Posted on 10/28/2006 3:22:14 PM PDT by betty boop
Moral conservatives were shocked to read a thinly veiled defense of infanticide in the New York Times a few years ago by MIT [now of Harvard] professor Steven Pinker. But they would be even more disturbed if they saw Pinker’s justification for his views in a book that appeared about the same time.
In How the Mind Works, Pinker argues that the fundamental premise of ethics has been disproved by science. “Ethical theory,” he writes, “requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused.” Yet, “the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events.”
In other words, moral reasoning assumes the existence of things that science tells us are unreal. Pinker tries to retain some validity for ethics nonetheless by offering a “double truth” theory: “A human being,” he says, “is simultaneously a machine and a sentient agent, depending on the purposes of the discussion.”
It’s astonishing that anyone, especially an MIT professor, would be capable of sustaining two such contradictory ideas. But in fact, it is quite common, says Phillip Johnson in The Wedge of Truth. Since the Enlightenment, knowledge has split into two separate and often contradictory spheres: “facts” (science) versus “values” (ethics, religion, the humanities).
The trouble with this division is that eventually one side comes to dominate. This is the key to understanding why America is embroiled in a culture clash today, Johnson argues — and why moral and religious conservatives are losing. The direction in intellectual history since the Enlightenment has been to grant science the authority to pronounce what is real, true, objective, and rational, while relegating ethics and religion to the realm of subjective opinion and nonrational experience.
Once this definition of knowledge is conceded, then any position that appears to be backed by science will ultimately triumph in the public square over any position that appears based on ethics or religion. The details of the particular debate do not matter. For, in principle, we do not enact into public policy and we do not teach in the public schools views based private opinion or tribal prejudice.
Johnson gives a rich description of how the fact/value dichotomy operates. Its origin is generally traced to Descartes, who proposed a sharp dualism between matter and mind. It was not long before the realm of matter came to be seen as more certain, more objective, than the realm of mind. The subject matter of physics is indeed much simpler than metaphysics, and hence yields far wider agreement. This was mistakenly taken to mean that physics is objective while metaphysics is subjective. The result was the rise of scientism and positivism — philosophies that accord naturalistic science a monopoly on knowledge and consign all else to mere private belief and fantasy.
Today, Johnson writes, “the dominance of the scientific naturalist definition of knowledge eventually ensures that no independent source of knowledge will be recognized.”
Darwin, Buddha, Jesus, Fairies
Yet, depending on how scientists judge the public’s mood, they are more or less blunt about this epistemological imperialism. When feeling secure in their role as the cultural priesthood, they insist that naturalistic science has completely discredited the claims of religion. Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, says Darwinian evolution is “a universal acid” that dissolves all traditional religious and moral beliefs. He suggests that traditional churches be relegated to “cultural zoos” for the amusement of onlookers.
I witnessed the same attitude at a conference last April at Baylor University: Nobel prize-winner Steven Weinberg lumped together all spiritual teachings, whether of Buddha or Jesus, as talk about “fairies.” A few months earlier he had told the Freedom From Religion Association, “I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive to religious belief, and I’m all for that.” If science helps bring about the end of religion, he concluded, “it would be the most important contribution science could make.”
Using a sports metaphor, Johnson calls these outspoken scientists “the offensive platoon,” brought out as needed to “invok[e] the authority of science to silence any theistic protest.” At other times, however, when the public shows signs of restlessness at this imposition of naturalistic philosophy under the guise of science, “the defensive platoon takes the field. That is when we read spin-doctored reassurances that many scientists are religious (in some sense) . . . and that science and religion are separate realms which should never be mixed.”
But separate-but-equal in principle invariably means unequal in practice. For example, a report by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) says, “whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.” But a survey of NAS members by Larry Witham and Edward Larson in Scientific American found that 90% of scientists don’t believe in a supernatural God. Witham and Larson conclude: “The irony is remarkable: a group of specialists who are nearly all unbelievers — and who believe that science compels such a conclusion — told the public that ‘science is neutral’ on the God question.”
Or perhaps worse than an irony, Johnson comments; it may be a “noble lie” that the intellectual priesthood tells to the common people to conceal their own nihilism.
