Science, Nihilism and the Artistry of Nature

Here's an article of mine, called Science, Nihilism, and the Artistry of Nature, that Scott Bakker put up on his blog. I wrote it several weeks ago and it builds on a number of my other articles. 

Here's the thesis: "The very cognitive approach which is indispensible to scientific discovery, the objectification of phenomena, which is to say the analysis of any pattern in impersonal terms of causal relations, is itself a source of certain values. When we objectify something we’re thereby well-positioned to treat that thing as having a special value, namely an aesthetic one. Objectification overlaps with the aesthetic attitude, which is the attitude we take up when we decide to evaluate something as a work of art, and thus objects, as such, are implicitly artworks."

And some news: I've taken a job recently and it's leaving me with much less time for blogging. I've still got a lot more to say, but until I settle in, at least, I won't be able to update as much. I'll likely have to switch to writing smaller pieces. We'll have to see...

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Scientism and the Scapegoating of Philosophy

In a Nerdist podcast, Neil deGrasse Tyson expresses the vulgar scientistic view of philosophy in something close to its paradigmatic form, so that if you looked up “scientism” in an ideal encyclopedia you’d find Tyson’s Nerdist comments featured as exemplars. Scientism, by the way, isn’t a formal argument, but a dismissive attitude shared by arrogant, Philistine scientists and engineers who judge the humanities in general to be empty or insignificant compared to the sciences. Thus, scientism is expressed by a rhetorical stance taken by one side in the culture war that’s been provoked largely by the power of science and technology.

Massimo Pigliucci, who has doctorates in both biology and philosophy and who personally debates with the Cosmos host on this issue, has responded to Tyson on his blog. Pigliucci also presents other examples of Tyson’s scientism. However, Pigliucci’s response is too conventional for me, which means that while his retort is generally accurate it doesn’t get to the root of Tyson’s dismissive attitude towards philosophy.

Here, from the transcript given in Pigliucci’s response, are most of Tyson’s anti-philosophical comments from the podcast (those comments start at 20:19 minutes into it):

That [philosophy] can really mess you up…My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, what are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?...Yeah, if you are distracted by your questions so that you can’t move forward, you are not being a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world. And so the scientist knows when the question “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a pointless delay in our progress…How do you define clapping? All of a sudden it devolves into a discussion of the definition of words. And I’d rather keep the conversation about ideas. And when you do that don’t derail yourself on questions that you think are important because philosophy class tells you this. The scientist says look, I got all this world of unknown out there, I’m moving on, I’m leaving you behind. You can’t even cross the street because you are distracted by what you are sure are deep questions you’ve asked yourself. I don’t have the time for that.

Interestingly, the interviewers—who mostly agree with Tyson—then say that philosophy “is a bottomless pit. It just becomes nihilism.”

The Incoherence of Tyson’s Antiphilosophical Humanism

Now, all of this is very revealing, especially if you make a habit of looking under the surface of things. Perhaps the most obvious problem with Tyson’s view is that whatever faults he thinks there are with philosophy, he can’t escape philosophy because the secular humanism he presupposes even in that podcast is philosophical, not scientific. For example, he speaks of a “delay in our progress.” But if we take a purely scientific view of nature, there’s no such thing as real progress in the world, not even in the development of technology. At most, there’s subjective, relative progress when a creature makes advances towards satisfying its goals. For example, if a squirrel tries numerous times to climb a concrete barrier, coming closer to achieving that goal each time, we can speak of the squirrel progressing towards its chosen end. But should the squirrel want to climb the barrier? Suppose there’s a hunter on the other side, just waiting to shoot the squirrel so that as soon as the squirrel succeeds, landing on that greener pasture, the animal ironically loses out as it’s killed. Had the squirrel appreciated the danger it wouldn’t have wanted to climb the fence, but that’s neither here nor there: in the real world, this squirrel has that desire so as it climbs the barrier it seems like it’s progressing relative to its actual, misinformed state of mind. Is this squirrel’s progress real or just an illusion? How can there be progress that ends in disaster?

