Some postmodernists speak of the “end of philosophy,” since it supposedly can no longer tell us anything about the world independent of its relation to us — about that which exists “out there” and derives, as Taylor puts it, “from a power which is beyond me.” At present, he writes, “we live in a condition” in which we suspect our own beliefs as having been influenced by sources other than the self and its reasons, with the human subject the mere effect of forces alien to our being. “We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time,” he writes, “looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty.” Has religion, then, come to end in doubts about ourselves?
In “A Secular Age,” Taylor answers with a resounding no. He argues for “the ‘deconstruction’ of the death of God view” proclaimed by Nietzsche. To see secularization as simply the separation of church and state, the alienation of truth from power, and the rise of skepticism and worldliness, he writes, is to miss the deeper and more enduring residues of religion and the spiritual life, the true “bulwarks of belief” that in his view have hardly eroded. Taylor argues against the “subtraction stories” of modernity, in which religious belief and other “confining horizons” are “sloughed off,” leaving the mind without faith or piety. Instead, he argues, “Western modernity, including its secularity, is the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial features of human life.” Even the old distinction between the sacred and the profane has taken on new meaning. Instead of disappearing, God is now “sanctifying us everywhere,” including “in ordinary life, our work, in marriage, and so on.”
Philosophy, in Taylor’s estimate, also enjoys a certain sanctification of mind and will. He cites Descartes to suggest how we are rational beings demanding to be ruled by reason governed by will. Freud’s sense of the proud solitariness of the ego is also an example of the inner truth of the emotions asking to be controlled apart from formal religion, and William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience” indicates how people everywhere have a need to believe that can be determined by the will.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Do We Live in a Secular Age?
And what does a secular age mean?
Charles Taylor addresses the question in his monumental work, A Secular Age. Here is an outtake, taken from a New York Times book review:
Perhaps his question about doubt summarizes our true secular age much better than the works of science, technology, and philosophical agnostics (such as me) and atheists (such as Dawkins).
The idea of doubt about our past and our nature is a powerful one. His point about secularity driving much deeper than political issues on the separation of church and state is another. We haven't merely become less religious, or more scientific, we've also become profoundly uncertain.
Science supports us in our uncertainty as it describes the fundamental fuzziness of the quantum universe and the fundamental chaotic nature of apparently orderly systems, such as river systems, weather fronts, and trees. Knowing that we know is no longer a possibility. But knowing we can learn and change me prove to be a more than fair exchange for us.
If philosophers are right about the fact that philosophy consists of only a long series of questions, a conversation of questions, then philosophy is truly not dead and may even revive in our secular age.
I have written an essay on Charles Taylor elsewhere. Please give it a read:
Darwinian Conservatism
Larry Arnhart has been writing a superb blog detailing many aspects of how biological evolution and American conservatism mesh very nicely.
For instance, he recently wrote a paper for a political science conference titled, Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right: A Reply to Critics. Here is his summary of the paper as posted on August 10, 2011 in his blog:
Some of the material in this paper has been pulled from various posts on this blog.
Under the title "What Nature Has Taught All Animals," I summarize some of the common ground between Thomistic natural law and Darwinian natural right.
I then reply to six objections that have been raised by my critics:
(1) It is said that I fail to see that natural law depends on a divine lawgiver as its source.
(2) Darwinian science denies the natural teleology that is required for natural law.
(3) Darwinian science denies the reality of species as the ground of natural law.
(4) Darwinian natural right denies human freedom by denying the freedom of reason in ruling over the human desires or emotions.
(5) Darwinian explanations of human nature ignore the importance of culture and habituation in shaping human character.
(6) Darwinian naturalism is self-defeating, because in denying that the human mind was created in God's image, and asserting that the mind arose from a mindless process of evolution, it gives us no reason to trust our mental capacity for true beliefs.
My general claim is that by rooting natural law in a scientific conception of human nature, and by avoiding the contradictions that arise from Thomas Aquinas's occasional efforts to elevate revelation over reason, Darwinian natural right is the natural fulfillment of Thomistic natural law.