Keep the Public In the Dark
Similarly, Harvard’s Stephen J. Gould proposes a peacemaking formula he calls NOMA (“non-overlapping magisteria”), granting science and religion each its own distinct authority. This sounds fair enough — but it all depends on where one draws the line. Consider Gould’s assessment of the 1996 statement by John Paul II, in which the pope tentatively supported evolution while emphatically rejecting any theories that “consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter.”
How did Gould treat this affirmation of the reality of the spiritual realm? He condescendingly granted that such a quaint notion might have some “metaphorical value,” but added that he privately suspected it to be “no more than a sop to our fears, a device for maintaining a belief in human superiority within an evolutionary world offering no privileged position to any creature.”
In other words, Gould reduced religion to mere emotion at best — at worst, to the sin of speciesism. This was a bit much even for John Haught of Georgetown University, himself an ardent evolutionist: He complained that Gould “never concedes the slightest cognitive status to religion” — that for Gould religion merely “paints a coat of ‘value’ over the otherwise valueless ‘facts’ described by science.”
Precisely. For the modern Darwinist, Johnson explains, the only role left for the theologian “is to put a theistic spin on the story provided by materialism.” Theology does not provide an independent source of knowledge; all it can do is “borrow knowledge to put a subjective interpretation on it.”
Clearly, the function of the defensive platoon is merely to keep religious folk content with their subordinate status. Darwinists understand that it is sometimes more effective not to press the logic of the fact/value split to its unpalatable conclusions too adamantly, lest the public catch on and raise a protest. Instead of arguing that religion is false, by relegating it to the “value” realm, they keep the question of true and false off the table altogether. As Johnson says, religion is consigned “to the private sphere, where illusory beliefs are acceptable ‘if they work for you.’”
Thus the fact/value split “allows the metaphysical naturalists to mollify the potentially troublesome religious people by assuring them that science does not rule out ‘religious belief’ (so long as it does not pretend to be knowledge).”
Once this division is accepted in principle however, Johnson warns, the philosophical naturalists have won. “Whenever the ‘separate realms’ logic surfaces, you can be sure that the wording implies that there is a ruling realm (founded on reality) and a subordinate realm (founded on illusions which must be retained for the time being).” Hence, “the formula allows the ruling realm to expand its territory at will.”
Epistemological Imperialism
The expansion of the “fact” realm into theology can be traced in the work of scientists such as Harvard’s E.O. Wilson, who seeks to explain religion itself as a product of evolution. Religion is merely an idea that appears in the human mind when the nervous system has evolved to a certain level of complexity.
In Consilience, Wilson says religion evolved because belief in God gave early humans an edge in the struggle for survival. Today, he says, we must abandon traditional religions and develop a new unifying myth based squarely on evolution — a religion that deifies the process itself, where no teaching, no doctrine, is true in any final sense because all ideas evolve over time.
A similar expansion can be traced in ethics, where sociobiology and evolutionary psychology now presume to answer moral questions. In the notorious New York Times article mentioned above, Pinker argues that since infanticide is widespread in human cultures, it must be a product of evolution. As he puts it, the “emotional circuitry of mothers has evolved” to include a “capacity for neonaticide.” It is simply part of our “biological design.”
Accept this logic, Johnson warns, and you will be pressed to the conclusion that killing off babies is not a moral horror but a morally neutral act, a genetically encoded evolutionary adaptation, like wings or claws.
Pinker does not draw this conclusion — yet. But when the time seems ripe to overthrow the traditional moral view, Johnson predicts, doctrinaire naturalists “will complete the logic by observing that the moral sphere is as empty as the religious realm,” and therefore has no power to stand against the conclusions of “science.”
Shortly after Johnson finished his book, his forewarnings were confirmed by the appearance of a book titled The Natural History of Rape, which argued that, biologically speaking, rape is not a pathology; instead, it is an evolutionary strategy for maximizing reproductive success: In other words, if candy and flowers don’t do the trick, some men may resort to coercion to fulfill the reproductive imperative. The book calls rape “a natural, biological phenomenon that is a product of the human evolutionary heritage,” akin to “the leopard’s spots and the giraffe’s elongated neck.”