Then, of course, there’s the aesthetic, quasi-religious admiration of nature which Tyson flaunts in his remake of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos television show. That reverence or at least respect for nature, which Sagan and Einstein famously had in common with Tyson, is likewise not entailed by anything that science alone has to say. When Tyson feels that nature is sublime, majestic, or full of wonders, he’s engaging in normative, aesthetic, or otherwise philosophical judgments. For example, he’s an environmentalist, so he believes we ought to take care of the environment instead of polluting it and thus endangering all life, including ours. But again, from the scientific viewpoint all values are only subjective and thus illusory. So who says life ought to be preserved? Who says evolution ought to be allowed to continue? Not any scientist in his or her scientific capacity. Scientists only describe what’s happened, explain what’s happening, or predict what must or will probably happen. Science itself says nothing about what ought to happen.

Americans Debate whether they Get Stuff Done

Dateline: WASHINGTON—Politicians rallied on Get Stuff Done Day, to reassure the American people that their government is in working order. Many boasted of their accomplishments while in office, describing in great detail the stuff in question.

Some showcased the collection of games on their mobile devices, which they play to occupy their time as representatives in Congress.

“The stuff I accomplish,” said Rep. Blowhard, “may not be as fancy as that of the young whippersnappers; I don’t go in for the newfangled gadgets. But I’m second to none in the fine art of finger-twiddling.”
 

“Every single work day without fail,” said Rep. Doolittle resentfully, “I walk from my office to the restroom to empty my bowels. That’s twelve steps there and twelve more back again, mind you, and I’m on that toilet for hours on end because of my IBS. So I can stand proud and declare that I get piles of stuff done for my fellow Americans.”

Congresswoman Shirker has been criticized for doing next to nothing in her official capacity, but at a press conference she vigorously defended the stuff she gets done: “Sure, I sit on my leather chair all day, apparently doing nothing whatsoever. But have a closer look! See how many times I breathe a minute? And now you’ve confirmed the stuff I get done for the American people.

“Do I hold my breath to spite my constituents? Not on your life! I inhale and exhale thousands of times a day, laboriously going through those motions, taxing my lungs, and I do it to carry out the public will. They didn’t elect me just to keel over. No sir, I assure you I’m very much alive as I doze off at my desk. With each breath I take I get stuff done, adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere to feed the plants which in turn supply oxygen to my constituents—to working men and women and to their children. You’re welcome!”

Cynical protestors showed up at some of the political rallies, insisting that the politicians aren’t in fact working hard enough to get stuff done.

“They talk a lot,” said a young unemployed man wearing a Jon Stewart T-shirt, “but they don’t get stuff done. I want to see them fix the country, but the stuff they do? They’re just making everything worse. Their stuff is the bad stuff, but we expect only good stuff from our elected representatives. I’d have thought that was implied.”

Asked what he thinks should be done about the gridlock and systemic corruption in Washington, the young man said his job as a disaffected ironist and know-it-all is to ridicule everything until the Apocalypse, whereupon he can brag that he expected all along that the worst would happen.

A third party surprised the audiences at the rallies and press conferences, to protest both the politicians and the cynical protestors.

“Whether a politician gets stuff done is neither here nor there,” said one of those outraged citizens. “If your standard of political action is that pitifully low, your political system’s utterly dysfunctional, your culture is in ruins, and it’s time for a revolution. That’s what the Declaration of Independence says: abolish the government if it stands in the way of our rights to safety and happiness.

“So how would that be for getting stuff done?”

Psychopathic Gods and Civilized Slaves

How do animals turn into people? The answer has several facets, including evolutionary and neurological ones, although unenlightened folks prefer a theological story according to which divine beings miraculously created us to transcend the other species, by giving us godlike powers of intelligence and creativity. I’m delighted to inform connoisseurs of irony that a large part of how people came to be conforms to the outline of that theistic creation myth, even as the truth humiliates theists and atheists alike. The truth here is stranger than fiction—including the fictions of the major religious myths as well as the liberal secular ones that deny the discontinuity between humans and animals, by way of denying that there are decisive differences between cultures or the sexes, so as to prop up the ideal of equality.

The part of the answer I wish to bring to the fore is historical rather than biological or mythological. Natural selection, the shaping of our brain structure, and the advantage of settling in the Fertile Crescent after the last ice age were so many props and costumes, as it were, for our act of stumbling upon civilized culture. That culture in turn drove the strongest of the late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers to form what Lewis Mumford calls megamachines, military, bureaucratic, and labour social systems which reshaped the landscape and set the stage for the new kind of performance which anthropologists call behavioural modernity. Like butterflies that require cocoons to emerge from their pupal form, behavioural modernists, that is, civilized people from our perspective are born from a type of culture that forms in a particular microcosm we construct. Those we used to call primitives or savages, namely the premodern foragers who lived especially before the invention of agriculture at about 10,000 BCE but who still cling to life in their benighted tribes and villages here or there, are indeed intermediaries in the evolution from our anatomically-prehuman ancestors to the behaviourally-modern humans whose activities mark the starting points of history.

