Don't Take Our Freedom for Granted

I'm headed out of town tomorrow for the holiday, so I won't get a chance to post anything substantial this week. But in the meantime, I thought I'd recommend a film that you need to see for the sake of the survival of our civilization.

A friend recently lent me Islam: What the West Needs to Know on DVD. It's a very professionally put together film; the information is startling and not what our cultural elite want you to hear (the same dominant culture that never managed to admit that communism was a problem).

It's politically incorrect to say (the truth often is), but the claim that Islam is a religion of peace is (very lamentably) false.

A basic principle of Islamic exegesis is that when there is a conflict between different passages in the Koran, the ones WRITTEN LATER (not necessarily situated later in the Koran) take precedence. The peaceful passages of the Koran so often quoted were written when Mohammed was just starting out in Mecca and had little power. The violent passages were written once he had ascended to power as warlord of Medina. (What's particularly frightening is that the last written book is the most violent. And I haven't mentioned the violence exemplified in the haditha, the recorded acts of Mohammed, which are taken as normative for Muslims.) In other words, violence in an essential part of Islam (those who deny it are ignorant, or lying—and the film describes how Mulsims see lying and deceit for Islam as justified).

Muslims are happy to dialogue as long as they are out of power. But when they are in control, there is no dialogue: all other religions have second-class status at best; there are no integral human rights. Those who convert from Islam are to be killed. There is no freedom to preach any religion but Islam, or to advocate any societal system but that mandated by the Koran.

I highly recommend Islam: What the West Needs to Know; it's essential for understanding the depth of peril the West faces from Islamic ideology.

So this Thanksgiving, give thanks and don't take your freedom for granted.

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Also read what Hillaire Belloc wrote about Islam: "The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed."

More from Maritain Conference

Two weeks ago (Nov. 2-5) I attended the American Maritain Association conference in Nashville. The topic was "Nature, Science, and Wisdom: the Role of the Philosophy of Nature." I posted a little on it last week, and I would like to tell you more now. There were many great talks and because many were concurrent, I was unable to make it to all of those that interested me. Below are some sparse and unfortunately inadequate notes on those I attended.

Fr. Leo Elders spoke on St. Thomas Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle's Physics. There are diverse ways of grouping the 8 books of the Physics. The first five books are on nature and the last three are on motion. But Porphyry and Philoponus classed book 5 with books 6-8. Aquinas classed books 3 and 4 as being on movement, 5 and 6 on parts of movement, and 7 on movement in relation to movers. Fr. Elders contends that when St Thomas write in his commentary of what he regards as secure doctrine (teaching) in the Physics, he calls Aristotle "the Philosopher." Thus book 8 is not established doctrine. In his commentary on De Caelo (On the Heavens), St. Thomas says that Aristotle's cosmology is not necessarily true: that other cosmologies are possible.

Mark Ryland's plenary talk emphasized the ways in which both Darwinism and its primary critic Intelligent Design (ID) have in common a very modern view of Nature; he criticized the modern view and suggested that Aristotle's view must be brought back into the modern debate to provide a more radical critique of the philosophical problems that have grown up around modern science. He was at pains to emphasize, however, that ID does broadly agree with Aristotle in rejecting materialist reductionism and arguing for an intelligent cause; this gulf separating ID and Aristotle from such reductionism dwarf the differences between the two.

The big assumption that ID and Darwinism have in common is that "design" can only come from outside of nature—that the regular workings of nature cannot themselves manifest an intelligent designer, but God's workings somehow can only be over and above those of nature. This commonality of outlook predates Darwin even in those advocating design: William Paley's example concluding design from a watch found in the woods was overtly mechanistic. The ordering within a watch does not come from within, as it would in a natural thing like a tree, but from without. The parts of a watch have no intrinsic relationship to each other: the order is imparted from outside. Darwinism is the completion of the Newtonian revolution because Darwin brought naturalism to biology in the way that Newton and his followers had brought it to the inanimante world and the cosmos.

