tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post2549191690614428930..comments2024-02-13T12:50:30.457-05:00Comments on Rants Within the Undead God: Theistic Proofs in an Echo ChamberBenjamin Cainhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-20655014106246915612018-11-04T10:26:21.865-05:002018-11-04T10:26:21.865-05:00Thanks. I think the difference here is just betwee...Thanks. I think the difference here is just between human arrogance and humility. Power or fame makes anyone arrogant, although the Catholic variety of smugness is particularly galling because of the mixed bag of Catholic history, to say the least. Likewise, weakness and failure humble anyone. So it's not really about Catholicism or atheism. Atheists became arrogant when the new atheist movement became famous, and Catholics are arrogant because their Church ruled the Western world for centuries. <br /><br />By contrast, philosophy is unpopular because it's bad for your health and business. So the Socratic lesson of humbling yourself before the truth that the wisest philosopher knows only that he knows nothing--ultimately because nature is absurd and horrific and makes all our knowledge claims laughable--is rarely learned. When we think objectively and wonder whether our beliefs are correct, we're humbly admitting the possibility that we've failed in our cognitive task. That's easy if little depends on our judgment, but suppose you're a professor with a lifetime of work under your belt, or a blogger like Feser with a sizable following, or a famous podcaster and debater like Sam Harris. If you lead a movement, you get trapped by your fame, as everyone from Jesus to Kurt Cobain found out, making authenticity impossible for them.<br /><br />South Park had a brilliant take on Catholicism when it depicted the Church as a giant spider that had nothing to do with Jesus's message. It's the difference between Jesus and Paul, which The Last Temptation of Christ movie also made clear. Jesus's message of radical ethics was meant for the End Times, but they never came, which led the Christian institution to have to fudge its way through inauthenticity. This is also what Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor parable is about.Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-82184403898182696982018-11-01T22:44:16.032-04:002018-11-01T22:44:16.032-04:00You did a great job on this one.
The comparison b...You did a great job on this one.<br /><br />The comparison between traditionalist scholastic types and new atheists is one I can’t believe isn’t made more often. Both are overwhelmingly unpleasant, loud, overconfident and totally unwilling to seriously entertain objections to their worldviews. The New Atheists often get (rightfully) criticized for this, but it seems the Catholics get off the hook a lot easier (maybe it’s just because no one is really listening to them anymore?).<br /><br />On the whole though, I think internet Thomists are worse than the new atheists. The new atheist is naive and pitiable, for sure, but I find there’s often something exceptionally sinister and cold about the internet Thomist that I don’t see as often with the others.<br /><br />I think they are pretty hypocritical, too. They always criticize atheists for being ignorant and failing to engage with the strongest cases for theism, but they themselves often have a very impoverished knowledge of the strongest cases for atheism.<br /><br />For example, I’ve never seen them critically engage with Kant or Hume, who are widely regarded as having dealt the death blows to the ontotheology the scholastics still think is self-evident. They seem to rest easy on objections from Feser, who badly strawmans Kant and Hume every time he discusses them - so in effect, isn’t the internet thomist just as culpable here as say, the New Atheist who gets their understanding of Aquinas from Dawkins?<br /><br />As someone who was raised irrelgious, then has gone from Evangelical Protestant, to New Atheist, to Traditionalist Catholic, and now just calls themself an irreligious naturalist, I notice the same ills plague people on all sides. I’ve changed my mind so much because I actually did seek out the strongest objections to my beliefs and, if I found them unconvincing as I often did, endeavoured to understand them until I could see why someone would find them convincing. Maybe it’s a character flaw in me, and it’s really none of my business, but it really bothers me when others don’t do this. And I think the Thomists are the worst for this, probably because they are dogmatically bound to not question too much.<br /><br />Although I’m tempted to say the faith of many a traditionalist Thomist is far from sincere. It’s hard not to suspect that they adopt Catholicism just to give their far-right political opinions a basis is some kind of ancient wisdom, and thus some perceived legitimacy. If this is true, I guess the fact that there exist powerful objections to the content of their beliefs in Hume and Kant (or even more recently in say, Mackie or Oppy or Schellenberg) is irrelevant because the content of their beliefs doesn’t actually mean much to them - it’s the function of the beliefs they value. If Christianity is supposed to be about love and charity (which is debatable, depending on your interpretation), then these people really don’t scream Christian to me. Doesn’t it often seem like Aquinas is their God, Feser is their Jesus, and their only commandments are to undo all moral progress since the Middle Ages?Tylernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-73895698590455994772018-10-14T16:30:45.073-04:002018-10-14T16:30:45.073-04:00Just judging from their Wikipedia pages, stabilizi...Just judging from their Wikipedia pages, stabilizing selection is part of Newman's theory of the formation of animal types, and Chaitin is a mathematician who apparently thinks biology should be subject to mathematical standards of proof, whereas it's hardly obvious that that should be so.<br /><br />I don't think natural selection is the only mechanism responsible for biological evolution, but it's certainly one of them. <br /><br />If you're a skeptic about Darwinian explanations, what's your explanation of speciation? Does it involve intelligent design?Benjamin Cainhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00661999592897690031noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6320802302155582419.post-83930257337700744172018-10-14T13:58:36.324-04:002018-10-14T13:58:36.324-04:00"The powerful Darwinian explanation of organi..."The powerful Darwinian explanation of organic design turns out to be good enough, by Occam ’s razor, in which case we evolved because of mindless chemical processes that built life forms to shelter and transmit genetic codes over vast periods of geological time."<br /><br />This is in the eye of the beholder, last time I checked, many leading evolutionists don't share your optimism, the picture looks rather bleak according to someone like Stuart Newman:<br /><br />"First, let's look at some of the expectations of the natural selection-based modern synthesis: (i) the largest differences within given categories of multicellular organisms, the animals or plants, for example, should have appeared gradually, only after exceptionally long periods of evolution; (ii) the extensive genetic changes required to generate such large differences over such vast times would have virtually erased any similarity between the sets of genes coordinating development in the different types of organism; and (iii) evolution of body types and organs should continue indefinitely. Since genetic mutation never ceases, novel organismal forms should constantly be appearing.<br /><br />All these predictions of the standard [Darwinian] model have proved to be incorrect." (Stuart Newman, Where Do Complex Organisms Come From?)<br /><br />Or how about Gregory Chaitin, still working hard on trying to show that evolution actually can do the job we have been told it does just fine:<br /><br />“For many years I have thought that it is a mathematical scandal that we do not have proof that Darwinian evolution works.” (Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical (2013)D4rw1n_sk3ptichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17558520641679568293noreply@blogger.com