In short, Arnhart insists that biological evolution permits the development of moral sentiments, and then ethical/legal systems of thought and action in human beings without the necessity of a god planning and then creating human beings. Biological evolution doesn't mandate these developments, but it does indeed permit them.
Read Arnhart's blog. It's excellent.
Were People Nice When They Believed in Hell?
Not that I'd ever noticed, even after a close read of history.
Brian LeCompte responded this way to a post on the riots in London. I then responded as written above:
I believe the problem is a loss of the fear of Hell. Nietzsche predicted that when liberal religion destroys man's concept of good and evil, he will be delivered over to his own irrational appetites. That was in reference to the coming world wars of the 20th century. We have yet to see the outcome in the 21st.
Lots of countries besides the UK have social welfare programs and are not faring so poorly in their moral example. What the UK today lacks is a sense of tribal unity. Its best and brightest are fleeing the country for work abroad. The bonds of ethnicity among the remaining are weathered by the large influx of immigrants. The bonds of religion are broken by the inevitable ennui brought on by liberal theology. Recent articles on the gang culture of UK youth point to an influence by American gang culture, with the same slang, music, and dress code here being appropriated there. American gang culture has always provided a sense of belonging in a world where one doesn't belong. The UK youth must feel adrift and lost.
But blame it first on the loss of fear of Hell, rather than on politics. Without fear of loss of heaven and the pains of hell, you cannot expect a population to be anything other than pagan.
One wonders how humans survived the hunter-gatherer stage of cultural evolution. Did the emergent concept of hell get us out of this mess?
Unlikely. The rise of civilizations during the Axial Age and the early formation of related concepts of hell were not known for promoting any resulting civilized behavior between tribes either.
LeCompte was impressed by the high level of violence exhibited by humans during the 20th century. But mass violence such as that is much more likely to be a result of the power given to humans by industrialization than the loss of an ancient religious belief.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
A Humanist's Manifesto
I wrote this manifesto partially in response to the Humanist Manifestos published by the American Humanist Association (I had some major problems with the statist sentiments expressed therein) and partially because I wanted to summarize my own personal belief system in some detail, but in as few words as possible. I got my manifesto down to under 900 words (not including introduction). Enjoy:
Did Democracy Actually Grow Out of Christianity?
If so, why did it take 1800 years to do so?
Pope Benedict XVI’s campaign to remind Europe of its Christian roots and to call Europe to a nobler understanding of democracy. As the Holy Father demonstrated in an address in Zagreb, Croatia, in early June, the two parts of that campaign—the recovery of Christian roots and the deepening of 21st-century Europe’s idea of democracy—go together.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/08/benedict-xvi-on-europersquos-future
The Pope claims democracy derives from Christianity, but considering how many societies over the centuries considered themselves Christian, one might just as well claim that monarchy, theocracy, serfdom, and tyranny also grew out of Christianity.
Democracy in nation-states is a very recent political/historical phenomenon. After discounting ancient developments in Greek city-states, we can confidently assert that there would be no democracy today without 1. Specific cultural tendencies in England that encourage self-government in 2. its American colonies, which then 3. generated wholly new democratic forms out of its frontier experience.
A careful reading of Christian writers dealing with the existence of the then new American Republic showed that they were actually very worried about said Republic, worried that it not foster Christianity, but would in fact destroy Christian culture. The presumption that European "Christendom" was as firmly based upon the divine right of kings as it was on the Bible is a commonplace historical observation. The further presumption that a society tightly organized under its kings and nobles and official clergy would be the only society capable of sheltering Christianity is also well noted in the literature of political thought in the late 18th century through (at least) the early 20th century.
It would be a much more accurate assertion that modern democracy derives from the Enlightenment...American style.
When did Catholic theologians and popes figure out that their predecessors were wrong about the nature of America and of democracy?