The book roused sharp controversy, but as one of the authors, Randy Thornhill, said on National Public Radio, the logic is inescapable: Since evolution is true, it must be true, he said, that “every feature of every living thing, including human beings, has an underlying evolutionary background. That’s not a debatable matter.” Every behavior that exists today must confer some evolutionary advantage; otherwise, it would not have been preserved by natural selection.
The “fact” realm has even expanded into the philosophy of mind, where consistent Darwinists tell us there is no single, central “self,” residing somehow within the body, that makes decisions, holds opinions, loves and hates. Instead, in the currently popular “computational” theory, the mind is a set of computers that solve specific problems forwarded by the senses. The notion of a unified self is an illusion, Pinker says — an illusion selected by evolution only because our body needs to be able to go one direction at a time.
Of course, computers operate without consciousness, so the question arises why we are conscious beings. Some neuroscientists conclude that we aren’t — that consciousness too is an illusion. Philosopher Paul Churchland says mental states do not exist, and suggests that we replace language about beliefs and desires with statements about the nervous system’s physical mechanisms — the activation of neurons and so on.
Piling example upon example, Johnson illustrates the epistemological imperialism of the “fact” sphere. This explains why moral and religious conservatives seem to have little effect in the public square: Their message is filtered through a fact/value grid that reduces it to an expression of mere emotional attachment and tribal prejudice. To turn the tide of the culture war, conservatives must challenge this definition of knowledge, and make the case that religion and morality are genuine sources of knowledge. We must “assert the existence of such a cognitive territory,” Johnson writes, “and be prepared to defend it. ” [Emphasis added.]
Of course, others have offered philosophical arguments to undercut the fact/value dichotomy, notably Michael Polanyi and Leo Strauss. What makes Johnson’s approach unique is that he takes the battle into science itself. He proposes that Darwinian evolution itself can and should be critiqued, since it functions as the crucial scientific support for philosophical naturalism. For if nature alone can produce everything that exists, then we must accept the reductionist conclusions described above. If, to take the last example, the mind is a product of material processes at its origin, then we must concede that it consists of nothing more than material processes — that our thoughts are reducible to the firing of neurons.
How Information Changes Everything
In science itself, the cutting-edge issue is information, Johnson says. Any text, whether a book or the DNA code, requires a complex, nonrepeating arrangement of letters. Can this kind of order be produced by chance or law? The answer, he argues, is no. Chance produces randomness, while physical law produces simple, repetitive order (like using a macro on your computer to print a phrase over and over). The only cause of complex, nonrepeating, specified order is an intelligent agent. [Emphasis added.]
Ordinary laboratory research implicitly assumes the reality of intelligent design, Johnson notes. Biologists talk of “molecular machines” and evaluate their “engineering design.” They conduct experiments that are described as “reverse engineering” to determine what functions biological structures perform. They talk about “libraries” of genetic information stored in DNA, and about how RNA “translates” the four-letter language of the nucleotides into the 20-letter language of proteins.
All this implies that information is real — and information in turn implies the existence of a mind, a personal agent, capable of intention and choice. Thus purposes and ends [e.g., formal and final causes, to use the Aristotelian language] are real and objective, and the “value” realm is restored to the status of genuine knowledge.
Johnson only hints at what this would imply for a revival of traditional theology and ethics. But he suggests that it would begin with the many-layered verse in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word,” the Logos — reason, intelligence, information. “These simple words make a fundamental statement that is directly contradictory to the corresponding starting point of scientific materialism,” Johnson writes, and they open the door to a much richer definition of knowledge and of reason itself.
This conclusion is certainly suggestive, though not well developed. Johnson’s greatest accomplishment is to give a deft analysis of the imperialism of the “fact” sphere. Unfortunately, he barely touches on the opposite dynamic — the incursion of the “value” sphere into the “fact” realm — which is well advanced in many fields. It is called postmodernism, and it reduces all knowledge claims to social constructions at best, to power plays at worst. Johnson devotes a chapter to the impact of postmodernism on the humanities, but it is the thinnest chapter in the book, and it is clear that his greatest concern is with the scientific fields where the older Enlightenment rationalism still reigns.
