Collapse: The Blog

The Name of the Rose

I recently picked up Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, a murder mystery set in the early 14th century, at the start of the collapse of the medieval social order. The primary character is William of Baskerville (whose novice attendant, Adso of Melk, narrates the book), a sort of House-like metaphysician and heresy examiner, who has long and fascinating conversations on the philosophical and theological developments of the day.

But so far, my favorite aspect of the book is it's sheer quotability. This one leapt out at me from the prologue:

In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarves), but this is merely one of the many facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels, Lucretius becomes a woman. Everything is on the wrong path.

Indeed, it is.

Well, Darn

I've been trying to catch up on philosophy lately and was surprised to discover that my diagnosis of the modern condition as a case of spiritual autism is already heavily represented in the works of Eric Voegelin (e.g., The New Science of Politics), who regarded modernity as a resurgence of Gnosticism and who saw the modern mind's pathologies as arising from a characteristic alienation from society and a belief in the inherent disorder of the universe. He even has a better word for my cumbersome "spiritual autism" formulation: "pneumopathology" (literally, spiritual sickness or deformation).

Darn!

More on this later, when (if) I finish reading.

Things the Far-Right Needs #1: A Book

As conservatives, we ought to know first and primarily that ideals are worthless unless given institutional realization. The far-right has no shortage of good ideas; we simply have no means to propagate and disseminate them in the hopes of their ultimate actualization.

Nearly every major ideology represented on the national stage today has some readily accessible creed at its disposal. Every religion has its holy book, and so every ideology has its statement of principles, whether the left's Theory of Justice or the libertarians'/paleoconservatives' Founding documents (The Declaration, Constitution, and Federalist/Antifederalist Papers). The far-right has no shortage of principles, but the thought that informs it is largely scattered across millennia, cultures, and languages. Worse, it is often largely unreadable to the modern, poorly-educated layman of modest intellect who intuits that modernity sucks but isn't aware that there's an alternative.

What the far-right needs, first and foremost, is a book. I'm inclined to think that, since the second-sigma types (115 < IQ < 130) are overwhelmingly a leftist constituency, we are better off confining at least our initial efforts to those within, say, half a standard deviation of the mean (92 < IQ < 108), which has the advantage of being a larger proportion of people by a factor of almost 3. Later efforts can focus on peeling away some of that intellectual middle-class, who in turn may well become the vanguard of later reactionary efforts.

Because our target demographic is naturally of more modest intellect, any reactionary book needs to be written appropriately. It should be a relatively slim volume which distills difficult concepts into easy and intuitively accessible forms. We have plenty of models to go on in this regard; Edward Feser's The Last Superstition does a wonderful job of presenting difficult principles like teleology, essentialism, and the distinction between act and potency, and Bonald's essays likewise are great distillations of a vast philosophical tradition that stretches from Socrates to Scruton.

We are lucky in that all the work has been done for us. Where the left fumbles around in the dark making shit up as it goes along, the right already has a coherent vision of God, of creation, of man and of his place in the universe, and of society. The challenge, such as it is, is merely in capturing the most essential points of several millennia's worth of work and expressing them in terms the average laymen can understand and be convinced by.

We need to write a book. We need to distribute free copies of it to every library in America. And we need to ruthlessly promote the Hell out of it.

Berg's Third Way: The 'God Has No Explanatory Value' Argument

Berg's Third Way (of six arguments for atheism) reads as follows:

1. God if he exists must be the ultimate being and provide the answer to all our ultimate questions -- otherwise he is not really God.

2. Yet even supposing as a hypothesis that God exists the questions that God was supposed to finally answer still remain (though in some cases God is substituted in the question for the Universe).

3. Therefore hypothesising God's existence is only unnecessarily adding an extra stage to such problems and has no real explanatory value.

4. Therefore according to Logic (Occam's Razor Law -- 'that entites are not to be multiplied beyond necessity') we should not postulate God's existence and there is no adequate reason to suppose that God exists.