But once again the god of irony mocks us, because the modern prejudice is misplaced in light of civilization’s grotesque origin. In the first place, the development of behavioural modernity was accidental and undead, not teleological. Although language and culture had already been invented in the Paleolithic Era—language emerging possibly in the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, 50,000 years ago, and prehistoric art, for example, being found to be at least 40,000 years old—those tools wouldn’t be applied to the task of building the microcosm that accelerated our domestication, until the last glacial period happened to end to pave the way for agricultural civilization. Secondly, we should be most comfortable calling the behaviourally-modern farmers of the Neolithic Era people like us because they share the disgrace of our origin. To be sure, we modernists are embarrassed on behalf of half-naked, jungle-inhabiting tribalists such as the natives of Australia, Africa, or South America, who still worship animals and know little if anything of the wider universe. But in the undead god which is the impersonal natural system that changes and even creates itself (via inflation in the megaverse) to no humane end, there’s more than enough shame to go around…

Monstrous Kings as Creator Gods

Let’s look at the logic of the theistic account of our advent. Putting aside the mystification, superstition, and personification of the undead forces and elements, there is, after all, certain logic to what is nevertheless a pseudo-explanation. The logic is that a greater being imparts life to a lesser one. The gods are often pictured as creating humanity through a bizarre sexual act, the slaying of some deity or beast, or some act of craftsmanship whereby the human body is formed from inanimate materials and miraculously brought to higher life. These accounts provide, at best, the illusion of an explanation, because ultimately the gods are assumed to be beyond our comprehension. In the monotheistic faiths, God’s origin is inexplicable, by definition. Still, at several points the theistic creation myths betray an ancient intuition of how people were really formed.

Mystical vs Modern Enlightenment: Eckhart Tolle and the Undead God

In this YouTube video, I compare mystical and modern enlightenment and I criticize mostly Eckhart Tolle's kind of spirituality, but also the modern kind of wisdom (secular humanism).

Hopefully, one of these days I'll figure out how to fix the focus problem with my camcorder, although it's not so bad in this video. I think maybe I have to sit farther out from the background wall...

Anyway, cheers!

Wealthy Man replaces his Sexist and Racist Thoughts with Clones to silence Critics

Dateline: NEW YORK—Tired of being accused of having stereotypical ideas of women and racial minorities, the gazillionaire Roderick Billington set about spending his vast fortune to perfect his conceptions.

“I realized the essence of the problem early on,” he said. “I’d be thinking that the Chinese can’t drive well, that blacks are thuggish, and that women are sentimental and prone to hysteria. But I’d be told that those were just outrageous stereotypes. So there was a mismatch between my ideas and the facts.”

Mr. Billington decided to eliminate that mismatch. “The first order of business was to eliminate the material difference between my ideas and the reality of those groups of people. My ideas were made of neurons, but the billions of women out there, for example, are made out of all sorts of stuff: bone, muscles, skin cells, not to mention the women’s possessions and social relationships.”

To correct his conception of women, therefore, he cloned every woman on Earth. “Storing them all was the really tricky part,” he confesses. “Our planet is already overcrowded, so I had a duplicate planet built in orbit and shipped my women out to live on it.”

Now, when Mr. Billington is asked to speak on an issue related to women, he points to the second batch of women on that second Earth and says, “That’s what I think of romance novels, soap operas, and romantic comedies. Fly out to my concept of women if you want to know the details. I’m no longer arrogant enough to pretend that I can adequately model billions of people with just some squishy neurons in my puny noggin.”

Having silenced feminists in that fashion, Mr. Billington proceeded to nip the issue of racism in the bud with another round of cloning and another manufactured Earth. “I find I can easily now side-step talk of my alleged discriminatory treatment of dark-skinned people. When asked why I steer clear of African-American neighbourhoods, I ask them in turn why they’re asking me, as if my idea of those places were lodged merely in my skull.