For the rationalist, Johnson is no doubt correct that the only approach that carries weight is a scientific one. Only a demonstration that the scientific data itself has theistic implications bridges the sphere of objective, public, verifiable knowledge. Johnson includes clear and readable discussions of standard anti-Darwinian arguments. (There has long been skepticism within the scientific community about the enormous extrapolation from minor variations within living things to explain the origin of living things.) He also gives a deliciously witty account of the Kansas controversy.
The strength of the book, however, is to show the wide-ranging implications of intelligent design theory in other fields, and to trace its relevance for nonscientists — indeed, for all who are concerned about preserving a free and humane society.
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This data file may be reproduced in its entirety for non-commercial use. A return link to the Access Research Network web site would be appreciated.
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But calling it Logos, reason, or divine and you've already got yourself a nontraditional trinity.
"Logos" is already a very old name for Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity. It originates in the opening of John's Gospel, and relates to the use of the word in Greek philosophy. As is well known, Jesus has many "Names," and this is a traditional one.
John says, In the beginning was the Word . . . and without Him nothing was made that was made." Traditionally, the Creator is God the Father, but from this verse and the creeds, it is widely accepted as orthodox that God the Father created the universe through, or with the agency of, the Son. Even Milton, widely supposed to be a Monist, depicts things this way in Paradise Lost.
But it was evident to the Church Fathers in their commentaries on John that the title of Logos also refers to the Word, to a built-in rationality, and to order in the universe, all possible meanings of the Greek word. This is standard Trinitarian doctrine, not an innovation.
The traditional Christian philosophical view is that because through the agency of the Logos God created and sustains the universe, therefore the universe shares the same rationality that we find in ourselves, who are also part of the creation. Our minds understand the objective universe and can hold rational dialogues with others concerning it, because both were created by the same rational God.
But the coin thingy is misleading. The reductionist doesn't recognize the other side. The resolution is not a side.
Sometimes true, certainly. Materialist scientists may say "either/or," and consider both sides before coming to a decision. Others may see only one side or the other. I don't recall the exact metaphor that is under question here, but I would put in my two cents worth and say that although a coin must land either heads or tails, these are also the two sides of a single coin.
Moreover, sometimes the exclusionary choice may be correct. It depends what question is under consideration.
Thank you for stating this better than I did, Cicero! But that is what I was trying to say about the Logos.
On the rationality of the universe, it's interesting to compare the Christian understanding with Plato's. Christians believe we humans were made in the image or likeness of God by the Father according to His Word (the Son, one of whose names is Logos, "word").
Plato thought that human beings were the image or eikon of the Cosmos itself: we are "microcosmos." And both Cosmos and microcosmos have the nature of zoon noun echon, "ensouled living beings (i.e., "animals") that think (i.e., that possess reason, or nous). Thus, where Christian philosophy holds that "Our minds understand the objective universe and can hold rational dialogues with others concerning it, because were created by the same rational God" -- Plato might say that because both man and universe have in common the nature of living, reasonable beings, we are able to understand the universe, and to enter into rational discourse with other minds concerning it.
Plato is vague on the issue of the creator. It seems clear to me that the Demiurge of Timaeus is not God himself. Plato seems to put God entirely "outside" the Cosmos -- a "God of the Beyond." [Sort of like YHWH -- "the true name of our Heavenly Creator" -- before His self-relevation to Moses in the burning bush at Sinai....]
To a Christian, that Plato could not speak of a personal creator god stands to reason; for Christ's Incarnation (by which He revealed the Father to mankind in His own Person) did not occur until some four centuries after Plato's death....
Just some stray thoughts....
Thanks so very much for writing, Cicero!
Thanks for your kind words of encouragement, FreedomProtector!
The Bible; New Testament and in the Old which hinted or even implied at a Trinity is evident.. (Father Son(Christ/messiah/savior) and Holy Spirit..) but there could be other Spirits (more than three) involved in the drama.. I'm not saying the "IS" but there could be.. Whats not spoken or hinted at or understood or conceived or conceptually grasped could be (aspects of the trinty more finely divided)..
Because it's certain any man in "this state(human)" cannot fully conceive of whom and what God is.. All "these" references are/must be anthropomorphic (to a human)..