5. Therefore we should suppose that God does not exist.

Berg opens the chapter with a real knee-slapper:

The question who created God occurs readily to children and sometimes even to adults when they are told that God created the world but that question is never properly answered. This question ('who created God?') is so simple and occurs so readily that its age and first use is unrecorded and is probably as old as the notion of God as Creator. Presumably because this question cannot be answered satisfactorily it is usually dismissed contemptuously by theists as childish, facile and at best missing the point. It is certainly not responded to seriously by theists.

But that's because God is a necessary being -- He was not created because it would be impossible for Him not to exist. If theists don't take the objection (or the objector) seriously, it's because the argument is nonsense: even to ask it is to betray instantly one's ignorance of what theists are saying.

We see motion and change in the universe. Yet we also know that nothing moves or changes itself, or does so without cause at all: everything that moves does so because it is acted upon by something else. The stone being pushed along the ground by a stick is itself being pushed along by my hand. And my hand moves because local muscles are moving, which are moving because nervous impulses are instructing them to, which are doing so because my central nervous system is instructing them to, and so on up the chain of causality. Every chain of causality has a beginning, just as surely as every train rolling down the tracks is led by an engine. The beginning of every chain of motion and every chain of changes is therefore a thing which is itself unmoving and unchanging; to say it was created is a non sequitur. If it were created, it would not be the beginning.

If it is not the case that God is a necessary being, then, again, we are owed an argument as to why. Citing approvingly materialists like Carvakas and Hume, as Berg does, doesn't tell us anything.

Now, if God is a necessary entity, then it is hardly the case that asserting His creation of the universe "has no explanatory value." By contrast, He alone is the source of all explanatory value. The Godless materialist conception of the universe (as Edward Feser aptly demonstrates throughout The Last Superstition) leads unavoidably to falsehood, absurdity, and evil. Ockham's Razor, the supposition of scientific economy, cuts nothing away here: no entities are multiplied beyond necessity. (Ockham's Razor is severely overused by people wanting to sound smart, anyway; it's not a binding principle, much less a "law" as Berg misrepresents it, and at any rate, its common formulation itself implies that economy is the least important consideration in any scientific endeavor).

Next up, Berg's Fourth Way: The 'This is Not the Best Possible World' Argument.

Berg's Second Way: The Man and God Comprehension Gulf

Geoffrey Berg's second argument for the nonexistence of God is the "Man and God Comprehension Gulf," which he acknowledges more or less borrowing part from David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. (Hume is probably the one author most cited in the course of this book; not surprising, since he was, after all, the patron saint of the modern antirational liberal utilitarian atheist). It proceeds as follows:

1. Man is finite (in time, space and power, etc).

2. God if he exists is infinite (in time, space and power, etc).

3. Therefore mankind cannot possibly recognise God or even know that God exists.

There are (more than) a few things wrong with this argument, the chief one being that "or even know that God exists" does not follow from the premises.

This is (at best) an argument for agnosticism in the face of any particular claimant to Godhood, not an argument for atheism. Berg himself acknowledges this near the end of the chapter:

So the point that the comprehension gulf argument is an argument that shows we are unable to demonstrate the existence of God rather than an argument that shows God does not exist is valid. However even so all religions are still undermined by this argument irrespective of whether God actually exists. Sensible people would not worship a possible entity whose real existence (if such there is) they are necessarily incapable of determining, let alone identifying.

But notice that the argument itself doesn't mean that "we are unable to demonstrate the existence of God," so this dodge is entirely unfair. The argument, at best, suggests that we could not recognize as God an entity standing before us: it does not suggest that we cannot deduce the existence of God abstractly, and even discern some characteristics of His nature, through the exercise of reason, which is precisely what the Five Ways (which he summarily dismisses without explanation) do. Here Berg is simply asserting that his argument leads to conclusions it does not warrant.