“‘Good luck finding a shortcoming with my thoughts about dark-skinned folks,’ I tell the thought police. ‘My thoughts of them consist of exact copies of every dark-skinned person. So if they don’t like how I’m treating them, they should look at themselves in the mirror, because my way of thinking is more like them than is their reflection.’”

To forestall any further talk of his political incorrectness, Mr. Billington proceeded to Phase Two and created a duplicate universe. “You don’t like how I treat pebbles?” he asks rhetorically. “Something off about my way of thinking of salami sandwiches? Don’t blame me! My concept of pebbles is nothing but a second set of pebbles and my notion of salami smells just as bad as the real deal. So have fun searching for any discrepancy!”

Some persistent critics point out that Mr. Billington’s secondary universe is in fact the largest red herring ever thrown down as a distraction, since he’s not connected to that universe, so nothing that happens in it is responsible for his behaviour.

Says one such critic, “If that bigoted old rich guy could watch his clones whenever he wanted, then maybe they’d be relevant. But his brain would still be working with a simplified representation of women or Canadians or whomever. He’d be studying the clones only some of the time, from one angle rather than another, and so on.”

“Besides,” says another critic, “The point isn’t just that there’s a difference between any concept and what the concept is about. It’s that in Billington’s case, the difference is negative because he’s a sexist and racist jerk. He simplifies the facts in a mean-spirited way.”

Others maintain that Mr. Billington has inadvertently shown the silliness of our preoccupation with those who discriminate based on negative stereotypes.

Dark Mysticism: Tragic Heroism and Fear of the Undead God

Mysticism is commonly thought of as the esoteric practice of religion for the inner circle of initiates who seek enlightenment, which is to say freedom from suffering and an awakening from mundane experience. Enlightenment is said to be achieved by an inner discovery that the mind isn’t our true self, that our egocentric thoughts and feelings mislead us into identifying with the illusory world of material things. Our true self isn’t our personal one which distinguishes each of us from everyone else and indeed which drives us to compete, to dominate and inevitably to suffer and to cause others to suffer. The deeper self is supposedly impersonal conscious awareness, a way of perceiving that transcends everything that can be known with concepts and rational methods. Through pure consciousness we intuit the true nature of reality, including the timelessness of consciousness and thus the divinity of our true self. When we identify with our ego, with our personal mind, including our stream of thoughts, memories, and reactions to stimuli, we’re distracted from the fact that there’s another self that underlies those mental states, namely their conscious observer. That observer is God himself or at least ultimate reality, which the mystic discovers through an inner transformation, a detachment from the mind and a direct experience of pure awareness (awareness of nothing in particular) which shifts the mystic’s perspective. No longer craving positional goods in the animalistic struggle for material gain, the mystic has peace of mind since she’s found her home outside of space and time. She learns to identify not with her physical body but with divine consciousness which stands apart from all particular mental states and thus from any disappointment.

Eckhart Tolle: Optimystic

This is the mystical teaching, for example, of Eckhart Tolle, a popularizer of Buddhist and other ancient mystical traditions for Western, exoteric audiences. See, for instance, this interview with him, in which he explains spiritual awakening:

So what is it that we awaken from when spiritual awakening occurs? We awaken from identification with our thoughts. Everybody who is not awake spiritually is totally identified with and run by their thinking mind—the incessant voice in the head. Thinking is compulsive: you can't stop, or so it seems. It is also addictive: you don't even want to stop, at least not until the suffering generated by the continuous mental noise becomes unbearable. In the unawakened state you don't use thought, but thought uses you. You are, one could almost say, possessed by thought, which is the collective conditioning of the human mind that goes back many thousands of years. You don't see anything as it is, but distorted and reduced by mental labels, concepts, judgments, opinions and reactive patterns. Your sense of identity, of self, is reduced to a story you keep telling yourself in your head.

Tolle goes on to speak of how he came to interpret his personal enlightenment:

Years later, I realized that the acute suffering I felt that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from identification with the unhappy self, the suffering “little me,” which is ultimately a fiction of the mind. This withdrawal must have been so complete that the suffering self collapsed as if the plug had been pulled out of an inflatable toy. What was left was my true nature as the ever present “I AM”: consciousness in its pure state prior to identification with form. You may also call it pure awareness or presence.

Study shows Men secretly Resent Women’s Phatness

Dateline: NEW YORK—Islamic states are infamous in the West for forcing women to wear burqas, since those outer garments obscure the shape of women’s bodies and are thus odious from a feminist standpoint. Defenders of the sexist laws typically resort to theological or moral rationales, none of which is found in the Quran.