What IF the Holy Spirit(is a corporate entity) is indeed co-workers(Angels).. and delegates of the Godhead.. Cannot God delegate?.. Would kinda lift a guardian angel to a higher position.. and make the "trinity" quite logical in Gods business.. The devil and "his" co-workers would be a rival corporation.. If every human that ever lived has a guardian angel could explain how "God" could be everywhere at the same time.. 24/7 for a lifetime..
It's just a thought.. d;-)...
But an intriguing thought.. (to me).. I can live with the Bible account as currently conceived.. but then, other scenarios could be possible too.. Like God (itself) could be a perfect corporation.. in harmony and oneness.. Operating like a well oiled spiritual machine with "the Body of Christ" added to the mechanism.. as a project.. Cause if the Bible account is true, mankind is indeed a project of "God"..
The poor devil would just be a sharpening agent, a tool, to sharpen Gods double edged sword(his word/logos;also rhema).. wielded by Adam and Eve's progeny.. I must think more about this..
Note; nontraditional trinity, indeed.. What a concept.. Spiritual Physics/Cosmology, I mean... ;).. You people are a hoot.. Course the Holy Spirit could also be the project manager of the Angels too.. same result.. Could be a blast finally figuring out how all this works in "the eternity".. Not to speak of the human spirit being made "a little higher than the angels".. <<- biblical reference WHoa..
Wouldn't want to miss the knowledge of THIS even if I Won this entire planet in some lottery.. would be not enough to even temp me..
Hi hosepipe!!!
Clarify something for me: Who/what would be the "rival corporation" of the devil and his co-workers -- the angels, or the Trinity?
Thanks so much for writing!
Thanks for the pings. It's good to get our eyes off the elcetion results and be reminded of the reality beyond this world.
Reference to the arch angel(the devil) and those that followed him(other angels).. because the devil (Satan) was and still is an angel.. Who and what the "fallen Angels" ARE I don't know exactly.. but then who does?.. What an UNfallen angels is we don't know exactly either..
Spirits?... of some kind I suppose.. Like.. "US" we are spirits too.. Most/many humans are yet to find out they are spirits also.. The Spiritual Dimension is a quite nebulous dimension at this time.. God in all aspects is/are Spirits, Angels are Spirits, even "WE" are spirits..
In the "future" we might find that humans were merely spirits riding a earthy body like a DONKEY... and this planet became totally donkeyfied.. O.K. not totally... Especially after being "born again" became a factor..
STOP IT... I see you're eyebrow raised(in my spirit- LoL) and you're toe tapping....
It's fun to muse a muse..
There are may other kinds of oppositions that may or may not resemble contradictory metaphysical claims. They too will be variously explained, resolved, or dismissed. Pythagoreans struggled over the odd and even, Zeno is famous for his paradoxes, Empedocles suggested Love and Strife, Socrates describes pain and pleasure as Janus-headed in the Phaedo, in the Parmenides we find the problem of the one and the many, Aristotle discusses the principle of noncontradiction, he also perceives the interplay of stasis and kinesis, other dualistic myths abound outside of ancient Greece, Christ our Lord teaches life through death, and so on. Hot and cold, slavery and freedom, and other kinds of opposites also show their own unique relations.
With all of these classified in some reasonable order we might strictly reserve a particular term such that antinomy is used only to speak of contradictory metaphysical claims and contradiction of formal logical oppositions. A term like paradox may now be unacceptable in cases, depending on someone's social preferences. Habits of thought often shift according to the convenience of power or advantage. Take your pick, there are a whole lot of terms that do the trick:contrariety, antitheses, in/congruity, in/consistency, inversion, dilemma, dis/parity, hetero/homogeneity, in/equality. There may be good reason to reserve the term complimentarity for observations made about physical nature.
Anyhow, what is fascinating is that Kant's resolution of the cosmological antinomy greatly resembles the description of complimentarity in particle/wave duality of subatomic physics. In fact, both of these are similar to the classic way Thomas Aquinas resolves debates: both points whose are true in a restricted sense. This is exactly how Kant works his way around. He held that these jusitifiable but contradictory metaphysical claims are resolved by limiting the application of the claim. As Kant understood it, human knowledge is barred from knowing anything in itself, including nature. This means that claims about nature are limited. They are true in a restricted sense. His restrictions were described in terms of the conditions and categories of knowledge and reasoning. And in the case of subatomic physics, "particles and waves appear to be mutually exclusive entities, but that is only from the point of view of the observer."