The modern Intelligent Design movement manifests the same problem. In William Dembski's trichotomy of explanations into "necessity, chance, and design." Necessity is another name for things that happen by a regularity that can be encapsulated as a law. But why can't regularities in nature demonstrate "design" in some sense? Surely the fact that pine seeds grow up in the vast majority of cases to be pine trees and not "man-faced ox progeny" or some other monster is evidence of order in the world, and thus of an orderer. As Peter Pagan said in his talk, "Admitting natural selection without a selector is like admitting action without an agent" (paraphrase).

Bryan Cross's paper, "A Philosophical Critique of Dembski’s Mathematical Argument to Design," amplified on the shortcomings of ID by dismantling a critical part of Dembski's design argument.

In his book No Free Lunch, William Dembski argues that certain recently proven mathematical theorems show that evolutionary algorithms are in themselves unable to generate specified complex information [necessary for development of new forms].... thus that intelligence can be the only source of such information. [p. 1]

...

I have considered various ways of modifying Dembski's Natural Cause argument so as to make it valid, and I think I have shown that none of these ways is successful.... This does not mean that we cannot by way of natural reason determine that nature was intelligently designed. On the contrary, the intelligent design of nature is readily apparent, even in (and perhaps especially in) its mathematical elegance as revealed more fully by modern physics. But I have shown that the generative limitations of mathematical algorithms do not demonstrate that the complex specified information we happen to find in nature must have been inserted into the cosmos by an intelligent designer. [pp. 14-15]

A big part of Dembski's problem, according to Cross, is that he assumes that the causal powers of material things are completely described by the mathematical representions of their characterizations. This unexamined assumption is one of the great philosophical mistakes of our age, and so deserves examination here. Cross writes lucidly on the inadequacy of mathematics to comprehend reality:

Mathematical modeling is more successful when we are treating very simple entities, or artifacts whose extrinsic nature is simple. Mathematical modeling also works best over a short period of time. The longer we run out the model, typically the less likely the result matches the state of the actual thing being modeled. We 'successfully' model complex entities only by at least to some significant degree stripping away (abstractively) their depth of being, their particularities or unique accidents, and their environmental interactions. Perhaps 'wildly' successful is a bit of an overstatement.

What is more ontologically revealing, is not how well simple entities can be mathematically modeled, but how even the simplest of living organisms cannot as such be mathematically modeled. The greater the difficulty in mathematically capturing entities as we move up the chain of being indicates that we never fully capture them as we move down the chain of being. Even the simplest of material beings is still a material being, neither a pure form nor an ens rationis [being of reason]. This implies that no material being can be perfectly mathematically modeled. Therefore, we cannot justifiably assume that the per se limitations of purely mathematical algorithms with respect to generating information are precisely the information generating limitations of any material being. [pp. 13-14]

Marie George gave a fascinating and entertaining account of the many problems of animal language studies in her talk "Nature, Human Beings, and Animals." These studies claim that apes (and sometimes dolphins) can communicate on par with humans (which they do by pushing buttons on a special keyboard) and thus have intellects. Among the problems she observed with the studies:

1. Failure to distinguish actions based necessarily on intellect from those based on internal senses (animals are conscious, but not self-conscious),
2. Failure to acknowledge that animals can learn and their characteristic actions need not be based exclusively on instinct,
3. Failure of researchers to provide transcripts or data sets (to show how representative remarkable events documented in papers are of their behavior).
4. Failure to account for influence of the researcher (e.g., emotional reactions to apes "speaking")

Dr. George described how unredacted accounts of interactions with these apes show how unconversational they are. Their words are statements are mostly single words, such as "banana," or "tickle [me]." She read a published journalistic account in which the ape mostly tried to insert a stick in the journalist's ear. Apes don't use language to augment their own knowledge of the world, or that of others—in other words they don't converse.

Dr. George quoted Noam Chomsky as saying, "It’s about as likely that an ape will prove to have a language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for human being to teach them to fly." In other words, if apes were capable by nature of communicating in a human way, they wouldn't need us humans to unlock that capability. Contrast the painstaking efforts required to get an ape to "talk" with the almost automatic aquisition of language by a human infant (to the point that it would take incredible efforts to prevent a human infant from talking).