But then, the fact that God is a vastly different being from ourselves does not itself mean we could not recognize Him. God is omnipotent, after all: He need only will that a person know His existence for it to be so. And, of course, if God is in fact the "joy of man's desiring" -- if, as C. S. Lewis says, "God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love" -- then this objection fades away to nothing. To know God (by participation in the Beatific Vision) is no more an exercise in rational discernment than to know one's wife: it is simply a fact.

Berg probably doesn't know this because he is, again, completely ignorant of what theists believe and why they believe it. What a tragedy for him.

Next up, Berg's Third Way: The 'God Has No Explanatory Value' Argument.

Berg's First Way: The Aggregate of Qualities Argument

As I mentioned earlier, I recently had the extreme misfortune of stumbling across Geoffrey Berg's The Six Ways of Atheism, a sloppy, solipsistic, and derivative work that would be barely worth mentioning if it weren't so likely to damn some poor and thoughtless idiot's soul to Hell.

This post is the first in a six-part series addressing and refuting all six of Berg's "ways." The first is what he calls the Aggregate of Qualities Argument, and proceeds thus:

1. If God exists, God must necessarily possess all of several remarkable qualities (including supreme goodness, omnipotence, immortality, omniscience, ultimate creator, purpose giver).

2. Every one of these qualities may not exist in any entity and if any such quality does exist it exists in few entities or in some cases (e.g., omnipotence, ultimate creator) in at most one entity.

3. Therefore it is highly unlikely that any entity would possess even one of these qualities.

4. There is an infinitesimal chance that any one entity (given the almost infinite number of entities in the Universe) might possess the combination of even some two of these qualities, let alone all of them.

5. In statistical analysis a merely hypothetical infinitesimal chance can in effect be treated as the no chance to which it approximates so very closely.

6. Therefore as there is statistically such an infinitesimal chance of any entity possessing, as God would have to do, all God's essential qualities in combination it can be said for all practical and statistical purposes that God just does not exist.

What's interesting about this argument is that Berg, in his introduction, claims this arugment is "absolutely and completely original" to himself, despite being startlingly similar to Dawkins' "Ultimate Boeing 747" argument, which precedes it by three years. Well, in fairness, he only claims it's original as far as he knows, which demonstrates nothing except that he's so terribly ill-read in a field he has the temerity to sully with a book that he hasn't even read a relative touchstone piece of atheistic logic produced, to much fanfare, just a few years earlier.

 In fact, Berg's argument is so unoriginal that I don't even feel I need to be original in refuting it: Alvin Plantinga did an admirable job of that back when Dawkins first advanced this "absolutely and completely original" argument:

So why think God must be improbable? According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds. But if God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he exists, of course, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0. Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally probable. So if Dawkins proposes that God's existence is improbable, he owes us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God—an argument that doesn't just start from the premise that materialism is true. Neither he nor anyone else has provided even a decent argument along these lines; Dawkins doesn't even seem to be aware that he needs an argument of that sort.

Question-begging aside, it's painfully clear that Berg doesn't actually know what classical theism says about God. He declares in the book's introduction that Aquinas' Five Ways "are now considered invalid, at least by most people" -- and that baseless assertion, unaccompanied by explanation or citation, is pretty much the last we ever hear of Aquinas in this book. One cannot help but walk away with the impression he hasn't actually read the Five Ways.