But a team of researchers at NYU has published a study explaining the behaviour as the result of men’s surprising annoyance at women for being sexy and beautiful.

“Women’s curves are ostentatious and seductive,” says the lead scientist, Alfonse Flurfleburger, “but that poses a problem for heterosexual men who would rather not be preoccupied by their raging erection when they’re trying to get work done.”

The team’s report points out that these second thoughts about feminine charms crop up in Western cultures as well. “You hear men crying out, ‘Goddamn, woman!’ when they’re walking down the street, minding their own business, only to be slammed by a vision of a voluptuous woman’s bulging rump and enormous, pendulous breasts that are only barely concealed by the sexy clothing that’s standard fare in the free world.

“Western women want their liberties, but my team and I hypothesize that men sometimes want to think about something less silly and savage than stopping everything they’re doing and smothering their face in the woman’s phat flesh.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I love them ladies,” says a bank teller, Dirk Simmons. “But sometimes I wonder if it’s too much to ask not to have to start thinking like a monkey whenever I see a foxy chick at work. She’s bending over the desk in this tight skirt and her phat butt’s as round as the full moon, man; I mean, it’s like having the moon itself fall to our planet just to smash you in the face. And I’m like, “Gaddayum!’ you know?”

The study shows that the telltale condemnation, “Goddamn, woman!” when uttered by a male who’s exasperated by the preposterous overkill involved when a curvaceous female flaunts her boobs and booty, making civilized life next to impossible, is actually a euphemism.

According to Prof. Flurfleburger, “men are condemning women for taunting and tempting them with their outrageous lady humps, for reducing men to gibbering imbeciles who can’t take care of business at the same time as they’re fantasizing about tearing off their clothes and humping the phat mounds like crazed gorillas.

“So the full exclamation isn’t just “Goddamn, woman!’ It’s “Goddamn your cleavage and your horse-like haunches for causing my erection which makes me ashamed to pretend to be civilized, dressed as I am now in my suit and sitting here, sweating and masturbating furiously in the bathroom stall, fantasizing about my female colleague who’s free to display the curves of her heavenly jugs and apple bottom.”

Parasitic Supervillains and the Housing Bubble

The subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 has both exoteric and esoteric significance. Exoterically, the inflation of the housing bubble and the Great Recession that followed were grist for the punditry mill, events that were quickly spun by social engineers using code words that mesmerized the partisan spectators, reinforcing battle lines in the American culture war. The function of that war between mainstream ideologies is to dissipate emotional energy so that it’s not effectively channeled for any democratic purpose.

In this respect, the political culture war is similar to the separation of the government’s powers, which as Carl Schmidt said, also conflicts with democracy. Democracy is meant to uphold the individual’s right to self-determination so that everyone is sovereign over themselves, through their vote, and the majority rules by way of a compromise with anarchy. However, democracy turns out to be counterproductive when the population doesn’t deserve the capacity for self-determination, such as when the people are grossly uninformed and easily manipulated by self-serving demagogues. For that reason, the government’s ability to carry out the majority’s will is often practically limited by a separation of the government’s powers, to prevent a tyranny of the vulgarized majority. Conflict between the branches of government delays or prevents the administering of the majority-approved policies, but it also distracts the public with the spectacle of empty rhetorical exchanges or it exacerbates divisions among the constituents, creating gridlock between the parties. The liberal myth is that all rational individuals deserve to rule, because they’re godlike. But wherever voters are much more like animals than gods, liberalism entails in practice only superficial democracy. The government is literally broken into pieces to prevent an outbreak of real democracy, since such an outbreak would be like the oinking of wild, stampeding boars. 

Exoterically speaking, then, the meaning of the housing bubble is lost in the noise generated by so-called liberals and conservatives. Liberals blame the deregulation of big banks, even though neoliberals under Clinton continued the deregulation that had accelerated under Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and Obama’s economics team consisted of those same deregulators. Conservatives blame big government for pressuring banks to issue subprime loans. These are the same conservatives whose free market policies entail the capture of the government by the army of lobbyists from big business and by the revolving door between government offices and those in the private sector; moreover, as I explain below, the surge in subprime loans wasn’t the main cause of the collapse. To be sure, the political culture war is itself a sideshow in that it doesn’t reflect the American opinion as a whole, since at most only half of the eligible voters participate in the political system. Also, the American mainstream media, which establish the limits of exoteric meaning, that is, the consensus that takes on mythical status for the antiphilosophical masses, ignore the poor, the marginalized, and the radicalized, preferring to report on the Serious opinions that flatter those who are most responsible for maintaining the political and economic status quo. For their part, the disenfranchised masses are uninspired by the myths that buttress the American dominance hierarchy.   