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November 29: corrected summary of Mark Ryland's talk; other minor corrections.

The Real Darwinist Agenda

I got back Sunday from the American Maritain Association conference in Nashville. I had a great time. I'll write more about the conference later, but for now I just wanted to tell you about some of the interesting ideas about the actual doctrine of Darwinists.

Before I get to that, I should mention that there were a variety of (philosophical) perspectives on Darwinism at the conference. Mark Ryland's plenary talk explored the similarities between Darwinism and Intelligent Design (ID: capital I, capital D), beginning with Paley. In the final session, the speakers were Fr. Edward Oakes, Michael Behe, and Peter Pagan. Fr. Oakes spoke on the compatibility of (an understanding of) Darwinism with traditional theism. Dr. Pagan was critical of Darwinism and Intelligent Design Theory. Only Dr. Behe spoke against Darwinism and in favor of ID.

A central argument of Dr. Behe's talk dovetailed with the argument of an earlier talk by Richard von Sternberg on "Is Darwinism Anti-Logos by Chance or Design?". It is this talk that I want to turn to first.

Dr. Sternberg's talk posed the question, "[I]s Darwinism neutral with respect to logoi and the Logos [i.e., divine order in nature, and the Divine Archetype]? To answer these questions it is necessary to examine Darwinian responses to empirical challenges." Darwinists like Ernst Mayr have conducted repeated purges of scientists who would observe any sort of order in nature. This behavior shows they are against finding any sort of order in nature: they believe only in complete randomness.

Unfortunately for these ideological Darwinists, science is self-correcting in the long-run: the truth cannot help coming out eventually. (And besides, you really can't do science without believing in some sort of order in nature.) Hence, evolutionary theory is currently in a phase of "Damage Control", as Dr. Sternberg labelled the era since 1976 to the present, in which neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins scramble to claim the order bursting from scientific research as feathers in their own cap.

Other interesting details from Dr. Sternberg's talk:

1. Population genetics models assume infinite population size. But metazoans (multi-cellular animals) lack an "effective population size" for natural selection to operate. The models that support Darwinism don't apply to reality.
2. Almost all the race biologists in Nazi Germany were Darwinists.
3. Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, who warmly declined for P.R. purposes.

Dr. Sternberg concluded that Darwinism is purposely anti-logos.

Michael Behe's talk in the last session supported Dr. Sternberg's claims about the Darwinists' true agenda. Dr. Behe said that in evaluating the meaning of Darwinism, one should not look at the "tamest" possible version of the theory (Fr. Oakes's project), but at what the Darwinists actually say about the theory.

In 1995 the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) defined evolution to exclude any compatibility with belief in a Creator:

The diversity of life on Earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments. (h/t: Metanexus)

Under public pressure, the statement was later revised to omit the words "unsupervised, impersonal," but (as expressed elsewhere) with the understanding that "natural" includes these concepts. (Current statement)

In September 2005, 39 Nobel laureates (many them biologists) wrote a letter (PDF) to the Kansas School Board:

Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.

The words "unguided, unplanned" are exactly those used by Cardinal Schonborn in his NYT op-ed. It is very clear that Darwinism as represented by Darwinists is against any sort of design in nature ("intelligent design" in all lowercase).

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Citations in Sternberg's Slides

Abigail Lustig, "Biologists on Crusade," Darwinian Heresies (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

A. Desmond, Archetypes to Ancestors (University of Chicago Press, 1986).

A. Desmond, The Politics of Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 1992).

N.A. Rupke, Richard Owen (Clarendon Press, 1995).

P.J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

G.S. Levit and K. Meister, "The History of Essentialism vs. Ernst Mayr's 'Essentialism Story': A case study in German Idealistic Morphology," Theory in Biosciences 124:281-307.