But let us grant, for the moment, Berg's materialist premises. Let us even go so far as to assume that God is a contingent and not a necessary being, that time precedes Him and He exists within it, and that it's a crapshoot whether or not a being worthy of the title of God will emerge from the great primordial soup of creation (my well-read readers will have to excuse the absurdity of this line of thought, if only to demonstrate that not even absurdity can produce a Godless universe). First, it's only necessary for God to be omnipotent: if He is omnipotent than He can simply will Himself into being everything else that theists claim He must be. Thus, we need not be concerned with five or six or eight probabilities but only one, the probability of an omnipotent being coming into existence. Let's call that probability p and assign it a value of .00000000001, with a corresponding probability of nonoccurrence q (= 1 - p) 0f .99999999999. And let us assume that the primordial soup could generate an omnipotent being at literally any second. There are 31,557,600 seconds (and therefore trials) in the average year; so the probability of 31,557,600 consecutive unnfavorable (Godless) outcomes is .99968447379 (= .99999999999^31,557,600). The probability of consecutive nonfavorable outcomes over the course of a thousand years is just under .73. Over two thousand years, just .53; over three thousand years, just .39; over ten thousand, .04; over fifty thousand, .002. The probability of observing an unbroken chain of consecutive nonoccurrences approaches zero as the timeline approaches infinity -- and as soon as it's broken, poof, God emerges and the Christian creation narrative continues as announced. (Granted, it would still be highly unlikely for a God figure to emerge at any given moment: the point is that, unless you have some reason for placing constraints on the timeline, there is no reason to suppose that the tiny probability of God's emergence is sufficient to preclude it from happening).

As one of Berg's reviewers at Amazon put it:

Not only is the answer wrong, but Berg seems unaware that vanishingly small probabilities are not negligible if there are an infinite number of them. (E.g., a rolling sphere always comes to rest on a single, infinitely improbably point.)

Likewise, when I go fishing, the probability that I will catch any given fish in existence is vanishingly small -- virtually nil, in fact. But the probability that I will catch a fish is considerably nearer to 1, perhaps very close to it, indeed, if the conditions are right and I have sufficient skill.

 Thankfully, we don't have to rely on statistics to know that God exists -- we know it evidentially: existence itself requires such a being (this we know from the Unmoved Mover and First Cause arguments). Berg anticipates this argument, though he makes no reference to the Five Ways; instead, he cites John Locke, according to whom "this combination of qualities is necessary for the originator of the ourselves to have, without which we humans would not exist -- and we clearly do!"

Berg goes on to claim that the argument is "clearly fallacious" because "lesser things can produce greater things just as greater things can produce lesser things." (This is certainly contrary to what Dawkins claims, that the complexity of a thing cannot exceed the complexity of its originator). He provides the example that Albert Einstein was birthed of less-intelligent parents, ignoring the (obvious) counterpoint that nothing in Albert Einstein's parents were meaningfully lesser unless you suppose IQ to be deterministically genetic.

Berg compounds his error by declaring, "More fundamentally things need not necessarily be caused anyhow" (!). He provides literally no explanation for this lame, indefensible Humean bullshit. When has anyone, ever, in the history of the world, ever assumed a thing (other than the creation of the universe) has happened without cause? Even when we can't find a natural cause for something, we'll attribute it to delusion, hypnosis, magic, or simply conclude we'll never know the cause before we assume nothing caused it. Atheists routinely peddle this Humean crap when it suits them (i.e., when it can be used as a blunt object with which to bludgeon God out of existence) but are never willing to follow it through to its logical conclusion, which is a rejection of all scientific knowledge, criminal justice forensics, experiential and self-knowledge, etc.

The last really interesting thing Berg says in this chapter (which, tragically, comes about six and a half pages before its end) is

... can there be valid evidence available to us for God's qualities existing and all combining within one entity? I should think not. As finite entities we humans cannot know the absolutely infinite.

But that (like the statistical argument itself) isn't really an argument for God's nonexistence -- at best, its an argument for agnosticism. Unfortunately, Berg isn't content to leave this kind of solipsism as a chapter footnote; he later elevates something like it to the status of an argument in and of itself.

Next time, Berg's Second Way: The Man and God Comprehension Gulf Argument.

The Six Lamest Arguments for Atheism Ever Conceived

I recently had the misfortune of coming across Geoffrey Berg's The Six Ways of Atheism, intended as a counter to Aquinas' Five Ways: a series of positive disproofs of God's existence.

