gave the source above. please see my response to mc.

By: James Kabala

James Kabala — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 11:29:50 +0000

What is the source for your mention of anti-Trinitarian Christians who became Jews? That sounds like a fascinating story.

By: razib

razib — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 10:05:58 +0000

Are you defending the scientific project against insiders (scholars, intellectuals, those who one would think would be defenders of it) who are trying to derail it?

more this.

By: Michael Blowhard

Michael Blowhard — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 08:52:18 +0000

I’m not following well. Are you defending the scientific project against insiders (scholars, intellectuals, those who one would think would be defenders of it) who are trying to derail it? Against non-specialist ordinary-everyday rubes? One or the other? Both? Or am I missing the point entirely?

Dopey-but-intrigued, semi-po-mo ex-English major would appreciate a straightforward two-sentence summary of your argument. I’m on the verge of bringing forth the names Michael Oakeshott and Stephen Toulmin, but I’m not entirely sure that now’s the moment.

By: razib

razib — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 07:47:49 +0000

mc: see the barbarian conversion. look up "judaizers."

By: michael vassar

michael vassar — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 07:37:04 +0000

Razib: Couldn’t you at least call the French Enlightenment a mitigated failure? It produced the US, and the Physiocrats, who provided the foundations for Adam Smith, and a lot of good science and math.
Thrasymachus: I’m not convinced of the inferior social skills of “geeks”, just of their lower numbers. I think they do a better job getting along among their own kind than other groups do. Will a “trekkie” be any more out of place among “popular kids” than vice versa?

By: mc

mc — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 05:37:01 +0000

“Some pre-Reformation intellectuals who brought up these issues eventually became Jews (they are recorded because of their trials as apostates).”
Astonishing when you consider the time and place. Can you supply references about them?

By: razib

razib — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:34:37 +0000

the human desire to believe what we like

i want to be clear and note that i don't just believe people are biased toward believing in particular things because of emotional reasons. after all, most conceptions of god are not fuzzy best buds as in the liberal christian modern conception (to simplify). rather, i think humans have a particular way of thinking which evokes particular ideas and paradigms, or at least, is more easily parasitized by particular ideas.

i don't hold out much hope that most people can currently really shed this tendency, and it is hard enough for those who fancy themselves intellectuals (ie; many scientists and scholars say jack-stupid shit when they are out of field). rather, my particular concern is that a certain subset of intellectuals is trying to blow up the castle from the inside for their own selfish reasons. ultimately, i am broadening the defenders of the castle beyond the enlightenment, as neo-thomism is a product of an older rationality.

p.s. in christianity, i think tertullian is an early expositer of the tendency which i am pointing too. tellingingly, two of his famous quotes are:

"I believe because it is absurd"

"What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?"

By: Matt McIntosh

Matt McIntosh — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:28:48 +0000

Razib,

I agree that whatever popular traction this stuff gets is due partly to the human desire to believe what we like and damn the torpedoes, but also that such anti-rationalism is enabled by our intuitive-but-wrong authoritarian "folk epistemology" that searches for authority for beliefs in "positive reasons" or "rational justifications" of one sort or another. If McGrath sounds like garbled Wittgenstein, ther's a reason for that. Consider this:

"We have been liberated from the rationalist demand to set out 'logical' and 'rational' grounds for our beliefs."

The reason they can get away with this is precisely because "justified beliefs" are impossible, despite the best efforts of a long line of philosophers to make it work. Irrationalists can always win this argument by asking "why?" like an annoying child until the naive rationalist loses patience and puts his foot down on "because, dammit!" The argument subsequently degenerates into table-pounding and the irrationalist claims "victory".

That's what made me think of Bartley: he examines the metacontext of Western philosophy (both theological and secular) and pinpoints its fatal flaw in the quixotic search for justified beliefs that will "hold come what may" (as Quine would say). He cuts the gordian knot by advocating a non-justificationist rationalism that focuses on critical preferences rather than justified beliefs; everything is open to criticism and all our knowledge is on permanent probation.

Needless to say that this is an attitude that doesn't come naturally to human minds.

By: razib

razib — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:07:07 +0000

The problem with the Enlightenment is that it has constantly tried to devalue our extremely effective "loose and imprecise reasoning structure" not only in the places where it is ineffective (scientific observation), but also in the places where it is extremely effective (navigating systems of social mores).

you are speaking to a different issue. why would i speak relatively positively of neo-thomists if i didn't understand the distinction you are making?

the examples i gave were:

1) an author who thinks that post modernism is great because it destroys atheism.

2) an author thinks that post modernism is OK because it opens up a spot for intelligent design.

3) a quack who rejects HIV-causes-AIDS.

two of those are explicitly about science, while the first is a narrow-focus intellectual argument (though mcgrath does imply that atheism is the cause of destructive social engineering in some ways in his book). you want to engage a totally different topic, which is the overreach of the enlightenment, i already pointed to skepticism's importance in restraining rationality. excessive rationalization of social mores and norms have caused a lot of destruction, but on the balance i would argue that the enlightenment has been a good thing (ie; the reduced quality of life and frankly, even the totalitarian genocides of the 20th century, were contingent upon the health and wealth that were also a byproduct of scientific rationality).

By: Thrasymachus

Thrasymachus — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:59:28 +0000

In practice you are mixing two very different things:

1) Science.
2) Popular intellectual movements.

Rationalism has benefited the first immensely. The second is a mixed bag.

The problem is that Science has an effective domain. There is a very good reason that "the default cognitive state of humanity is far more congenial to loose, imprecise and emotionally satisfying narratives and fabulations." It's because our loose and imprecise reasoning structure is very very good at the day-to-day problems of social reasoning, while our logical-emprical side is not. (Which is why geeks don't spend their high school careers lording it over the jocks.)

The problem with the Enlightenment is that it has constantly tried to devalue our extremely effective "loose and imprecise reasoning structure" not only in the places where it is ineffective (scientific observation), but also in the places where it is extremely effective (navigating systems of social mores).

By: razib

razib — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:56:32 +0000

matt,

well, i think there are many roots of the anti-rationalist tendency, though the ultimate germ i think lay in the cognitive biases of our species. martin luther himself, though humanistically trained, rejected classical learning (though lutheranism is not hebraicized christianity, so it was more show than action). a lot of mcgrath's rhetoric reminds me of garbled wittgenstein.

in the end, i think protestant anti-rationalists are simply one end of the spectrum, while protestant rationalists being the other end (unitarianism in the USA is a post-christian offspring of protestant rationalism, but listen to congregationalists and the jesus seminar, and you'll hear modern day christian rationalism, or, more accurately, modernism). i think the relatively decentralized nature of protestantism results in greater ideological variance...though the rationalists always tend to (in my opinion) lose to the anti-rationalists when it comes to the popular following.

By: Matt McIntosh

Matt McIntosh — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:49:39 +0000

The Retreat to Commitment by W.W. Bartley is very relevent to this subject, if you're interested. It's part history of theology and part epistemology. The book foccuses partly on Karl Barth, who was evidently a significant influence on McGrath, and traces the roots of this anti-rationalist strain of Protestanitsm back to Kierkegaard. Seems as relevent as ever now.