Rainy morning

The day's overcast and drizzly. I feel down on days like this. It'd be nice if it were sunny out, but it has to rain at some point. Rain has the virtue of washing away the dust and grease that accumulates in the sun's reign.

A number of people I know are upset by today's election results. Sure it's sad to have the Dems in control of at least one house of Congress. But the Republicans hadn't comported themselves very well when they were in control: as Lord Acton said, "power corrupts"--it corrupts even those whose ideological committments should dictate they eschew power and government expansion. Let's hope President Bush will take this opportunity to reconnect with the "reality-based" community, and admit that leadership is as much about a proper sensitivity as it is resolution in the face of opposition.

The challenge for the Democrats now is to govern without falling prey to their vices of elitism and strident, liberal silliness. If they can avoid annoying people for another two years, they might be able to hold onto power. I'd be (pleasantly) surprised were that to happen. We need a viable two-party system, and for the longest time the Dems haven't been holding up their end. It's competition that keeps politics healthy.

The rain won't last forever.

Degrees of Abstraction

I doubt I'll be able to post anythign substantial next week, as I'll be in Nashville at the American Maritain Association convention on "Nature, Science and Widsom." In preparation, I've been reading Jacques Maritain. His Science and Wisdom is a wonderfully brief and lucid explanation of many things I've been trying to convey here. I highly recommend it. His Degrees of Knowledge is longer but includes more complete explanations.

Below is a very helpful selection from Degrees of Knowledge on the three degrees of abstraction. The diagram is my contribution. The a axis parametrizes displines by whether their objects can exist without matter, while the b axis parametrizes disciplines by whether their objects can be conceived without matter. (Maritain's diagram from Degrees of Knowledge is here [new window]; it is more detailed, but for that somewhat less clear on the main point of this post.)

The mind can consider objects abstracted from, and purified of, matter but only to the extent that matter is the basis of diversity amongst individuals within a species.... In this way, the object remains; and remains to the very extent that it has been presented to the intellect, impregnated with all the notes coming from matter, and abstracts only from the contingent and strictly individual peculiarities, which science overlooks. The mind thus considers bodies in their mobile and sensible reality, bodies garbed in their empirically ascertainable qualities and properties. Such an object can neither exist without matter and the qualities bound up with it, nor can it be conceived without matter. It is this great realm that the ancients called Physica, knowledge of sensible nature [i.e., natural philosophy and modern science], the first degree of abstraction.

Secondly, the mind can consider objects abstracted from, and purified of, matter insofar as matter is the general basis for the active and passive sensible properties of bodies. In this case, it considers nothing more than a certain property which it isolates within bodies—a property that remains when everything sensible is left aside—quantity, number or the extended taken in itself. This is an object of thought which cannot exist without sensible matter, but which can be conceived without it. For, nothing sensible or experimental enters into the definition of the ellipse or of the square root. This is the great field of Mathematica, knowledge of Quantity as such according to the relations of order and measure proper to it—the second degree of abstraction.

Finally, the mind can consider objects abstracted from, and purified of, all matter. In this case it considers in things only the very being with which they are saturated, being as such and its laws. These objects of thought which not only can be conceived without matter, but which can even exist without it, whether they never exist in matter, as in the case of God and pure spirits, or whether they exist in material as well as in immaterial things, for example, substance, quality, act and potency, beauty, goodness, etc. This is the wide domain of Metaphysica, knowledge of that which is beyond sensible nature, or of being as being—the third degree of abstraction.

Maritain further explains in Science and Wisdom how the degrees of abstraction are inhomogeneous in degree:

The way in which things are organised in the thought of Aristotle is well known. The theory of the three degrees or the three orders of abstraction became classic in the schools.

In the first degree of this process, the mind knows an object which it disengages from the singular and contingent moment of sense perception, but whose very intelligibility implies a reference to the sensible. This first and lowest degree of scientific abstraction is precisely the degree of physics and of the philosophy of nature. It defines the field of sensible reality. Above it comes the degree of mathematical abstraction, in which the mind knows an object whose intelligibility no longer implies an intrinsic reference to the sensible, but to the imaginable. This is the domain of the mathematical praeter-real. And finally, in the highest degree of intelletual vision, the metaphysical degree, the intelligibility of the object is free from any intrinsic reference to the senses or to imagination. This is the field of the trans-sensible reality.