Thanks for your reploy, bb. More later, time for choir.
Kant loses the image of God in his transcendental reason.
Speculation needs brakes to keep our life honest. Granted that our conceptions come short of what is infinitely beyond comprehension, the truth of our speech is more directional than propositional. Consistency should be the rule of thumb, not inordinate reduction or extension.
The problem, Cicero, is that logos has different meanings. Very often when we plug in the word "reason", we end up moving in a Kantian or modern direction. What is reason? You can follow an answer going in one direction with Augustine and another in Gregory of Nyssa. Even Clement of Alexandria catches himself and so does Iranaeus. Perhaps Augustine's ciceronian Platonism prevented him from seeing how Socrates made that all-important discovery about the character of his wisdom. He didn't call it socratic ignorance. He called it a kind of human wisdom. Socrates knew that his reason fell short of the divine, although you'll find commentators a thousand to one who vouch that Plato's analysis of divine reason was human reason. Kant, for example, claims to finish what Plato began.
So a distinction must be made. The first step toward working through this problem is to recognize three distinct natures: the uncreated divine, the created human, and the created order of nature. When we say "reason" we need to take as much care as when we say "evolution." For there are kinds. And it is important to distinguish the Christian (St. John's) sense of logos from the Greek views. St. John uses the word to compel Greeks into a direction that would emancipate them from paganism. One of these pagan views was the logos-fire idea attributed by Heraclitus but very popular with the Stoics. Stoicism, held that the divine wisdom is immanent in the world. What comes out of their ethics is the injunction to live according to Nature, not the Creator of nature, a subtle but profound difference. Identifying Christ the logos with a Stoic world spirit was awfully tempting for heretics and certainly innovative.
Quite an adult comment.. not fun..... but very adult.. d;-)~',','
I have a sense that something spiritual should also be fun..
In it's purest form.. When the fun is removed or limited then a dimension is lost..
I want to believe that fun and joy go together.. and fun and joy produce harmony/harmonics..
Can't prove it but I want to believe it..
Nobody asks that it be tragic!
Drama is produced on the stage of life..
Sometimes it's even beliveable..
I personally know three ex-atheiests who were swayed by this argument; two are philosophy professors and one is a monk.I'm not sure if it is necessary to prove that there is objective beauty for the argument to be valid, as CS Lewis does when demonstrating the existence of objective value with the argument from conscience [laws written on heart imply a Lawgiver].
Well, seems we're not quite there yet, metmom. The "post-mortems" continue. Still, it is said the Chinese character for "crisis" is a combination of two other characters: "danger," and "opportunity."
The political deck got seriously reshuffled Tuesday. Now it's time to pay attention to developments, and how best to manage them going forward. I personally find it difficult to conceive that the Dems will not self-destruct sooner or later. They have no ideas, and no policy plans except for the same old tired stuff they've been recycling for decades. They have no stomach at all for war, and they do not take, e.g., security -- national and homeland -- or the need for covert intelligence services and operations seriously at all. So we have to keep looking for the "opportunities."
Thanks so much for writing!
Hi cornelis! Jeepers, but I confess I’m rather rusty on Kant these days, not having read him in decades. But if memory serves, wasn’t his most famous antinomy phenomena/noumena? That’s an interesting split, which evidently is why he wrote two critiques of reason, “pure” and “practical.” There’s another antinomy! (Please do feel free to correct my mistakes of recollection or bad reasoning.)
But what is the standard of a “decent direction” for a resolution or reconciliation of the two, except in limited cases? (That is, how do we establish the standard by which we can judge cases as being “limited?”)
You wrote:
Anyhow, what is fascinating is that Kant's resolution of the cosmological antinomy greatly resembles the description of complimentarity in particle/wave duality of subatomic physics. In fact, both of these are similar to the classic way Thomas Aquinas resolves debates: both points whose are true in a restricted sense. This is exactly how Kant works his way around. He held that these jusitifiable but contradictory metaphysical claims are resolved by limiting the application of the claim. As Kant understood it, human knowledge is barred from knowing anything in itself, including nature. This means that claims about nature are limited.Here’s a detail about Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” which as already mentioned Bohr preferred to call the “indeterminacy principle.” He explained his preference this way: “uncertainty” says that we could know, but in the instant case we just happen not to know. That is, there is still a way for us to “find out.” Indeterminacy, on the other hand, according to Bohr, says that we can’t know.[Or as Bohr put it (paraphrasing), such claims (e.g., science) are not nature itself, but indications of man’s relation to nature, and thus are dependent on man.]