Then there’s the esoteric importance of the economic crisis, that is, the enlightened interpretation made available especially to social outsiders. When the liberal and conservative caterwauling is duly ignored, along with the centrist, pseudo-mature middle ground in which either side’s rhetoric is merely reduced to its bland essence, “Stop fighting and let the system work!” what we find is that in 2008 a great mirror was raised to the face of the United States and the reflected visage was so hideous that only a masochist or a social outsider with nothing to lose could stand to look at it for long. The housing bubble was a titanic clusterfuck that deligitimizes nearly every facet of American society. Both parties and all three branches of the government along with the banks, the regulators, the accountants, the economists, the business journalists, the plutocrats and even the average American citizens are all implicated. From beginning to end, the economic crisis reflects the rottenness of postmodern America.

Science and Aesthetic Morality

Earlier, I posted some fruitful email exchanges I had with readers of this blog, on pessimism and angst and on social justice. Here's another email exchange. You can contact me by email through the Contact the Ranter form on the right side of this blog, just below my blog profile.

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Dear Ben,

I apologize if this is stupid. But there's something I can't quite reconcile and I would appreciate your help. Scientism is this sort of dogmatic view that says “any question science can't answer is meaningless.” However, it seems like you use science to dismiss various metaphysical schemes that entail morality or the supernatural, which makes plenty of sense. Yet you turn around sometimes and say “well we shouldn't dismiss everything, because we don't know the limits of science, and it may well be more limited than we think.”

It seems to me like you have one foot in the door. You use science when it's convenient for dismissing theism and various metaphysics. Yet you reject science when it might suggest that holding onto the manifest image [the prescientific account of the self] at all is pointless. In other words, you seem to want to be able to build morality in line with scientific conclusions, and reject morality and metaphysics that are not in line with scientific conclusions. This is where my problem comes in. If you say science is practiced as scientism, then why are we limiting what we consider to be possible? For example, the multiverse formulation of QM [or chaos theory and the ecological perspective in biology] might make the mechanistic view moot. We should then also consider that the reductionistic view of consciousness could be flawed. [Thus, contrary to scientism, science itself seems limited.] But again, you turn around and use science to show the flaws in other systems of thought, seemingly on the basis that science is a better explanatory tool.

I know that's not exactly straightforward, and quite jumbled. But I'm curious where you draw the line. I want to know how you feel you use science to destroy certain metaphysics or morality competently, while maintaining that science also does not have this all-encompassing reach. How does it go just far enough to get your work done, without going quite all the way? What justifies aesthetic morality over Christian/slave morality? Would it not be possible that because human beings have, say, a biological intuition that other people are ends-in-themselves, we could consider that intuition an aesthetically pleasing object, even if clichéd? If we could make the world more egalitarian and less dominated, wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing?

I guess part of my problem is about where to draw the line with your aesthetic morality. Once science destroys metaphysics and morality, what is there left to cling to? And if we're going to allow that science can't give us normative or subjective answers, why then must we destroy, for example, a Kantian conception of morality? Simply because it ultimately derives from Christianity?

Do you see where I'm coming from? I'm not attacking your conception. These are questions I struggle with generally. And they're questions that I've found few satisfying answers to. You touch on them in your blog, but I still don't quite see a cohesive synthesis on this front. Any illumination would be greatly appreciated.

[name redacted]

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Dear Reader,

Some of your questions touch on the debate I've been having with Scott Bakker. I'll try to clarify my account for you. First, we've got to be clearer on some of the terms. I reject scientism, not science. Scientism is the self-refuting philosophy that says science is cognitively unlimited. On the contrary, science is limited because it has no normative implications. Thus, the whole domain of normative questions is left to philosophy and religion to sort out. The naive self-image is committed to there being meaning, purpose, and morality, and the naturalist who thinks this self-image isn't just a delusion must find a way to naturalize those phenomena. I try to do that by speaking of evolution, complexification, and emergent properties.