More Indications that Life is an Emergent Phenomenon
Note to Creationists: Wherever science looks, science seems to find emergence. Including finding the building blocks of DNA in meteorites.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Certainty and Uncertainty, Part 1
Nothing is ever certain. We can be reasonably certain of that. There are aspects of our world that baffle us, others that we think we know, and then learn better. The reasonable certainty of our uncertainty is the attitude we've taken in the last few centuries, which has allowed modern science to sprout, grow and flourish. Instead of a liability, uncertainty becomes an asset. Science uses uncertainty as a tool. We look into the chasm of darkness of our ignorance, learn a bit, spread the light, which then intersects with a much more vast realm of ignorance. This is why we are convinced that we are more ignorant than we ever were. Even though we're not.
That uncanny ability of moderns to learn from our own uncertainty is exactly what leads us to discover. The nature of stars and grass and leaders and food and sex. Things that our forebears knew existed, but couldn't explain. So, naturally, they imputed all sorts of magical nonsense to them.
With uncertainty and science to guide us, we pried at mysterious existence and found less mystery and paradoxically more mystery. The universe became a cat's cradle of entanglements, of unknowable complexity, of emergence, often unpredictable, full of unintended consequences to our planned actions. That most of the universe is this way, unplanned, uncreated, unguided, is something that our ancestors had never guessed. This is not a natural thought to us. Not self-evident at all.
We are fooled by our own intentions. Since we have intentions, we had assumed everything else did, too. The river wills its flow to the sea. The lightning wills its blasting. The birds their flocking. The flowers their blossoming. But even amongst ourselves, only but a small portion of organized human life is the successful fulfillment of intention. The flawless production of the craftsman, the organizers of a hunt. And then the fearful, astonishing, happy, desolate, unintended consequence pops up again to bedevil us.
You can think of this as one reason I'm a philosophical agnostic if you wish.
Monday, August 8, 2011
The Star, the Star Maker, and the Scripted Universe
Sometimes concepts are so tough to wrap your mind around, you need science fiction metaphors to do the work for you. Such is the theological conundrum of a god so powerful that it overwhelms its universe. And such is my problem with the Judeo-Christian model of a god. Wouldn't an all-powerful, all-knowing god automatically run everything in its universe? The short, one-word answer is a resounding YES!
And this essay is my very long answer to the same question. When I read Arthur C. Clarke's short story "The Star" and Olaf Stapledon's landmark novel, "Star Maker," I realized exactly what was wrong with "Christendom's" concept of God. In short, the Scripted Universe. One of the genuinely creepiest concepts human beings have ever come up with. Think of what I describe in this essay as modern science's updated version of the ancient Greeks' concept of Fate. [shudder]
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
The Problem with Certainty
In 2005, in his last homily given to the College of Cardinals before being elevated to the papacy, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger famously warned, “we are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
There's another problem with certainty that the Pope and other orthodox believers don't address: Human fallibility. They assume that if they get The Word from on High, that they not only get it from an infallible source (very doubtful), but that they understand it infallibly. However, as we've learned to our sorrow over the centuries, even the most devoutedly kind and generous believer can indeed be in error. I don't need to use the most famous examples from history. Just look at your own decidedly fallible life, as I look at mine.
Our own highest goals may or may not be our own desires, but our self-knowledge certainly should warn us against Believing without a care to whether we are actually correct in our beliefs.
Why I Am an American Conservative
Many religious people will find it odd that a non-religious American can be a conservative. In this essay, I attempt to make it crystal clear as to how this can be:
American conservatives seek to conserve a classical liberal order, which includes, among many other good things, freedom of religion and freedom from the requirement to be religious. America is not a command society in any sense. It certainly is the opposite of a theocracy. Thus, any non-religious person who reads carefully and studies American political philosophy will find himself or herself becoming an American conservative.
The Problem with Darwinian Language
In this essay, I explain why evolutionists must use terms indicating intention when describing unintentional, emergent properties of evolutionary theory:
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