They are true in a restricted sense. His restrictions were described in terms of the conditions and categories of knowledge and reasoning. And in the case of subatomic physics, “particles and waves appear to be mutually exclusive entities, but that is only from the point of view of the observer.”
Recently I came across another interesting antinomy, this one not from quantum, but from classical physics, from Rod Swenson (Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, University of Connecticut):
The first and second laws of thermodynamics are not ordinary laws of physics. Because the first law, the law of energy conservation, in effect, reduces all real-world processes, it is thus a law on which all other laws depend. In more technical terms, it expresses the time-translation symmetry of the laws of physics themselves. With respect to the second law, Eddington (1929) has argued that it holds the supreme position among all the laws of nature because it not only governs the ordinary laws of physics but the first law as well. If the first law expresses the underlying symmetry principle of the natural world (that which remains the same) the second law expresses the broken symmetry (that which changes). It is with the second law that a basic nomological understanding of end-directedness, and time itself, the ordinary experience of then and now, of the flow of things, came into the world. The search for a conserved quantity and active principle is found as early as the work of Thales and the Milesian physicists (c. 630-524 B.C.) and is thus co-existent with the beginnings of recorded science, although it is Heraclitus (c. 536 B.C.) with his insistence on the relation between persistence and change who could well be argued to hold the top position among the earliest progenitors of the field that would become thermodynamics. Of modern scholars it was Leibniz who first argued that there must be something which is conserved (later the first law) and something which changes (later the second law).If that's a bona-fide antinomy, it appears to be one that does "resolve" -- at least at the "macrolevel" of the observable universe. Another piece of the puzzle here, seemingly not consistent with Kant's cosmological antinomies....
Recently I read a wonderful essay/post from you to another correspondent in which you wrote: “Kant loses the image of God in his transcendental reason.” Just as I imagine Hegel loses it in his dialectical science: He stands Plato’s metaxy on its head, lopping off the “divine pole” of human existential tension, leaving us with a reduction to “thought thinking itself” on the basis of an obscure text from Aristotle. I guess that's why I don’t read the Germans as much as I should. With the exception of Eric Voegelin, of course, who, following Plato, keeps the door open to the divine Nous “beyond” the universe. They all seem to have spawned antinomies. As noted, Kant's phenomena/noumena; for Hegel, it was thesis/antithesis, which finds its resolution in the synthesis of “thought thinking itself.” For Voegelin it was intentionalist consciousness/luminosity of consciousness in the exgesis of reality.
On yet another post you wrote: “Socrates made that all-important discovery about the character of his wisdom. He didn't call it socratic ignorance. He called it a kind of human wisdom. Socrates knew that his reason fell short of the divine, although you'll find commentators a thousand to one who vouch that Plato’s analysis of divine reason was human reason. Kant, for example, claims to finish what Plato began.”
My goodness, but didn’t Hegel do the same thing?
Whatever. Plato analyzed divine reason, or Nous; he seemed to indicate that human reason (nous) was syngenes, or “alike” to the divine reason. Both Kant and Hegel created “reductions” of Plato — certainly neither “completed Plato’s work.” It seems to me they simply changed the subject….
Well enuf for now: I’ve run on so long already! Thank you so much, cornelis, for your magnificent essay/posts! You always bring so much to the table — whenever you decide to extend your remarks.
For clarity of thought, although not related to this discussion more than tangentially, I would recommend one German philosopher, Josef Pieper, in his books on the seven virtues, cardinal and theological.
Perhaps his essay on prudence is somewhat relevant, since I have always thought that the change in the presumed definition of prudence from the Aristotelian-Thomist view to what is evident from what Machiavelli assumes in "The Prince" marks a significant turn in our understanding of what is "real" or "realistic"--or "prudent."
The Aristotle tradition would argue that prudence is the virtue or the habit needed to understand what is true or real.
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