I have never before read something so bereft of merit. What sloppy solipsism this man passes off as "proving beyond conceivable doubt that God cannot exist," as he has the temerity to claim in the book's conclusion.

As soon as I'm done with the series on usury, Berg is getting a six-part series of his own. Familiarize yourself, in the meantime, with the book's arguments as he presents them on his own Web site. And trust me when I say that nothing in the book itself improves on the arguments presented there.

God, save man from his follies!

Hell and the Modern Mind: A Review of Bruce Charlton's Thought Prison

The best books are the ones that are simultaneously familiar and novel -- familiar in that they conform intuitively to reality; novel in that they expose, for the first time, heretofore unarticulated intuitions to the light of day. Thus, the best books provoke the reaction: "Of course!" They set the heart aflutter with wonder that you had never thought to put it that way before, had never recognized  what was right in front of your face.

This is exactly the kind of book Bruce Charlton has written in Thought Prison: The Fundamental Nature of Political Correctness, which I previously discussed briefly here and of which Dr. Charlton was kind enough to forward me a proof copy. By "political correctness," Dr. Charlton means not merely the irritating tics of leftist speech (with which the phrase is normally associated) but the general worldview of the leftist mind, a worldview predicated on the assumption of the universe's irrationality and which a priori admits no possibility of God, truth, or reason. It confronts the existential void with constantly-elevating hedonistic self-distraction. This primarily accounts for the unprecedented collapse of Western morality in recent decades, as generation after generation of nihilism-addled degenerates derive diminishing pleasures from progressively more obscene behaviors.

Charlton is at his best when describing how the various peculiarities of PC behavior and thought patterns unavoidably derive from this worldview. The leftist is fashion-sensitive precisely because it provides the stimulating novelty that, alone, provides him with analgesia to dull the pain of life in a Godless, meaningless universe. He is obsessed with enemies but cannot engage them rationally because to submit to rational evaluation is to admit PC's falseness: thus, he can only destroy his enemies, hysterically tarring, shutting down, attacking or even killing them. (Nevertheless, the leftist would prefer to deal with enemies that cannot actually challenge it, so he is perfectly content to tilt at windmills with poorly-painted papier-mâché tentacles hastily glued on to them). What matters to the leftist is not who its enemies are but merely that it has enemies; without something to rebel against, the whole flimsily-constructed charade falls apart. Even the degenerate flashiness of modern news media stems from the PC worldview, as it simultaneously provides a constant stream of novelty and stimulation while glorifying the PC in its battle against its (largely illusory) enemies.

He's at his most alarming when he devotes a few chapters to following PC through to its logical conclusion.

There's much more to be said, but I'd hate to spoil it, so buy the book yourself and read it. It's a quick and easy read; Charlton's style is terse and expressionistic, and his chapters are brief and to the point. It's a book thankfully bereft of excess, an anorexic antidote to the ponderous but ultimately meaningless tomes largely produced these days. I read most of it in an afternoon, and I've always been a slow and easily distracted reader.

I titled this post "Hell and the Modern Mind" for two reasons. First, because Hell is exactly where the modern mind currently is. Its atheism, its nihilism, its utilitarianism are all the hallmarks of souls preparing themselves for the fire; to them, life itself is Hell, a meaningless, absurd, and painful void which cannot be escaped but the pain of which can be dulled, if only by dangerously increasing doses of stimulation. And second, because Hell is exactly where the modern minds are leading us. I was amazed, really, by the overlap between this book and Peter Drucker's The End of Economic Man. Dr. Charlton's description of the average PC intellectual and Drucker's description of the average German under the Nazi regime are appallingly similar. If he is right about what PC is and what it means for the world, than the conditions are very much right not only for a second outburst of totalitarianism but for our entry into the final stage of the cancerous progression of the modern project: the suicide of an entire culture; perhaps the suicide of an entire race.

Truly, the world is fallen -- and still falling -- and nothing short of miracle can save it.