Thus Aristotle did not only lay the foundations of physics. At the same time he threw light on the difference which distinguishes physics from metaphysics—a matter of capital importance. The division of the three orders of abstraction is an analogical division. The three orders are not part of the same genus: they constitute fundamentally different genera. They are not set at stages one above the other in the same generical line: there is a true noetic heterogeneity between them.

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Jacques Maritain, "The Philosophy of Nature," Science and Wisdom, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954), 37-39.

Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Gerald B. Phelan (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959), 35-36 (diagram, 39).

Equality's Discontents

I'm still working on a lengthier, substantial post, but in the meantime, I just re-read a great story by Kurt Vonnegut and thought you might enjoy it as well:

Harrison Bergeron.

Ignore the gratuitous initial editorialization by the person who so kindly posted the story. There has always been a tension between those two virtues of the French Revolution, liberty and equality. Hopefully our current leaning toward the latter won't eventuate in the dystopic future Vonnegut imagines.

The Virtue of Vanity

Now you might be inclined to think that an essay claiming to upholding vanity as a positive good is akin to Erasmus' "In Praise of Folly," but you would be mistaken. I mean seriously to point out the oft-neglected good side to what is often called vanity.

(This essay takes its inspiration in part from Alan Ehrenhalt's essay "Hypocrisy Has Its Virtues" from the waning days of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal; the piece explained how hypocrisy really is the tribute vice pays to virtue.¹)

We Americans pride ourselves on being practical, results-oriented people. We don't go in for the foppery that preoccupies other cultures (what Tocqueville called "forms"). We don't care as much for how a thing looks as for what it does. Ceremony should be minimized Furnishings and clothing should be functional, not fancy.

There is of course a great amount of goodness in this view, which is one thing that makes this a great country. However, there are two sides to everything. o as usual, I'm assuming the devil's advocate role, first of all to point out that any behavior taken to an extreme is no longer a virtue, but a vice. As Aristotle observed, true virtue is the medium between two extremes, and it must be admitted that we Americans, as with any other people in this fallen world, sometimes take our virtues beyond their proper limits.

The truth is that often what we call vanity is just being thoughtful of others. This realization first dawned on me when I noticed the dress of one of my fellow grad students, whom I'll call "Joe." He always wore "comfortable" clothes: birkenstocks, shorts and a t-shirt. I probably dressed only marginally better myself at the time, but whereas I didn't have to look at myself much, I did have to look at him: his hairy legs, long hair, and poorly shaven face were an eyesore. On reflection, I realized that "dressing up" was really a form of consideration for the people around us.

Women are often accused of being vain and the charge is not always just, but a reflection of their being much more "relational" creatures who take joy in pleasing others. As a current colleague of mine says, whereas men define themselves by what they do, women define themselves by their relationships. Of course, pleasing others can become self-serving—the vicious side of the virtue. Women just as easily as men use others, and usually by manipulation.² Our "vanity" or consciousness of the importance of others' perceptions is the glue that holds society together and keeps us from fragmenting into cultural solipsists.

Last time I saw Joe, he had become engaged and his mode of self-presentation had shaped up substantially. He'd clipped his hair, and wore much more respectable clothing. His fiancee had obviously inspired him with some of her feminine "vanity." And the world is a better place for it.

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Notes

1. The only quality immoral moderns like Bill Clinton regard as a virtue is consistency. "At least I'm not a hypocrite," they say in an effort to excuse themselves. But really they indict themselves of being "little minds"—ala Ralph Waldo Emerson.

2. Karol Wojtyla writes very well about the reciprocal unfortunate way each sex often uses the other in Love and Responsibility.

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Alan Ehrenhalt, "Hypocrisy Has Its Virtues," The New York Times[!], February 6, 2001.